The Last Lecture Quotes

“If you have a question,” my folks would say, “then find the answer.” The”
― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

“That is what it is. We can’t change it. We just have to decide how we’ll respond. We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.” In”
― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

“WE’VE PLACED a lot of emphasis in this country on the idea of people’s rights. That’s how it should be, but it makes no sense to talk about rights without also talking about responsibilities. Rights have to come from somewhere, and they come from the community. In return, all of us have a responsibility to the community. Some people call this the “communitarian” movement, but I call it common sense. This”
― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

“But Andy van Dam, my “Dutch uncle” and mentor at Brown, advised me, “Get yourself a PhD. Be a professor.” “Why should I do that?” I asked him. And he said: “Because you’re such a good salesman, and if you go work for a company, they’re going to use you as a salesman. If you’re going to be a salesman, you might as well be selling something worthwhile, like education.” I am”
― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

“The same is true in your life outside of your job. All my adult life I’ve felt drawn to ask long-married couples how they were able to stay together. All of them said the same thing: “We worked hard at it.”
― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

“A video game can be created and never make it through research and development. Or else it comes out and no one wants to play it. Yes, video-game creators who’ve had successes are greatly valued. But those who’ve had failures are valued, too—sometimes even more so. Start-up companies often prefer to hire a chief executive with a failed start-up in his or her background. The person who failed often knows how to avoid future failures. The person who knows only success can be more oblivious to all the pitfalls. Experience”
― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

“I told her I had nothing against yoga or meditation. But I did think it’s always best to try to treat the disease first. Her symptoms were stress and anxiety. Her disease was the money she owed. “Why”
― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

“Andy, I just gave my students a two-week assignment and they came back and did stuff that, had I given them an entire semester to complete it, I would have given them all A’s. What do I do?” Andy thought for a minute and said: “OK. Here’s what you do. Go back into class tomorrow, look them in the eyes and say, ‘Guys, that was pretty good, but I know you can do better.”
― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

“In the end, educators best serve students by helping them be more self-reflective. The only way any of us can improve—as Coach Graham taught me—is if we develop a real ability to assess ourselves. If we can’t accurately do that, how can we tell if we’re getting better or worse? Some”
― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

“When we send our kids to play organized sports—football, soccer, swimming, whatever—for most of us, it’s not because we’re desperate for them to learn the intricacies of the sport. What we really want them to learn is far more important: teamwork, perseverance, sportsmanship, the value of hard work, an ability to deal with adversity. This kind of indirect learning is what some of us like to call a “head fake.” There”
― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

“Fear turned to awe when I met my coach, Jim Graham, a hulking, six-foot-four wall-of-a-guy. He had been a line-backer at Penn State, and was seriously old-school. I mean, really old-school; like he thought the forward pass was a trick play. On”
― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

“But being considered the best speaker in a computer science department is like being known as the tallest of the Seven Dwarfs.”
― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

“I'm going to find a way to be happy, and I'd really love to be happy with you, but if I can't be happy with you, then I'll find a way to be happy without you.”
― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

“I had fallen in love, even if she was still finding her way.”
― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

“My colleague told me: “It took a long time, but I’ve finally figured it out. When it comes to men who are romantically interested in you, it’s really simple. Just ignore everything they say and only pay attention to what they do.” That”
― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

“T OO MANY people go through life complaining about their problems. I’ve always believed that if you took one-tenth the energy you put into complaining and applied it to solving the problem, you’d be surprised by how well things can work out. I”
― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

“Hard work is like compounded interest in the bank. The rewards build faster.”
― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

“to recognize that automobiles are there to get you from point A to point B. They are utilitarian devices, not expressions of social status.”
― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

“but he just keeps showing up in my head, forcing me to work harder whenever I feel like quitting, forcing me to be better.”
― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

“We now live in an age when parents praise every child as a genius. And here’s my mother, figuring “alert” ought to suffice as a compliment.”
― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

“I always liked telling my students: "Go out do for others what somebody did for you”
― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

“I sure got their attention. That's always the first step to solving an ignored problem.”
― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

“When you use money to fight poverty, it can be of great value, but too often, you're working at the margins. When you're putting people on the moon, you're inspiring all of us to achieve the maximum of human potential, which is how our greatest problems will eventually be solved.”
― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture - Lessons In Living

“A professor's job is to teach students how to see their minds growing in the same way they can see their muscles grow when they look in a mirror.”
― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture - Lessons In Living

“If your trashcan or wheelbarrow has dent in it, you don't buy a new one. Maybe that's because we don't use trashcans and wheelbarrows to communicate our social status or identity to others.”
― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture - Lessons In Living

“I kept my mantra in mind: The brick walls are there for a reason. They're not there to keep us out. the brick walls are there to give us chance to show how badly we want something.”
― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture - Lessons In Living

“Whatever my accomplishments, all of things I loved were rooted in the dreams and goals I had as a child ... and in the ways I had managed to fulfill almost all of them.
My uniqueness, I realized, came in the specifics of all the dreams -from incredibly meaningful to decidedly quirky- that defined my 46 years of life.”
― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture - Lessons In Living

“If you dispense your own wisdom, others often dismiss it; if you offer wisdom from a third party, it seems less arrogant and more acceptable !”
― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture - Lessons In Living

“It’s not about how to achieve your dreams. It’s about how to lead your life. If you lead your life the right way, the karma will take care of itself. The dreams will come to you.” I”
― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

“(It’s easy to look smart when you’re parroting smart people.)”
― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture