‘I truly believe that everything that we do and everyone that we meet is put in our path for a purpose. There are no accidents; we’re all teachers – if we’re willing to pay attention to the lessons we learn, trust our positive instincts and not be afraid to take risks or wait for some miracle to come knocking at our door.’ – Marla Gibbs

‘It’s fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.’ – Bill Gates

‘Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood. All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle.’ – Ralph Waldo Emerson

‘Learning lessons is a little like reaching maturity. You’re not suddenly more happy, wealthy, or powerful, but you understand the world around you better, and you’re at peace with yourself. Learning life’s lessons is not about making your life perfect, but about seeing life as it was meant to be.’ – Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

‘There are no regrets in life, just lessons.’ – Jennifer Aniston

‘We should not look back unless it is to derive useful lessons from past errors, and for the purpose of profiting by dearly bought experience.’ – George Washington

‘Acceptance and tolerance and forgiveness, those are life-altering lessons.’ – Jessica Lange

‘I learned everything the hard way – like, literally, everything. I know that God does that to people that he has lessons for. I just wish that I had learned less extreme lessons.’ – SZA

‘We all learn lessons in life. Some stick, some don’t. I have always learned more from rejection and failure than from acceptance and success.’ – Henry Rollins

‘Mistakes are a part of being human. Appreciate your mistakes for what they are: precious life lessons that can only be learned the hard way. Unless it’s a fatal mistake, which, at least, others can learn from.’ – Al Franken

‘That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.’ – Aldous Huxley

‘One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.’ – Oscar Wilde

‘The lessons from the peace process are clear; whatever life throws at us, our individual responses will be all the stronger for working together and sharing the load.’ – Queen Elizabeth II

‘I’m so grateful for all the experiences I’ve had; the life lessons I’ve learned along the way are just completely invaluable.’ – Gretchen Bleiler

‘Have you learned the lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood aside for you? Have you not learned great lessons from those who braced themselves against you, and disputed passage with you?’ – Walt Whitman

‘I don’t have regrets, there are only lessons. You learn from them, and you become a better person.’ – Nicole Polizzi

‘The biggest lessons I learned were probably the times where I had the biggest setbacks and the biggest challenges – when I had the biggest jumps forward and lessons learned.’ – Michelle Kwan

‘Lessons are not given, they are taken.’ – Cesare Pavese

‘Punctuality and showing respect in the workplace are the foundations of success. Success is meaningless without them. I’m always looking to pass these lessons on to younger players, because they are the secret of excelling and developing your game.’ – Raul

‘One of the lessons that I grew up with was to always stay true to yourself and never let what somebody else says distract you from your goals. And so when I hear about negative and false attacks, I really don’t invest any energy in them, because I know who I am.’ – Michelle Obama

‘Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.’ – Stephen King

‘There are many harsh lessons to be learned from the gambling experience, but the harshest one of all is the difference between having Fun and being Smart.’ – Hunter S. Thompson

‘There are no mistakes or failures, only lessons.’ – Denis Waitley

‘All honest work is good work; it is capable of leading to self-development, provided the doer seeks to discover the inherent lessons and makes the most of the potentialities for such growth.’ – Paramahansa Yogananda

‘One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.’ – Will Durant

‘Our mothers give us so many gifts. They give us the precious gift of life, of course, but they also leave treasured lessons that can guide us along our journeys even when they are no longer with us.’ – Maria Shriver

‘All the lessons are in nature. You look at the way rocks are formed – the wind and the water hitting them, shaping them, making them what they are. Things take time, you know?’ – Diane Lane

‘The teacher is the one who gets the most out of the lessons, and the true teacher is the learner.’ – Elbert Hubbard

‘Don’t blame the child for forgetting lessons; make the lessons unforgettable.’ – Sonam Wangchuk

‘Wisdom and penetration are the fruit of experience, not the lessons of retirement and leisure. Great necessities call out great virtues.’ – Abigail Adams

‘Running taught me valuable lessons. In cross-country competition, training counted more than intrinsic ability, and I could compensate for a lack of natural aptitude with diligence and discipline. I applied this in everything I did.’ – Nelson Mandela

‘Poverty can teach lessons that privilege cannot.’ – Jack Klugman

‘I’ve always been involved in music. Whether it be taking piano lessons or something, I always have.’ – Juice Wrld

‘When I was younger, I started taking singing lessons and dance and acting. I just started acting first because that’s how everything happened.’ – Lindsay Lohan

‘The lessons I learned from the dark days at Alibaba are that you’ve got to make your team have value, innovation, and vision. Also, if you don’t give up, you still have a chance. And, when you are small, you have to be very focused and rely on your brain, not your strength.’ – Jack Ma

‘Even the accomplished suffers setbacks sometimes. The more bitter the lessons, the greater the successes will be.’ – Lucio Tan

‘There’s so much power in allegory, to form ideas and learn lessons that you can actually take and apply to real life. I think that’s why I originally really loved fantasy and reading.’ – Amandla Stenberg

‘Sonny Liston is nothing. The man can’t talk. The man can’t fight. The man needs talking lessons. The man needs boxing lessons. And since he’s gonna fight me, he needs falling lessons.’ – Muhammad Ali

‘And we are never too old to study the Bible. Each time the lessons are studied comes some new meaning, some new thought which will make us better.’ – John D. Rockefeller

‘Excellence is a better teacher than mediocrity. The lessons of the ordinary are everywhere. Truly profound and original insights are to be found only in studying the exemplary.’ – Warren Bennis

‘You reflect on the people who used to be in your life, and it’s like, ‘Wow, I can’t believe that person was ever really in my life.’ But people are put into your life for seasons, for different reasons, and to teach you lessons.’ – Selena Gomez

‘In moments of difficulty there are positives you can take and lessons you can learn.’ – Tyrone Mings

‘The biggest lessons I’ve learned in life have probably come from a bad situation, from an angry situation, even if I wasn’t the one who was angry.’ – Evan Rachel Wood

‘I think in every lesson there’s a blessing, and there’s so many blessings from all the lessons I’ve had to go through in life.’ – Alonzo Mourning

‘The lessons of the past are ignored and obliterated in a contemporary antagonism known as the generation gap.’ – Spiro T. Agnew

‘I’ve never taken vocal lessons. My early trumpet training and a fortunate talent for singing has always been enough for me. In the case of rock singing, I’ve always felt it was better to remain a bit untrained to maintain your individuality.’ – Ronnie James Dio

‘The shortest and surest way of arriving at real knowledge is to unlearn the lessons we have been taught, to mount the first principles, and take nobody’s word about them.’ – Henry IV of England

‘That’s the beauty of education, kids taking lessons out of the classroom and back into their own world where they can positively affect their family, their friends, and their greater community.’ – Erin Gruwell

‘Sometimes life’s so much cooler when you just don’t know any better and all the painful lessons have not hammered your head open yet.’ – Anthony Kiedis

‘I can’t put this down. I’m reading it in Spanish but I am still having English lessons. It is a motivational book about basketball legend Michael Jordan. His determination was inspiring. It helps me focus and drives me on.’ – Bojan Krkic

‘Don’t be too proud to take lessons. I’m not.’ – Jack Nicklaus

‘The focus on just thinking about standardized test scores as being synonymous with achievement for teenagers is ridiculous, right? There are so many things that kids care about, where they excel, where they try hard, where they learn important life lessons, that are not picked up by test scores.’ – Angela Duckworth

‘Rest assured that whatever station of life we are placed, princely or lowly, it contains the lessons and experiences necessary at the moment for our evolution, and gives us the best advantage for the development of ourselves.’ – Edward Bach

‘Slow down and think about the lessons of the elders.’ – Maya Soetoro-Ng

‘All the lessons of history in four sentences: Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad with power. The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small. The bee fertilizes the flower it robs. When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.’ – Charles A. Beard

‘Drumming completely eclipsed my life from age 13, when I started drum lessons. Everything disappeared. I’d done well in school up until that time. I was fairly adjusted socially up until that time. And I became completely monomania, obsessed all through my teens. Nothing else existed anymore.’ – Neil Peart

‘I take all of my life lessons, which some people might call ‘mistakes,’ and apply them to my future so that I keep growing.’ – Kimberly Caldwell

‘That’s the reason they’re called lessons, because they lesson from day to day.’ – Lewis Carroll

‘I am not someone who is ashamed of my past. I’m actually really proud. I know I made a lot of mistakes, but they, in turn, were my life lessons.’ – Drew Barrymore

‘As my kids grow up, I think a lot about the lessons and values I want to impart to them. More than any particular skill or even financial support, I believe perseverance and resilience will serve them best, regardless of what curveball life inevitably throws them.’ – Sal Khan

‘The world of sports knows no religious, racial or political differences. Athletes, from whatever land they come, speak the same language. The lessons of competition are lessons for life.’ – Robert Kennedy

‘Be grateful. That’s one of the most important lessons in life, I think, is to just be grateful for every minute, every moment.’ – Stephanie McMahon

‘No one who ever had lessons would have a swing like mine.’ – Lee Trevino

‘There are those who believe that the value of a children’s book can be measured only in terms of the moral lessons it tries to impose or the perfect role models it offers. Personally, I happen to think that a book is of extraordinary value if it gives the reader nothing more than a smile or two. In fact, I happen to think that’s huge.’ – Barbara Park

‘There are a lot of lessons to be learned. We can all learn lessons.’ – David Gill

‘The most profound lessons about journalism I’ve learned have been taught to me by the people I’ve covered.’ – Jodi Kantor

‘I learned how to play the drums. When we were in pre-production, when we were still in LA, I had a couple of drum lessons and then some in Toronto. I got the one beat down and that was it.’ – Mary-Kate Olsen

‘The 20th century taught us how far unbridled evil can and will go when the world fails to confront it. It is time that we heed the lessons of the 20th century and stand up to these murderers. It is time that we end genocide in the 21st century.’ – Allyson Schwartz

‘One of the major lessons in all of biochemistry, cell biology and molecular medicine is that when proteins operate at the sub cellular level, they behave in a certain way as if they’re mechanical machinery.’ – James Rothman

‘One of the main lessons I’ve learnt is to give back more than you take, and that has become a core part of my life.’ – Jock Zonfrillo

‘I learned really valuable lessons from ‘Blue’s Clues.’ I’d repeat them every day. ‘You can do things. You are smart.” – Steve Burns

‘I am a poor student sitting at the feet of giants, yearning for their wisdom and begging for lessons that might one day make me a complete artist, so that if all goes well, I may one day sit beside them.’ – Rod Taylor

‘Because I know about the Holy Land, I’ve taught lessons about the Holy Land all my life, and – but you can’t bring peace to Israel without giving the Palestinian also peace. And Lebanon and Jordan and Syria as well.’ – Jimmy Carter

‘You can take lessons to become almost anything: flying lessons, piano lessons, skydiving lessons, acting lessons, race car driving lessons, singing lessons. But there’s no class for comedy. You have to be born with it. God has to give you this gift.’ – Steve Harvey

‘Whether it’s in the right way or sometimes the wrong way, you learn about life and its lessons.’ – Amelie Mauresmo

‘Life deals you a lot lessons, some people learn from it, some people don’t.’ – Brett Favre

‘It was more fun trying to figure out I Want To Hold Your Hand than to take lessons. By this time I knew basic chords.’ – Tommy Shaw

‘Reincarnation occurs because we decide that we haven’t learned enough lessons.’ – Sylvia Browne

‘When you are reading about a book, you focus on the main character, of course. When you have something in common with them and connect with them, you remember the lessons they learned, and then you can apply them to your life. So you can live the best life you can.’ – Marley Dias

‘One of the greatest lessons of my own life was learning to turn the inner rampage of hatred and anger toward my own father for his reprehensible behavior and abandonment of his family into an inner reaction more closely aligned with God and God-realized love.’ – Wayne Dyer

‘Sometimes life gives us lessons sent in ridiculous packaging.’ – Dar Williams

‘When I was 5, I started taking singing lessons, and then, after ‘School of Rock,’ I started taking guitar lessons. I would always write songs and play them for my friends, and I would play my guitar on the set a lot.’ – Miranda Cosgrove

”Shake It Up’ definitely teaches kids about the importance of reaching for your dreams and setting high goals. It also teaches great lessons about friendship and family.’ – Zendaya

‘It’s the best thing in the world, the most challenging thing in the world, being a parent, and one of the first lessons I learned was to ask for help.’ – Kerri Walsh Jennings

‘I never wanted to be part of any scene, I never wanted to be a part of anything, I wanted to do my own thing. Those are the lessons I learned from punk rock.’ – Buzz Osborne

‘We’re put here on Earth to learn our own lessons. No one can tell you what your lessons are; it is part of your personal journey to discover them. On these journeys we may be given a lot, or just a little bit, of the things we must grapple with, but never more than we can handle.’ – Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

‘The biggest thing we get out of it is seeing the kids smile. And hopefully we will also see that the lessons we’re teaching – not only the fundamentals of hockey, but also the life values – are sinking in.’ – Bobby Orr

‘One of the lessons learned during the Vietnam War was that the depiction of wounded soldiers, of coffins stacked higher than their living guards, had a negative effect on the viewing public. The military in Iraq specifically banned the photographing of wounded soldiers and coffins, thus sanitizing this terrible and bloody conflict.’ – Walter Dean Myers

‘There’s just a lot of really great life lessons that you can take out of chess… I think that’s one of my favorite parts about it is it’s very competitive, but it’s totally cerebral.’ – Aaron Gordon

‘I give thanks to my Creator for this wonderful life where each of us has the opportunity to learn lessons we could not fully comprehend by any other means.’ – Joseph B. Wirthlin

‘I’m honest and tell it like it is. I’ve been around the horn a few times and learned valuable lessons from screwing up a bit. So, if I can pass off advice or make someone smile on the way to work, I’m for it.’ – Stone Cold Steve Austin

‘You know, all these sentiments about beauty coming from within, they’ve always resonated when I’ve read them, but it takes a bit of living to truly appreciate them. To realise we are so much more than our experiences, that we are who we are because of the lessons we’ve learnt, now that’s what true ‘beauty’ is for me.’ – Christy Turlington

‘As a kid, I had a lot of energy; but the ballet lessons made me calm – this pleased my mother.’ – Penelope Cruz

‘Live news teaches you some incredibly strong lessons: that every day is a new day, and it’s never too late to fix something.’ – Nancy Dubuc

‘An hour of violin lessons in Berlin is an hour where you get the child interested in music. An hour in a violin lesson in Palestine is an hour away from violence, is an hour away from fundamentalism.’ – Daniel Barenboim

‘Have I ever had dance lessons? I’m mobile, but not nearly as much as our promotional videos lead people to believe.’ – Tobias Forge

‘Dad is a skilled athlete and runs his own football school for kids. While football is his entire life and he encouraged us to play, he still found time to take me to ballet and tennis lessons.’ – Montaigne

‘I go to schools in L.A., and I teach lessons. I run with the girls and teach them things about bullying and gossip. For instance, we’d play things like telephone, where you can actually see how words get twisted.’ – Peyton List

‘One of the hard lessons to learn in life is that there are some things you can control and some things you can’t. If you want a short recipe for being frustrated and miserable, this is it: focus on things you can’t control.’ – John Bytheway

‘I’d bowled a lot, but I never really had proper lessons.’ – John Goodman

‘When I first started out, being from the South and going to New York or Chicago, people kept telling me to get voice lessons and ‘lose that stupid accent you got.’ And I’m like, ‘Well, where I come from, you have the stupid accent.” – Jeff Foxworthy

‘Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.’ – Wallace Stegner

‘Kids in sports – it makes such an impact in life with the lessons that you learn.’ – Patrick Mahomes

‘I think flag football is a great alternative, and it’s a great game in its own right. It’s a wonderful alternative. You can develop all of the skills and athleticism and glean the lessons you can from contact football through playing flag.’ – Chris Borland

‘My first acting lessons were Shakespeare. The first time I ever started working with a coach was doing scenes from ‘Measure for Measure,’ which were tough dramatic scenes. And then ‘Taming of the Shrew,’ which required comedic timing. And that’s the kind of stuff I love.’ – Dave Bautista

‘My father always taught by telling stories about his experiences. His lessons were about morality and art and what insects and birds and human beings had in common. He told me what it meant to be a man and to be a Black man. He taught me about love and responsibility, about beauty, and how to make gumbo.’ – Walter Mosley

‘The wild Indian power of escaping observation, even where there is little or no cover to hide in, was probably slowly acquired in hard hunting and fighting lessons while trying to approach game, take enemies by surprise, or get safely away when compelled to retreat.’ – John Muir

‘One of the main lessons I have learned during my five years as Secretary-General is that broad partnerships are the key to solving broad challenges. When governments, the United Nations, businesses, philanthropies and civil society work hand-in-hand, we can achieve great things.’ – Ban Ki-moon

‘I believe that the financial crisis of 2008/9 exposed more a lack of ethics and morality – especially by the financial sector – rather than a problem of regulation or criminality. There were, of course, regulatory lessons to be learned, but at heart, there was a collective loss of our moral compass.’ – Paul Polman

‘My book ‘Trust Your Heart’, which is the story of my life, will be followed by ‘Singing Lessons’, a memoir of love, loss, hope, and healing, which talks about the death of my son and the hope that has been the aftermath of the healing from that tragedy.’ – Judy Collins

‘The Army will take its lessons learned. They’re excellent at looking into themselves and reflecting on what did we do right, what did we do wrong.’ – Colin Powell

‘My whole belief system is that our paths are drawn for us. I believe in reincarnation. I believe we’re here to learn and grow. We choose how we come into this life based on what it is we have to learn. Some people have harder lessons than others.’ – Gillian Anderson

‘Well, in order to become a grown man, in order to become significant in my family and significant in my children’s life, I had to learn my lessons.’ – Bobby Brown

‘Ultimately there is no such thing as failure. There are lessons learned in different ways.’ – Twyla Tharp

‘My pictures of ‘Oliver Twist’ and ‘A Boy in Flanders’ are being used as school lessons.’ – Jackie Coogan

‘More time on paperwork means less time spent with students or preparing lessons for students. It is as simple as that. The numerous reforms in the bill will go a long way to free our time of special educators.’ – Christopher Bond

‘Everything shapes you to be the person you are today. Sometimes hard lessons pay off dividends.’ – Al Jourgensen

‘I started flying because I had a fear of it early on. I figured if I learned to fly, I would understand better what was happening and started taking lessons in the late 1950’s, once I had made some money on tour.’ – Arnold Palmer

‘My brother and I played music together, and we all liked to show off. But I wasn’t a particularly musical kid. I did piano lessons and quit. I got kicked out of the choir.’ – Tim Minchin

‘Everyone has challenges and lessons to learn – we wouldn’t be who we are without them.’ – Sean Combs

‘The short story and the truth is that I was taking vocal lessons here in New York… One day, instead of my lesson, the piano player and I went into a studio… and we put down some demos… Those demos got to Quincy Jones through an agent… He listened to them, he called me, and we started to record.’ – Lesley Gore

‘Part of company culture is path-dependent – it’s the lessons you learn along the way.’ – Jeff Bezos

‘Many of the lessons we are to learn in mortality can only be received through the things we experience and sometimes suffer. And God expects and trusts us to face temporary mortal adversity with His help so we can learn what we need to learn and ultimately become what we are to become in eternity.’ – David A. Bednar

‘Stuttering is painful. In Sunday school, I’d try to read my lessons, and the children behind me were falling on the floor with laughter.’ – James Earl Jones

‘Always remember those things that tend to strengthen and improve your understanding. You cannot learn without attention, neither retain those lessons that you have once learnt without frequently reflecting upon and reviewing them in your mind; by this means, things long past will remain impressed upon your memory.’ – Dorothea Dix

‘Don’t pretend to know everything. I’ve been blessed to work with a lot of veteran actors, and I soak up lessons from them like a sponge.’ – Michael B. Jordan

‘We all have a natural instinct to protect children from harm. It’s never fun to see a child hurt, even if it’s just a scraped knee. But on the other hand, children need to take on physical challenges to learn and grow, and scraped knees and other bumps and bruises teach them valuable lessons about their own limits.’ – Darell Hammond

‘Everything does not happen according to a plan, and you learn your lessons the hard way.’ – Juhi Chawla

‘Entertainers are there to entertain. They aren’t there to teach your children the lessons that you haven’t bothered to teach them at home yourself.’ – Wentworth Miller

‘When fathers come home after a tough day at work, they should come home to serve, like my father did, teaching lessons around the dinner table and leading the family in worship and prayer.’ – Tony Evans

‘One of the best lessons I learned early is that not everything in life is about you. It is about service. If you want trips and excessive gifts, then don’t get into public service.’ – Sean Hannity

‘Sometimes you surf well and still don’t win. It happens to everyone. You learn that one big score doesn’t mean much if you don’t have a backup. I guess every rookie learns that as time goes by. I took some big lessons from my losses.’ – Gabriel Medina

‘One of the lessons I have learned in the different stages of my career is that science is not done alone. It is through talking with others and sharing that progress is made.’ – Carol W. Greider

‘Fear is not a good teacher. The lessons of fear are quickly forgotten.’ – Mary Catherine Bateson

‘I didn’t take lessons, and I don’t know my scales.’ – Lindsey Buckingham

‘Sometimes, growth isn’t always equal to success. You may fall forward and continue to make some mistakes, but it’s all about growth and really finding the lessons that needs to be learned in order to get to the next level.’ – Aja Brown

‘Of the many lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic thus far, two of the most critical are the need for effective national leadership and clear, consistent communication. Countries that fared well had both in abundance; those that didn’t often faltered.’ – Leana S. Wen

‘I’m thinking about learning a few new things – like taking classical guitar lessons – and I’d like to bring what I learn into hard rock.’ – Mick Mars

‘I started taking ballet lessons when I was 4, and I was performing in ballet companies when I was 10, and I did summer stock in Miami Beach when I was 12, and finally I said, ‘I gotta go to Broadway.” – Rita Rudner

‘I took several years of dance lessons that included ballet, tap and jazz. They helped a great deal with body control, balance, a sense of rhythm, and timing.’ – Lynn Swann

‘Lyrically I like to use themes that make the listener use his or her imagination, and to give a little of the lessons I’ve learned in my own life.’ – Ronnie James Dio

‘If you’re small and can speak clearly and you’re a cute kid, that’s the craft, really. The whole child actor thing can be dangerous sometimes. Other kids were taking piano lessons; I did ballet and acting.’ – Rose McIver

‘So I guess I had, I think they tell me I had, about three years total of piano lessons, off and on.’ – Warren Zevon

‘Good knife skills are lessons you learn over time.’ – J. Kenji Lopez-Alt

‘As a writer I’ve learned certain lessons. One of them is to be careful about how you put a view, and to bear in mind how easily and readily you’ll be misinterpreted.’ – Alexander McCall Smith

‘I trust that when people meet, we meet for a transcendent reason, and that the challenges we face in life are always lessons that serve our soul’s growth.’ – Marianne Williamson

‘Transforming yourself into a deep listener will not only prove more amusing as you open your mind to their mind, but you will gain the most invaluable lessons about human psychology.’ – Robert Greene

‘I’ve been through a lot off the field. I think that kind of translates onto the field. Football serves for a lot of life lessons, and so it allows me to stay humble and continue to work.’ – Dak Prescott

‘I started playing guitar when I was eight. Well, I started piano and really liked it but never practiced, but it taught me how to read music, and then my mom signed me up for guitar lessons, and I connected to that way more.’ – Kerris Dorsey

‘Ecology should be object lessons that the world sees, that explains in a visceral, physical way, the attributes of God.’ – Joel Salatin

‘Definitely, I think I’m a life coach for real. The lessons I give are lessons you can take to the bank.’ – Flavor Flav

‘I tend to be freer on the piano. I never took guitar lessons, so my reach exceeds my grasp – what I hear in my head I don’t always know how to play. But I love to play over something else. I’m not a self-starter. I get kind of bored with the same three folk chords that I know.’ – Bonnie Raitt

‘Speech lessons probably did more for my singing voice – they teach you breathing, resonance.’ – Harry Dean Stanton

‘The first two Prime Ministers whom I served, Ted Heath and Margaret Thatcher drew strikingly different lessons from the Second World War.’ – Douglas Hurd

‘I discipline churchgoers with godly lessons and sharp words if they do not change their ways. My goal is to open their hearts so that they seek forgiveness.’ – William Brewster

‘If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I’d pay for riding lessons and take his gun away.’ – W. H. Auden

‘The truth is, gymnastics is a beautiful sport that has allowed me to grow and learn invaluable life lessons: sacrifice, dedication, discipline. Eventually, it led me to my voice.’ – Katelyn Ohashi

‘I started singing about three years ago, I entered a local singing competition called Stratford Idol. The other people in the competition had been taking singing lessons and had vocal coaches. I wasn’t taking it too seriously at the time, I would just sing around the house. I was only 12 and I got second place.’ – Justin Bieber

‘Consciously or not, we are all on a quest for answers, trying to learn the lessons of life. We grapple with fear and guilt. We search for meaning, love, and power. We try to understand fear, loss, and time. We seek to discover who we are and how we can become truly happy.’ – Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

‘I grew up in a musical environment. My parents played music and had it playing on the radio. They brought me to a concert at the age of 5, the same age I started violin lessons.’ – Joshua Bell

‘I grew up with the Woodstock generation. I went to Woodstock, and like everybody in my school, I wanted to be in a rock-and-roll band, and most of us were. But I also grew up with a lot of piano lessons and a lot of classical music training.’ – John Tesh

‘Playing music has always felt very natural. You know, you do try to do other things, and you do learn lessons that way, but, eventually – well… if your dad is a plumber, you become a plumber. It’s the family business, and I felt like I was taking over the family business.’ – Dhani Harrison

‘Despite what Washington thinks or does on this 15th anniversary, we the people will never forget those who perished and the lessons learned on Sept. 11, 2001.’ – Chuck Norris

‘The lessons Noam Chomsky sets out to teach us in ‘Toward a New Cold War’ are invaluable. The United States, like any other nations, can and does err, and often in a big way. But Chomsky cannot support at all his implicit diagnosis that America is ‘bad.” – Antony Blinken

‘My aunt had a season ticket for the Friday afternoon concerts, and I would go down for lessons. My lessons were Saturday morning.’ – Robert Ripley

‘I went to art school when I was little. I took ballet lessons. I played a little kick ball. I was sort of into everything because I had too much energy and I didn’t know where to put it. When I was a preteen, I got into singing, and became really obsessed with it.’ – Amanda Seyfried

‘My research has taught me many important lessons, but perhaps none more important than this: drug effects, like semesters, are predictable; police interactions with black people are not.’ – Carl Hart

‘COVID has taught us some really harsh lessons about who our allies are and how much we can depend on our allies.’ – Leslyn Lewis

‘I never took guitar lessons. I took classical piano lessons from the age of six when we lived in Holland.’ – Eddie Van Halen

‘I’ve grown up a lot, I’m on my own, and I’ve learned some valuable life lessons.’ – Zac Efron

‘Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.’ – Aldous Huxley

‘I love mayonnaise. It’s one of the first lessons I teach my cooking students. Turning eggs and oil into an emulsion – that creamy, satisfying third thing – feels like magic.’ – Samin Nosrat

‘Man seems to insist on ignoring the lessons available from history.’ – Norman Borlaug

‘This was a tragic event in human history, but by paying tribute to the Armenian community we ensure the lessons of the Armenian genocide are properly understood and acknowledged.’ – Jerry Costello

‘The moment I started learning to play the piano it changed my whole dynamic with music and with school. Suddenly I had a reason to be there, or at least at my music lessons; it just took hold of me.’ – Santan Dave

‘When I was a kid, I played basketball religiously. I begged my mom to get me voice lessons because I wanted to learn to sing the right way, but at the same time, I was playing Junior Olympic basketball, and I was playing point guard for my school. But I was wanting to get into entertainment, into music and film and television.’ – Justin Timberlake

‘Teaching man his relatively small sphere in the creation, it also encourages him by its lessons of the unity of Nature and shows him that his power of comprehension allies him with the great intelligence over-reaching all.’ – Annie Jump Cannon

‘God has his plans and his reasons. Sometimes we are supposed to go through things so that we learn lessons.’ – Dolly Parton

‘The lessons of history would suggest that civilisations move in cycles. You can track that back quite far – the Babylonians, the Sumerians, followed by the Egyptians, the Romans, China. We’re obviously in a very upward cycle right now, and hopefully that remains the case. But it may not.’ – Elon Musk

‘I once started tennis lessons and turned some poor man grey overnight. Now I feign injuries when I’m asked for a game.’ – Alexander Armstrong

‘When preparing for a concert, I do lots of training. I work with a choreographer to create great moves and then I have to keep my voice strong with lessons.’ – Miley Cyrus

‘He who follows his lessons tastes a profound peace, and looks upon everybody as a bunch of manure.’ – Moliere

‘Lessons of wisdom have the most power over us when they capture the heart through the groundwork of a story, which engages the passions.’ – Laurence Sterne

‘The righteousness of Jesus Christ is one of those great mysteries, which the angels desire to look into, and seems to be one of the first lessons that God taught men after the fall.’ – George Whitefield

‘As I grow up, the lessons I learn in love and relationships and how we treat each other are hopefully maturing – hopefully.’ – Taylor Swift

‘The so-called lessons of history are for the most part the rationalizations of the victors. History is written by the survivors.’ – Max Lerner

‘Rather than make excuses for their failures, resilient people learn from each mistake. They identify skills, ideas, and life lessons that can be gained from each failed opportunity.’ – Amy Morin

‘The goal, I think, of American education, for decades, and across many, many scholars, was basically to teach people broad lessons in how to live life, how to engage life, how to essentially be effective citizens and effective people.’ – James Heckman

‘You shouldn’t have regrets. I’d say instead that I’ve learned a lot of lessons. Yes, I could have handled some things better. But they’ve also made me who I am today.’ – Natalie Cole

‘When you get older, you learn certain life lessons. You apply that wisdom, and suddenly you say, ‘Hey, I’ve got a new lease on this thing. So let’s go.” – Robert Redford

‘Take some elocution lessons; you can joke with Ebonics, but the truth is, nothing beats the King’s English. Learning how to speak properly, and the art of delivery can take you very far in life!’ – Wendy Williams

‘The lessons of the past should steer us towards ensuring lasting legacies for generations yet to be born.’ – Hun Sen

‘I don’t claim to be knowledgeable about theology. Most of my knowledge comes out of my experience and the lessons in the Bible. Every Sunday I’m home I teach 45 minutes and we boiled them down to one page for the new book, ‘Through the Year with Jimmy Carter.” – Jimmy Carter

‘What is learned on the athletic field is not forgotten, nor are the lessons of character that are forged there ever lost. Consider the contributions in the field of public life, business, law, medicine, and the military of those who actively participated in athletics.’ – Robert Kennedy

‘I make movies the same way other kids play tennis or go to piano lessons. I’m trying to get better at what I want to do, just like other kids are trying to get better at what they want to do.’ – Elle Fanning

‘I have to say that it was working with my grandpa, who grew up on a farm in Mountain Home, Idaho, that had the most influence. Witnessing his work ethic and hearing his stories gave me an appreciation for the farm’s best lessons.’ – John Bytheway

‘Maybe I wanted to have kids because you want to leave behind lessons, leave behind everything that matters to you. That’s how you touch the world. But I have to reconsider what it’s like to leave a legacy.’ – Mattie Stepanek

‘My history helps other people in terms of treatment and lessons in recovery. It affects my daily routine, as my body is not the same as someone who has not had that kind of a situation, but only adds to the joy once the challenge of overcoming physical pain is met.’ – Melody Gardot

‘I was taught some very good life lessons and morals as a young kid growing up.’ – Israel Folau

‘We have the tools to be a stronger nation than we were before Sept. 11, 2001. We have learned valuable lessons about the danger of growing enemies and the importance of developing alliances.’ – MJ Hegar

‘Where do we enroll in Life 101? Where are the classes dealing with the loss of a job, the death of a loved one, the failure of a relationship? Unfortunately, those lessons are mostly learned through trial by fire and the school of hard knocks.’ – Les Brown

‘I got involved in athletics during physical education lessons at school.’ – Alberto Juantorena

‘Golf was my first glimpse of comedy. I was a caddy when I was a kid. I was on the golf course rather than being in lessons, but I can play better now than I could then.’ – Bill Murray

‘At the age of 15 I began my singing lessons, and once I became a professional performer, I dove into acting.’ – Elena Roger

‘The education process is moving beyond the traditional classroom/lecture setting. More and more teachers are seeking tools and techniques to engage their classes and enrich their lessons. Video calling is one of these tools, as it removes barriers to communication and lets students move beyond the boundaries of their classrooms.’ – Tony Bates

‘I started studying music at the age of five and a half. My older sister was taking piano lessons. When her teacher left our apartment, I would get up on the piano bench and start picking out the notes that were part of my sister’s lessons.’ – Marvin Hamlisch

‘It is only from the people I’ve had the good fortune to meet that I am learning the lessons to guide me. Baz Luhrmann, director of ‘Moulin Rouge,’ for example, has a childlike curiosity about the world. He doesn’t pretend to know all the answers – quite the opposite, in fact. He asks loads of questions of everyone.’ – Simon Sinek

‘I didn’t have any real art training, but when I was about twelve nad thirteen, another boy and I went to a sign painter’s house every Friday night and took lessons.’ – Rube Goldberg

‘The lessons I learned as an officer, the challenges I’ve faced, and the camaraderie I’ve experienced are at the core of who I am.’ – Tammy Duckworth

”Sabotage’ was an opportunity. That was journeyman work, but the irony is I learned more off that movie on what filmmaking is and isn’t than everything else combined. A lot of lessons, and it will impact me for the rest of my career.’ – David Ayer

‘Priesthood lessons are regularly devoted to topics of family leadership, and quorum leaders everywhere are feeling more and more their responsibility to teach and train their quorum members to be better husbands and fathers.’ – Joseph B. Wirthlin

‘I started taking piano lessons from the age of six years old. It’s such an essential part of what I do in the production process. I wouldn’t be Kygo today without those piano lessons.’ – Kygo

‘The sixth move of doom? Yeah. So John Cena went to China, took some lessons, and all of a sudden, now he’s got a bad palm strike. Listen, I’ve been traveling the world for years and I’ve been beating up people with martial arts techniques from far superior styles and techniques. So, I ain’t worried about that.’ – Samoa Joe

‘I get free life lessons from J-Hope and Jimin; sometimes it’s like they’re 10 years older than me.’ – RM

‘Often when I’m trying to make tough decisions, I rely on the lessons my father taught me and ask myself, ‘What Would Tony Say?” – Kimberly Guilfoyle

‘I’ve long believed that the work-out life has lessons for the writing life. I’ve ‘solved’ a lot of books while at the gym, in part because I’m not trying to solve them at that precise moment.’ – Laura Lippman

‘I don’t want to just tell my story – I want to share the experiences, life lessons, and values that have shaped who I am and my ideas for the future.’ – Valerie Jarrett

‘I never really get to go to school because I am always on tour or with my father. There is a tutor most of the time, but usually I am working so I never get to do the lessons. The worst thing about maths is all the kids are ahead of me because they go to school.’ – Willow Smith

‘I took piano lessons and dancing lessons. I was very good at piano.’ – Cloris Leachman

‘One of the lessons learned from 22 July is that we have to take seriously all those people who take part in debates on the Internet, expressing extreme views, and then meet them, discuss with them, bring them into the open. We have not used bans or used the laws to try to forbid parties or political tendencies which we don’t like.’ – Jens Stoltenberg

‘All things are lessons that God would have us learn.’ – Iyanla Vanzant

‘One of the great lessons I’ve learned in athletics is that you’ve got to discipline your life. No matter how good you may be, you’ve got to be willing to cut out of your life those things that keep you from going to the top.’ – Bob Richards

‘My mom and dad began giving me dancing lessons when I was about four.’ – Demond Wilson

‘Creative writing lessons can be very useful, just like music lessons can be useful. To say, as Hanif Kureishi did, that 99.9% of students are talentless is cruel and wrong. I believe that certain writers like to believe they arrived into the world with special, unteachable powers because it is good for the ego.’ – Matt Haig

‘I was determined to achieve the total freedom that our history lessons taught us we were entitled to, no matter what the sacrifice.’ – Rosabeth Moss Kanter

‘I remember that – you know, I didn’t receive a formal education. I was educated in the Montevideo cafe, in the cafes of Montevideo. There, I received my first lessons in the art of telling stories, storytelling.’ – Eduardo Galeano

‘In my view, Asian countries have learnt the lessons from the past and significantly enhanced their capabilities to fend off risks.’ – Li Keqiang

‘By the time we hit fifty, we have learned our hardest lessons. We have found out that only a few things are really important. We have learned to take life seriously, but never ourselves.’ – Marie Dressler

‘I would love to be an amazing singer. I take voice lessons. It’s good to have as a dancer – to be able to sing and act, too, because for a Broadway show or musical, you have to be able to do everything.’ – Maddie Ziegler

‘The very concept of history implies the scholar and the reader. Without a generation of civilized people to study history, to preserve its records, to absorb its lessons and relate them to its own problems, history, too, would lose its meaning.’ – George F. Kennan

‘The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.’ – Anita Brookner

‘Life is a succession of lessons enforced by immediate reward, or, oftener, by immediate chastisement.’ – Ernest Dimnet

‘My childhood should have taught me lessons for my own fatherhood, but it didn’t because parenting can only be learned by people who have no children.’ – Bill Cosby

‘We have all examined our past critically and are very much aware of even the unpleasant things. Now, we need to look at what we plan to do with the lessons we have learned from the past.’ – Heinz Fischer

‘Defeat has its lessons as well as victory.’ – Pat Buchanan

‘It’s now possible to play and take lessons from any place of the world. The concept of physical distance doesn’t exist in the online world, and that is so cool!’ – Alexandra Kosteniuk

‘I’ve always had the perspective that roles come into my life when I need them most and sort of teach me lessons. The same can be true of films, films are released into society to aid in a lesson, inspire people, comfort people.’ – Bryce Dallas Howard

‘We didn’t do anything wrong, but among the lessons learned, given the magnitude of the problems we now face in Afghanistan, a major U.S. force on the ground would convince the world we were in for the long-haul recovery of a country devastated by 21 years of warfare.’ – Alexander Haig

‘It was the desire to do the complete thing. I only took taking acting lessons because my whole thing, really, was to direct. But my first jobs were acting jobs.’ – James Coburn

‘I took acting and elocution lessons, to get rid of my Sicilian accent.’ – Maria Grazia Cucinotta

‘About 10 years ago, I took some vocal lessons. I’ll bet that helped. I got a tape of exercises that the girl gave me, which I don’t do anymore, but they were good. And I don’t smoke.’ – Dan Hicks

‘Books are standing counselors and preachers, always at hand, and always disinterested; having this advantage over oral instructors that they are ready to repeat their lessons as often as we please.’ – Robert Chambers

‘Surely one of the most visible lessons taught by the twentieth century has been the existence, not so much of a number of different realities, but of a number of different lenses with which to see the same reality.’ – Michael Arlen

‘Happy is the person who cherishes the precious lessons of the past and lives vigorously in the present.’ – Jerome Hines

‘I grew up on musicals, and I know they are quite the thing now, but I’m actually a little indignant, because I started taking singing lessons years ago – I put the time in!’ – Marisa Tomei

‘I went and took golf lessons so Dad would let me play with him. I was just terrible… but I was able to have a wonderful time just walking around with Dad. I can see the real pleasure of that game.’ – David Hyde Pierce

‘By that point, I had started taking singing lessons. And after the first session, I mean, I was surprised that the windows didn’t shatter. And after the third session, I really didn’t know where this voice had come from.’ – Gerard Butler

‘The lessons of their early youth regulated the conduct of their riper years.’ – William Godwin

‘If life’s lessons could be reduced to single sentences, there would be no need for fiction.’ – Scott Turow

‘I saw no African people in the printed and illustrated Sunday school lessons. I began to suspect at this early age that someone had distorted the image of my people. My long search for the true history of African people the world over began.’ – John Henrik Clarke

‘All those days of waiting on tables until I could get a role on Broadway, all that time going to school taking lessons, and all those years of being a nobody following a dream-and now here it is.’ – Marcia Gay Harden

‘I didn’t get lessons of any kind I slept through school.’ – Joel Madden

‘Quite a few musicians came to our house. And my ma took me to hear many more, hoping to encourage in me a love of music. But she wouldn’t consent to my having music lessons, for she feared I might end up as she had done – unable to play except from paper.’ – Mary Lou Williams

‘We in the United States should be all the more thankful for the freedom and religious tolerance we enjoy. And we should always remember the lessons learned from the Holocaust, in hopes we stay vigilant against such inhumanity now and in the future.’ – Charlie Dent

‘As for acting, I took drama lessons when I was in high school.’ – Megan Gallagher

‘I took acting lessons when I was 19, 20, and I had my writing.’ – Michael Ironside

‘But presidents matter. That’s one of the biggest lessons I learned being in the White House.’ – Sidney Blumenthal

‘It wasn’t until after private lessons and learning bass lines that I even noticed bass in the music I was listening to at that age. My ears were blown wide open.’ – Trevor Dunn

‘So, to prepare for the role, I had to take music lessons, talk to wives who had husbands overseas, and carefully study the reactions and mannerisms of a friend who was expecting.’ – June Allyson

‘The academy gave me a grounding in discipline and hard work that has sustained me throughout my life, and the lessons I learned there I now try to impress on young people.’ – Georg Solti

‘After about six months, I told my mother that I wanted the lessons to stop, and she was intelligent enough not to force me to continue. Besides, the lessons cost money, which was anything but abundant in our household.’ – Georg Solti

‘Before Huey was 5, I could take him to work with me. Now, though, he has sports and lessons and friends, and it’s not fair to remove him from his whole life.’ – Marg Helgenberger

‘It’s about lessons for life. It’s not just about winning either.’ – Lynn Davies

‘It is normal for politicians in all countries to profess themselves the pupils of history, anxious to draw the right lessons from her teaching.’ – Douglas Hurd

‘You may observe in all my lessons, that I tell you how the legs go, and those who are unacquainted with that, are entirely ignorant and work in the dark.’ – William Cavendish

‘These are excellent lessons to break him, and make him light in hand: but nothing puts a horse so much upon his haunches, and consequently makes him so light in hand, as my new method of the pillar.’ – William Cavendish

‘I’m going to have classical piano lessons next.’ – Colin Greenwood

‘My mother also had us take piano lessons, and this had a similar effect. I hated those lessons, but I now play regularly for pleasure and have even tried my hand at composing.’ – Robert B. Laughlin

‘I think there are huge lessons there, for young people who are getting started in life, as well as other people. And that is, to take responsibility for your own life. Only you are responsible for the course you take from there.’ – Story Musgrave

‘My goal was to play drums, but my father made me take piano lessons. He told me I needed to learn to read music first, so I took lessons for six years. I thank God that he made me take those lessons, because it taught me a tremendous amount.’ – Brian Austin Green

‘I had wanted to play drums since the age of 9 when I saw a drum set in the window of a music store for the first time. We took lessons at a local music school and began playing together after about 6-9 months of lessons.’ – Jack Irons

‘There are no pat answers – we’re pushing through some new frontiers, and lessons of the past don’t always apply.’ – Jim Barksdale

‘However, I began composing as soon as I started taking piano lessons.’ – Gyorgy Ligeti

‘I mean, it’s the life lessons that I suppose you learn that nobody gets a free ride and that you do the best you can with the means that you can and try to open yourself to as much knowledge and all that that you can.’ – Joe Mantegna

‘I’m concerned about the insidious influence of the media’s bad messages that undermine the lessons parents try to instill in their sons and daughters.’ – John Ratzenberger

‘We discussed politics, but we also talked about the importance of hard work, personal responsibility, living within your means, keeping your word. Those lessons stay with you throughout your life.’ – Bob Ehrlich

‘Uhm, I’m the one wanting the lessons! I don’t want to say too much about it because I’d rather have you see the movie, but he’s trying to find his music.’ – Harvey Keitel

‘I never had lessons. Used to try to play to records, which I hated doing. Still can’t play to them.’ – Charlie Watts

‘A friend of mine once told me that I can’t screw up when I play my own music. I also take voice lessons, play other peoples’ songs out of music books, and occasionally figure out how to play other people’s music from records. This keeps my ears, fingers, and mind working.’ – Lisa Loeb

‘The fact is that one of the earliest lessons I learned in business was that balance sheets and income statements are fiction, cash flow is reality.’ – Chris Chocola

‘I also thought of playing improvisational jazz and I did take lessons for a while. At first I tried to write fiction by making up things that were completely alien to my life.’ – Amy Tan

‘I started formal piano training when I was 4. From there I had little violas, and I had dancing lessons of every sort and description, and painting lessons. I had German. And shorthand.’ – Twyla Tharp

‘Even if I don’t have the money to take vocal lessons, I’ll practice in the house by myself singing out loud.’ – Christina Milian

‘My mother stopped working when she had my brother. She was a full time mom until I started getting heavily into ice skating lessons, and it got to the point where they really needed my mom to earn an income.’ – Dorothy Hamill

‘One of the first lessons he or she learns is that in baseball anything, absolutely anything, can happen. Just two days ago as I write this, something happened that had never happened in baseball before.’ – John Thorn

‘Save for thee and thy lessons, man in society would everywhere sink into a sad compound of the fiend and the wild beast; and this fallen world would be as certainly a moral as a natural wilderness.’ – Hugh Miller

‘I grew up taking piano lessons and liking Wagner when I was in second grade.’ – Tom Verlaine

‘I really didn’t even have time to get that many lessons, to be honest, because I was suddenly on the road. I was kind of thrown in the deep end. But that wasn’t a bad thing when I look back at it.’ – Caroline Corr

‘Kylie and I were both taking piano lessons at the time and didn’t think of acting. A friend rang mum up and said, ‘How about bringing Kylie and Danielle in because they might be right for the part?” – Dannii Minogue

‘I don’t think there are many larger lessons to be found in sports.’ – Gregg Easterbrook

‘Yes, I was forced to take piano lessons for 8 years as a child.’ – Jim Coleman

‘I think I started learning lessons about being a good person long before I ever knew what basketball was. And that starts in the home, it starts with the parental influence.’ – Julius Erving

‘It’s not right to say that our loss in Vietnam turned out to be a gain. But lessons were learned. And they were the right lessons.’ – Tom Clancy

‘It Might As Well Be Spring… I used to sing that as a young girl in my voice lessons. Then I picked it up again and it spoke to me in a whole new way.’ – Bernadette Peters

‘I learnt pity, sympathy, and what it was like to be at the other end of the stick. Such lessons can’t be learnt in lecture halls.’ – Lionel Blue

‘Playing sport was somewhat frivolous, but I liked it. I rebelled a little bit, and wouldn’t go to music lessons and things like that, but I would go and play ball. My parents learned to love it because they saw how much I got out of it.’ – Mike Krzyzewski

‘Instant telecommunication allows better and updated information, lessons learnt and problems encountered to be exchanged and debated, it alerts us more quickly to problems and brings to many households around the world visions and information which hopefully spur us to action.’ – Carol Bellamy

‘Business wise, I have always learned valuable lessons so I don’t regret any decisions I have made.’ – Kiana Tom

‘It’s very important to always put things in their historical contexts. It teaches important lessons about the country in question.’ – Warren Christopher

‘I got started when I was 3 years old because my father was a music teacher and my lessons were free. Instead of learning to walk, you learn to play the piano.’ – Carla Bley

‘When we got with George, he didn’t care what was happening. He liked how crazy we were looking and dressing. I kinda liked being with George more so at the time, because George let us do what we wanted to do. But I needed both lessons.’ – Bootsy Collins

‘I was taking piano lessons with a very good piano instructor in Toronto, and I’m afraid due to my schedule and discipline, it kind of fell apart. One thing lead to another and I was unable to practice as much as I wanted to.’ – Geddy Lee

‘After this, I took private lessons in Italian from an elementary school teacher. He gave me themes to write about, and some of them turned out so well that he told me to publish them in a newspaper.’ – Grazia Deledda

‘I took group lessons at a rink near my home. We first had to learn how to stand up on the ice wearing skates. Eventually we learned to move forward, but soon found out that it was not that easy to stop! So that was our next important lesson.’ – Nancy Kerrigan

‘My parents never pressured me to skate. They always said I could quit if I wanted to. They only expected me to skate when they had already paid for the expensive lessons. But, otherwise they said I could do what I wanted to do.’ – Nancy Kerrigan

‘I started taking ballet lessons when I was three and a half and I still take dance classes.’ – Oksana Baiul

‘Another thing that I don’t like to do is show too much how it goes. I do it once in a blue moon. Sometimes there are lessons when I don’t pick up a violin at all.’ – Itzhak Perlman

‘An uncle gave me a side drum and my mother decided I should have lessons.’ – Humphrey Lyttelton

‘What we can do now is contribute to a clearer understanding of what happened that day on Everest in the hope that the lessons to be learned will reduce the risk for others who, like us, take on the challenge of the mountains.’ – Anatoli Boukreev

‘To know ourselves, is agreed by all to be the most useful Learning; the first Lessons, therefore, given us ought to be on that Subject.’ – Eliza Haywood

‘When I was 12 and started to take singing lessons from a woman, she told me that I would probably spend the rest of my life taking care of my voice.’ – Johnny Mathis

‘When I was at school at Paris, I had special lessons from Mademoiselle Antoine, an actress at the Comedie Francaise, and I was taken to every sort of play. I felt very grand.’ – Vivien Leigh

‘It’s kind of scary sometimes, I’ve seen this a lot in Asia. Children are given music lessons, very intensively I might add and involving great technical expertise sometimes, but you can tell that they have been told only to play happy pleasant music.’ – Michael Tilson Thomas

‘The real beauty of it – key to my life was playing key chords on a banjo. For somebody else it may be a golf club that mom and dad put in their hands or a baseball or ballet lessons. Real gift to give to me and put it in writing.’ – Vince Gill

‘I went to work in an office and learned, among other lessons, to do things I did not care for, and to do them well. Before I left this office, two of my books had already been published.’ – Sigrid Undset

‘I got private lessons in keyboard at Julliard, before New England Conservatory of Music in Boston.’ – Bernie Worrell

‘We were thus led to organize ourselves, as men who had fought the war together, in order to support those statesmen who had truly understood the lessons of that World War, thus attempting to prevent its recurrence.’ – Rene Cassin

‘I used to teach dance lessons.’ – Eartha Kitt

‘So, I took lessons, and I love to shoot now. It’s a lot of fun.’ – Reba McEntire

‘I guess by taking lessons early on, and really trying to play all the rudimentary stuff, and try to have it sound as good as my teacher. It took a lot of practice, which I enjoyed, and still do.’ – Matt Cameron

‘My mom would give me a piece to play, but I wouldn’t do any theory because when it came time to do it I would sneak back upstairs and watch TV. So, I had these kind of nonchalant lessons for years, then it just started soaking in.’ – Vanessa Carlton

‘I’ve always dabbled on guitar, but never took lessons.’ – Adam Jones

‘The ukulele was the first of many instruments they had bought for me. They got me a guitar when I was eleven, which my son Morgan uses until this day. They paid for 3 years of guitar lessons; they bought me a bass fiddle, which I still play.’ – Tony Visconti

‘And I’d say one of the great lessons I’ve learned over the past couple of decades, from a management perspective, is that really when you come down to it, it really is all about people and all about leadership.’ – Steve Case

‘I was coerced into taking piano lessons in the early ’50s. It was a quite unpleasant experience.’ – Robert Quine

‘We’ve certainly learned a lot of lessons from Katrina, from Rita. Rita was better than Katrina. We’re doing a better job planning. We’re closer – more closely aligned with the Department of Defense. These things would be positive things if we were to have another attack.’ – Michael Chertoff

‘Around 7 years old, we girls took dancing lessons, joined the Brownies, the Girl Scouts, the 4H Club.’ – Ruth Buzzi

‘Talking with other parents really gave me some lessons that I try to hold on to now, as a parent of two boys.’ – Joe Lando

‘I had piano lessons when I was a kid, like most people. And hated them, like most people. And quit, like most people.’ – Carter Burwell

‘When I was five I had violin lessons.’ – Randy Bachman

‘I longed to fly. I was paid in flying lessons and, by the time I was 13, I’d logged 100 hours at the controls.’ – Kent McCord

‘In terms of the idea of long-term occupation – I have been reading a little bit more about this period – and you can see in that occupation are many lessons for the current occupation of Iraq. So we have these connections that go way back that people aren’t aware of.’ – Edwidge Danticat

‘Well, Steve Vai joined my dad’s band right around the time when I actually started playing guitar. So he gave me a couple of lessons on fundamentals, and gave me some scales and practice things to work on. But I pretty much learned everything by ear.’ – Dweezil Zappa

‘I will have a one-hour program called the Mission Watch, where I will describe details of the mission and give additional information about the lessons from space.’ – Christa McAuliffe

‘The main thing is that I’ve been studying composition for the last four years. I’d say it’s the life experience combined with the lessons that enabled me to go much further.’ – Kip Winger

‘My mother gave me singing lessons; that was totally painful, because I couldn’t do what she wanted to hear. She used to say: there’s more there, there’s more voice but I just didn’t want to give it to her.’ – Linda Lavin

‘Of all the lessons most relevant to architecture today, Japanese flexibility is the greatest.’ – Stephen Gardiner

‘One of the first lessons you learn as an actor is to listen.’ – John Frankenheimer

‘Well, I was passionately curious about what my body was doing, and when I got the lessons on how to meditate, it seemed really solid to me. It seemed real.’ – Mariel Hemingway

‘Children can take lessons in that school via the Internet and can score extra points like e.g. in Geography or History. That sounds very promising and is a fantastic basis for future steps.’ – Anatoly Karpov

‘I think he had a wake-up call. It’s a different kind of race, and I think maybe he didn’t take it quite as seriously as he might have, but you can bet he learned a lot of lessons.’ – Frank Shorter

‘I’m an incredibly lucky girl. For someone who has made some very foolish mistakes and had some tough lessons to learn very quickly, I am still incredibly lucky.’ – Monica Lewinsky

‘I don’t believe in singing lessons. You can sing or you can’t.’ – Harry Dean Stanton

‘I took speech training. I took a few voice lessons in college.’ – Harry Dean Stanton

‘I’ve had all the lessons I could get. I’ve learned from everybody I’ve ever met.’ – Levon Helm

‘I’ve sung my whole life. I’ve taken lots of voice lessons and I love to sing. But I’ve never really sung professionally at all.’ – Liv Tyler

‘I have recently started acting lessons in south France, and I intend to commence acting lessons at Rada.’ – David Ginola

‘I understand that it’s hard for everyone, but one cannot give in to emotions… we’ll have to draw lessons from the current crisis and now we’ll have to work on overcoming it.’ – Boris Yeltsin

‘I am a partisan and artisan of Europe. But I draw the lessons of my experience in government.’ – Laurent Fabius

‘The lessons of September 11 are that if we allow law enforcement to do their work free of political interference, if we give them adequate resources and modern technologies, we can protect our citizens without intruding on our liberties.’ – Lucille Roybal-Allard

‘One of the great lessons the fall of the leaf teaches, is this: do your work well and then be ready to depart when God shall call.’ – Tryon Edwards

‘Go learn the language. Go take some acting lessons. Start from zero like everybody else.’ – Roselyn Sanchez

‘Surely the immutable laws of the universe can teach more impressive and exalted lessons than the holy books of all the religions on earth.’ – Elizabeth Cady Stanton

‘I believe that nothing is more important to our ability to effectively address our present than understanding the lessons learned from those who have come before us.’ – Charlie Gonzalez

‘We constantly learn new lessons up here. The experiences we gather will enable us to establish a long-term station on the moon and to go on to Mars.’ – John Phillips

‘But it’s important, while we are supporting lessons in respecting others, to remember that many of our youngest kids need to learn to respect themselves. You learn your worth from the way you are treated.’ – Anna Quindlen

‘My father is a real idealist, and he’s all about learning. If I asked for a pair of Nikes growing up, it was just a resounding ‘No.’ But if I asked for a saxophone, one would appear and next day and I’d be signed up for lessons. So anything to do with education or learning, my father would spare no expense.’ – Hugh Jackman

‘I come from a generation that suffered school lessons in portacabins and crumbling hospitals. I tell you one thing, for the eighteen years they were in power the Tories did nothing to fix the roof when the sun was shining.’ – Ed Miliband

‘Singing was my first love and I never even considered it after I started acting, but now I’m bringing it back into my life. I trained from the ages of 11 to 17. When I moved to New York and got into serious acting, I just kind of abandoned the whole singing thing. But when I grew up in Pennsylvania I went to voice lessons once a week.’ – Amanda Seyfried

‘I got into shape because I took kick-boxing lessons every day to prepare for a fight scene with Taylor Lautner. I really wanted to lie down and eat Chinese food, but I kick-boxed every morning and ran. If someone was filming you with your kit off, you’d do the same thing.’ – Jason Isaacs

‘Protectionism is a very real danger. It is understandable that in times of a severe downturn protectionist pressures mount but the lessons of history are clear. If we give in to protectionist pressures, we will only send the world into a downward spiral.’ – Manmohan Singh

‘Gymnastics taught me everything – life lessons, responsibility and discipline and respect.’ – Shawn Johnson

‘By the time we’ve hit fifty, we have learned our hardest lessons.’ – Marie Dressler

‘No movie influenced me more to go after my dreams than ‘Flashdance.’ After seeing it, I took 15 dance lessons a week. I cut all my sweatshirts. I did the ‘Maniac’ thing.’ – Elizabeth Berkley

‘When I was 12, I happened to see a schoolmate playing percussion, and it looked interesting. I asked for lessons, and it felt right.’ – Evelyn Glennie

‘I stopped thinking about it after trying to figure out what are the lessons learned, and there are so many. After I had basically sorted that out, I figured it’s time to really look at the future and not at the past.’ – Kalpana Chawla

‘This year has been full of lessons learned and soul searching and realizing I’m an adult. It’s time to take responsibility and not take the easy way out.’ – Nicole Richie

‘I am not driven by any bitterness by what happened in Athens. I learnt a lot of lessons from it and probably came through it a stronger person in the end. There have been a lot of near misses, and that’s taught me to keep persevering and that there is a chance it can come right.’ – Paula Radcliffe

‘I don’t know French at all. I took some lessons when I was younger but all I know are the numbers. I’ve been told basically everyone in Monaco speaks English because of it being a huge vacation spot so I’m excited about that. I might not need to learn French after all.’ – Freddy Adu

‘I think it’s important to have professional lessons or advice.’ – Delta Goodrem

‘I took piano for many years. I kicked and screamed through all of my lessons, but my mom really insisted.’ – Kristin Kreuk

‘I grew up painting and playing piano so when I was a little kid I thought I was going to be an artist or a painter but my mom had me taking piano lessons for about 10-12 years as a young kid.’ – Mike Shinoda

‘In third grade, I was taking tap-dance lessons, and about six weeks before the recital I wanted to quit. My mom said, ‘No, you’re going to stay with it.’ Well, I did it, and I was bad, too! But my parents never let their kids walk away from something because it was too hard.’ – Rebecca Lobo

‘I know what it takes to be fast and I feel like every year I learn valuable lessons about how to be better the next time.’ – Danica Patrick

‘I believe that a writer learns from every story he writes, and when you try different things, you learn different lessons. Working with other writers, as in Hollywood or in a shared world series, will also strengthen your skills, by exposing you to new ways of seeing the work, and different approaches to certain creative challenges.’ – George R. R. Martin

‘Kids below 10 or 12, I think they just need to learn by playing at golf. Later on, in high school, when they develop muscles and everything, that’s when they need to see about getting lessons.’ – Bubba Watson

‘I learned hard lessons, and I’ve taken that lesson and it’s helped me become a better business person and a better leader.’ – Rick Scott

‘I find interesting characters or lessons that resonate with people and sometimes I write about them in the sports pages, sometimes I write them in a column, sometimes in a novel, sometimes a play or sometimes in nonfiction. But at the core I always say to myself, ‘Is there a story here? Is this something people want to read?” – Mitch Albom

‘Are your kids learning the right lessons about 9/11? Ten years after Osama bin Laden’s henchmen murdered thousands of innocents on American soil, too many children have been spoon-fed the thin gruel of progressive political correctness over the stiff antidote of truth.’ – Michelle Malkin

‘Eighty-five percent of us in this country, by the way, live in coastal areas, so again, Katrina and Rita were not just about New Orleans. There were a lot of lessons that the nation can learn from us if they just pay attention to the things that are going on down here.’ – Mitch Landrieu

‘I had to take driving lessons in New York, which were really weird because it’s not the safest thing in the world.’ – Jordana Brewster

‘My son’s taking drum lessons, and my daughter’s taking piano lessons. One day they’re going to start a band.’ – Chris Daughtry

‘I love film, and I would love to be a part of something that people universally love as a piece of film. Sure. Of course I would. And I would love to take acting lessons, and see that side of it someday. But I’m a musician.’ – Norah Jones

‘I never took guitar lessons. I took classical piano lessons from the age of six when we lived in Holland. And when we moved to America, it was just the typical thing except I was really good at it; so was my brother.’ – Eddie Van Halen

‘And if I would have taken lessons I probably wouldn’t have done it, and what forced me to do all this weird stuff on the guitar was I couldn’t afford effects pedals, I didn’t have all this stuff when I was a kid so I just tried to squeeze all the weird noises I could out of the guitar, which brings me to building guitars.’ – Eddie Van Halen

‘The best kids are going to become the best. But the best thing about it is that you’re going to learn lessons in playing those sports about winning and losing and teamwork and teammates and arguments and everything else that are going to affect you positively for the rest of your life.’ – Carl Lewis

‘There are always lessons that can be learned from another manufacturer. You can learn from their successes and from their mistakes also. But you cannot replicate; you can only learn.’ – Carlos Ghosn

‘I’m giving life lessons and tips on how to take care of your emotional heart, because heart disease is the number-one killer in America.’ – Leeza Gibbons

‘All those lessons that I’ve learned on the court, I have applied them to my life outside of the court in business, my company, called V Starr interiors, an interior design company, and EleVen, which I wear on court.’ – Venus Williams

‘One of the things we wrestle with nationally is, ‘If we want the economy to be strong, what should we do?’ Why not learn some lessons from Virginia?’ – Tim Kaine

‘I’m a much better filmmaker than painter. But studying it did make me visually acute and taught me lessons like being economic: Say something once and you don’t have to say it again.’ – Jane Campion

‘I brought a Border Collie back home to Vancouver from Wales – where some of my ancestors are from – and needed to challenge him in other ways than just being my pet. So I investigated sheep herding and took a few lessons, and decided I was probably learning more than my dog!’ – Jane Siberry

‘I gave guitar lessons. I tried to join bands. My mom always said it was obvious that nothing was going to stop me.’ – Janis Ian

‘My parents signed me up for classical guitar lessons, which made for two years of the most depressing Wednesday evenings.’ – Andrew Garfield

‘The body is forever teaching us lessons. There are all sorts of things that we can’t do, shouldn’t do, had better not do very often or do for too long as we get older. The body makes its presence known.’ – P. J. O’Rourke

‘Little islands of human happiness, peace, and prosperity are so exceptional at this point in history that I’m not even sure we can draw lessons from them.’ – P. J. O’Rourke

‘Yeah, it turns out that guys don’t like deals on laser hair removal or pole dancing lessons.’ – Andrew Mason

‘I’ve not taken like acting lessons or anything but it doesn’t mean I don’t need to because I’m sure I do.’ – Miley Cyrus

‘My thinking was taught to tribes in South Africa like the Zulus and Xhosas. At the time there were about 210 fights breaking out among them every month, but after they listened to my lessons, this fell to just four.’ – Edward de Bono

‘I think one of the lessons of the Depression – and this is something that Franklin Roosevelt demonstrated – was that when orthodoxy fails, then you need to try new things. And he was very willing to try unorthodox approaches when the orthodox approach had shown that it was not adequate.’ – Ben Bernanke

‘I took piano lessons when I was like 5 or 6 but that was a long time ago. I stopped when I was 13.’ – Marion Cotillard

‘My father believed in toughness, honesty, politeness and being on time. All very important lessons.’ – Roger Moore

‘I hope to attend it as Japan needs to tell the world the lessons, knowledge and reflections learned from the nuclear crisis at the Fukushima No. 1 power plant.’ – Yoshihiko Noda

‘What I do remember is visualization of the sound of music, seeing bodies in movement in relation to how music sounded, because my mother practiced at the keyboard a lot and I also went to her lessons. As a two year old, three year old I remember seeing things in movement.’ – Twyla Tharp

‘Everybody in our family studied a musical instrument. My father was really big on that. Somehow I only took a year or two of piano lessons and I convinced my father to let me take dancing lessons.’ – Madonna Ciccone

‘I just started as a part of the public school music program. I took lessons at the school every Friday and was a part of the school band. I was just a normal kid taking instrumental lessons at school, nothing special.’ – Kenny G

‘I’ve learned some of the greatest life lessons from growing up in the skate and punk rock communities.’ – Mark Hoppus

‘With the lessons taken from the financial crisis in 1997, the Republic of Korea has been able to surmount the global economic crisis rather successfully.’ – Lee Myung-bak

‘Look, I debate for a living so I don’t need to learn any lessons from amateurs.’ – Bill O’Reilly

‘I learned some valuable lessons about the legislative process, the importance of bipartisan cooperation and the wisdom of taking small steps to get a big job done.’ – Hillary Clinton

‘I think the way things have been left after Iraq is that people won’t believe the Government of the day, so they have to know that lessons have been learnt and that all political parties and people, whether they were for or against the invasion of Iraq, have learnt lessons.’ – William Hague

‘I’d like to share my experiences and the lessons I’ve learned and hopefully create some amazing, fun courses.’ – Tiger Woods

‘I think that in itself, if you’re a true golfer, you’ll see specific things you need to work on. Much cheaper than private lessons.’ – Tiger Woods

‘I might have some Danish lessons sometimes.’ – Mary, Crown Princess of Denmark

‘Age is a terrible avenger. The lessons of life give you so much to work with, but by the time you’ve got all this great wisdom, you don’t get to be young anymore.’ – Elizabeth Wurtzel

‘We owe it to the victims of the suicide bombers who struck London on 7 July 2005 to find out how the attacks happened and to learn the lessons that will spare lives in the future.’ – Pauline Neville-Jones

‘I began these clinics because I want to share my years of experience in around the ring, in addition to my proven winning methods. I have seen the good and the bad. I have learned valuable lessons, which I want to pass along to those truly interested in the sport.’ – Emanuel Steward

‘You learn your lessons from the mistakes you make, not the things you achieve.’ – Katherine Jenkins

‘I had to ride a horse once. In ‘King Arthur.’ I said I could ride, but I had to call for lessons on the day the deal was signed. I started out on this little chunky thing and slowly moved up. It was months of work.’ – Clive Owen

‘Being betrayed is one of the most valuable lessons life can teach.’ – Shania Twain

‘I want to take piano lessons, I want to study at university, I want to travel, I want to do other parts, make another movie.’ – Zach Braff

‘You know, my family is very musical, I was surrounded by it. And from four years old I was the one that asked my mother could I take piano lessons.’ – John Legend

‘When I grew up we had gym at school, two or three dance classes after school, ice skating lessons, and all sorts of sports at our finger tips. We weren’t glued to computers because they didn’t exist, so being active was all we knew.’ – Lisa Loeb

‘Although my dad was a doctor, we weren’t necessarily a super-artsy family. We were just a classic, traditional family who got to take a lot of piano lessons and became a bunch of musicians.’ – Lisa Loeb

‘I’m also taking singing classes as well, not that I ever plan to sing in public in my entire life. I actually have a phobia of singing, so I decided to take some singing lessons to help me get away from the phobia.’ – Kelly Hu

‘I also want to try acting – give it a shot – maybe take some lessons, I think that could be fun. I feel like that could even help me with modeling, because in a way you have to act.’ – Jacquelyn Jablonski

‘Music is part of history, and our history has lessons that cannot be separated from our greatest music.’ – Mstislav Rostropovich

‘Well, I did go to Irish dancing lessons as a kid, but I was slapped and never went again.’ – Andrea Corr

‘I just want to bring as much natural as I can. I’m not saying that people who take acting lessons are false. They’re much better than I am, but it doesn’t work for me.’ – Betty White

‘I started piano lessons when I was four; I was being classically trained at the Colburn School.’ – Jacqueline Emerson

‘When I was six years old my friend was auditioning for ‘Annie,’ and I decided I wanted to audition with her. My mom was worried I would fall flat on my face because I’d never opened my mouth to sing, so she sent me to vocal lessons. I did the audition and fell in love with the entire process of a show.’ – Jacqueline Emerson

‘There is this strange fog of being a young man that I would refer to as soft time. Time does not go forward there. It’s a series of doors that kind of wind back into one another, like a series of doors in the upper floor of a house. You revisit the same lessons over and over again, or you choose to ignore them.’ – Ryan Adams

‘When I left school, I got a job in a shoe shop and I used to save 15 quid a week and pay for my own singing and acting lessons.’ – Luke Evans

‘I didn’t really get into golf until I was about 14. My mom and dad were taking lessons from a pro an hour and a half from our farm in Cohuna, Australia. When they got home, I’d ask my mom to explain everything they learned – drills and all.’ – Stuart Appleby

‘When I was at school, I was in choirs more than anything else, from a very young age, about 9 years old. And then I started taking drum lessons.’ – Ben Barnes

‘I started taking music lessons and singing when I was about ten.’ – Alex Winston

‘I took opera lessons. I can’t read music to save my life, but I would just copy and get away with it. I think that they thought I could read music, but I can’t. I would just listen.’ – Alex Winston

‘I’ve always been seen as the underdog in everything I’ve ever done in my life, and it doesn’t bother me in the slightest. The lessons have just made me stronger.’ – Victor Ortiz

‘People may have their opinions about Senator Helms, but he was highly effective and he took care of his constituency. I learned all those lessons from him, and I bring a great deal to the table because of that.’ – David Rouzer

‘I never took any theater lessons. So when I started to do movies, I was 14.’ – Melanie Laurent

‘Paying more heed to the lessons of the past might teach us to be a little more cautious about some of the political decisions taken today.’ – Michael Morpurgo

‘The lessons learned as we try to build ever more sophisticated nanomachines will almost certainly inform our understanding of the origins of life.’ – Paul McEuen

‘We have this wonderful language and we don’t appreciate it. That’s old-fashioned me, but when I went to school, everyone had elocution lessons, not to sound posh but so you could be understood.’ – Penelope Keith

‘Being a writer is an endless study in human transition and lessons learned or forgotten or misapplied.’ – Sloane Crosley

‘When I was 13, I moved from New Jersey to Germany with my family. The high school was so supportive of my dream to continue with my theater training; instead of taking PE, I would get credit for dance lessons.’ – Nina Arianda

‘Even bad results teach you something, and you can learn your lessons and get better.’ – Jeff Raikes

‘History provides a sense of where we’ve been and lessons that can be taken forward.’ – Jim Leach

‘I think I’m still chewing on my years as a foreign correspondent. I found myself covering catastrophes – war, uprising, famine, refugee crises – and witnessing how people were affected by dire situations. When I find a story from the past, I bring some of those lessons to bear on the narrative.’ – Geraldine Brooks

‘I’m trying to learn classical piano, Mozart and Beethoven and stuff. I took lessons when I was younger and now I sort of sight read the music and play it by ear. It’s fun. It takes up a lot of time. I practice a couple of hours a day, but I find it soothing.’ – Evan Peters

‘As a child, I was always making sound; it was a compulsion. I loved to scream and yell and sing; it freed me from all the thoughts in my head. I begged for opera lessons because opera singing is the most formidable, most emotional way to use your voice.’ – Zola Jesus

‘I took my archery lessons. It was really fun to learn something new.’ – Anna Popplewell

‘I had piano lessons at five and started guitar at ten, but although music and acting was always around me, my parents never pressured me into it.’ – Micky Dolenz

‘Acting lessons teach you to really listen to what the other person is saying because in acting it’s all about responding to the lines.’ – Tommy Mottola

‘I had piano lessons when I was younger, but I quit because I didn’t want to sit and learn the scales.’ – Conor Maynard

‘I’m not writing fairy tales or object lessons.’ – Junot Diaz

‘As a Naval officer, I’ve been all over the world, and one of the foundational lessons I learned was that parents everywhere would like to raise their children to a higher standard of living in a peaceful environment. That’s a universal goal for families.’ – Michael Mullen

‘My children have been learning lessons about entrepreneurship since they were in kindergarten, and these lessons are paying off: even though they are only 22, 18, and 15, they have already collectively launched three nonprofit organizations and several new businesses.’ – Naveen Jain

‘There are life lessons that can be derived from reality television.’ – Mike White

‘I used to play the piano by listening to it – like Chopin pieces, when I was, like, a little kid – and then the minute my parents got me lessons to read music, I couldn’t do it anymore.’ – Eliza Coupe

‘It was easy to believe, between lessons on Shakespeare and Dickens and Austen, that all of the great stories had already been written by dead Europeans. But every time I saw ‘The Outsiders’, I knew better. It was the first time I’d realized that real people write books.’ – Ally Carter

‘The ability to take another perspective has become one of the keys to both sales and non-sales selling. And the social science research on perspective-taking yields some important lessons for all of us.’ – Daniel H. Pink

‘I’ve been taking art lessons since I was little, and I’ve always drawn. I think in pictures.’ – Brian Selznick

‘Starting at age four, my mom decided that she was not going to have an idle child in the house. So I started taking dance lessons on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and then I was in acting classes on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and I was also modeling on Saturdays. And that was my childhood.’ – Chandra Wilson

‘You know, your first album is about really amazing things. Your first album is always about coming of age, first love, first loss, usually you suffer a first loss of someone that you love to death, even, you know, really big life lessons, things you learn from your parents’ divorce or from the travels that you took.’ – Brandi Carlile

‘My mother played the piano and my father the violin, I can remember my dad teaching me how to waltz; I had my feet on his, my mother playing the piano, and my husband will tell you the lessons weren’t very successful.’ – Quentin Bryce

‘As a father, physician and nurse, I have a special place in my heart for children, and I know the brief window of opportunity we have to teach them simple lessons that can lead to a lifetime of good health.’ – Richard Carmona

‘I always managed to get in trouble, like every kid. But I had to learn a lot of hard lessons on my own, without parents who would nurture me and guard me through that part of life, at a very young age.’ – Ted Dekker

‘When my kids wanted to give up on things, I wouldn’t let them, and those are lifelong lessons.’ – Amy Chua

‘Putting lessons in young adult books is very dangerous.’ – Ned Vizzini

‘There was a lot of music in our home. Mom played piano in church and gave piano lessons.’ – Ernie Isley

‘I did dancing and singing when I was little, and then when I was 12 years old my friends were taking speech and drama at school. They were private lessons, and I started doing that. Over the years everyone else dropped out and I just kept going. I loved it.’ – Bella Heathcote

‘I have a four-and-a-half-, nearly five-octave range. I probably should have had extra lessons as a child, as I am certain my family heard my potential, but I didn’t. I was in the choir as a schoolgirl, but really, it is all self-taught.’ – Daphne Guinness

‘I think God has a sense of humor, and the way my lessons come from God is very funny. I have to laugh at myself even if it’s a tough lesson.’ – Yvette Nicole Brown

‘It got a little stressful in my first two years of high school, trying to make conference calls with investors in between classes, but I definitely learned a lot of important time-management lessons.’ – Ben Casnocha

‘I’ve been very lucky, getting to travel the world with professional photographers. I’d grab their equipment, get a few lessons, and start firing shots.’ – Rob Machado

‘I took lessons for about everything you could imagine – gymnastics to karate to flute and piano. My mom always definitely kept me in some kind of class or program, but for guitar, I kinda gave up on then kinda just taught myself. Same thing with piano. I’ve never been good with following lessons.’ – Elle Varner

‘I took lessons since I was little; I used to pay for my own singing lessons and take myself. Just take the bus when I was a kid and go. But I’d been writing music for years, since the smallest age.’ – Rebecca Ferguson

‘You always learn lessons in business.’ – Eli Broad

‘Without the lessons I learned in gymnastics, I would be crushed.’ – Liang Chow

‘When I got large enough to go to work, while employed I was reflecting on many things that would present themselves to my imagination; and whenever an opportunity occurred of looking at a book, when the school-children were getting their lessons, I would find many things that the fertility of my own imagination had depicted to me before.’ – Nat Turner

‘I was bought an electric guitar when I was 12, but my guitar teacher beat me up. I didn’t like guitar lessons and I got quite bored. My teacher was obviously bored giving me lessons, and one day I offered him a liquorice toffee, but he didn’t answer. So I threw it at him, it hit him in the face, and he sort of beat me up.’ – Simon Cowell

‘If you’re eight and you live in Los Angeles and everybody has toys and you go to a country that has a Marxist dictatorship and there are no toy stores and nobody speaks English and it’s blazing hot every day and they only have fish, which you don’t like, then you tend not to appreciate the cultural lessons you’re learning.’ – Zooey Deschanel

‘Once in my childhood I had been eager to learn Irish; I thought to get leave to take lessons from an old Scripture-reader who spent a part of his time in the parish of Killinane, teaching such scholars as he could find to read their own language in the hope that they might turn to the only book then being printed in Irish, the Bible.’ – Lady Gregory

‘There were so many lessons I learned the hard way: missing out on a raise because I didn’t know to ask, having colleagues consistently get credit for my ideas because of how I spoke up in meetings. When I looked for a resource that addressed the challenges I was facing, I couldn’t find it. There was nothing.’ – Kathryn Minshew

‘As you know, I am a novelist, and I really want to write novels. But I knew enough about the Dreyfus case to understand immediately why what happened to Dreyfus was not merely a cause celebre from the end of the 19th century, but an event that could be shown to teach us lessons of the greatest importance for our own time.’ – Louis Begley

‘My little brother and I took piano lessons at a young age and played music together later on in life just to play around at home until we decided to make a record. Eventually we started having more and more songs.’ – Josephine de La Baume

‘I’ve actually tried to give Brett Ratner dance lessons, but he thinks he already knows how to.’ – Chris Tucker

‘One of the important lessons of the Internet is, how easy it is to get things done completely shapes what gets created. For that reason, technologies like Amazon’s cloud service are very important. Even if they aren’t technically impressive, they make things easy to do.’ – Patrick Collison

‘I learned hard lessons in life; I had to because I had so much happen: My mother died my sophomore year in high school. The next year, same day, my brother dropped dead. Two years after that, I got married because my girlfriend got pregnant. The year after my wedding, my father – who I had only recently met – died.’ – Bernie Mac

‘There are so many lessons in life that can be learned through golf. I am not afraid to say that I am still learning some of them and probably will continue for some time.’ – Paula Creamer

‘Reagan has very significant things to teach us – positive lessons and quite negative lessons.’ – Eugene Jarecki

‘When I was nine years old, I started playing guitar, and I took classical guitar lessons and studied music theory. And played jazz for a while. And then when I was around fourteen years old, I discovered punk rock. And so I then tried to unlearn everything I had learned in classical music and jazz so I could play in punk rock bands.’ – Moby

‘I think, as a nation, we didn’t learn our lessons from the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. We should have been more careful in a whole host of areas.’ – Raymond Kelly

‘I met my wife when we were both 19 or 20, at a music school where she was taking voice and piano lessons and I was doing classes in music theory and composition.’ – Rohinton Mistry

‘If you give people literacy, bad ideas can be attacked and experiments tried, and lessons will accumulate.’ – Steven Pinker

‘The reason the United States is not so likely to invade Iran is precisely because of the lessons learned from Iraq. And conversely, the Iranian push towards nuclear capability is calculated to deter invasions like the kind deposing Saddam Husain.’ – Steven Pinker

‘I’m not into nostalgia, and I only look back to find lessons.’ – Ian Schrager

‘Every woman has a mother, and every woman will have an issue with that mother and things that mother did or didn’t do. It just depends on how you choose to process the lessons that you learned from your own mother.’ – Kate Winslet

‘Lessons didn’t really work out for me, so I went to the old school, listening to records and learning what I wanted to learn.’ – Dimebag Darrell

‘The goal for the Laureus Sport For Good Foundation is to give kids an opportunity to be involved in sports and hopefully learn some lessons along the way. We want to put them in a safe environment, help them if they need it and maybe they will get a scholarship to a school because of the skills that they learn. Sport is just a starting point.’ – Martina Navratilova

‘When Evanescence took time off, I bought a big concert harp and started taking lessons like I was in high school again, which was really, really fun. I felt like I was learning again.’ – Amy Lee

‘My mother was the influence on me – my father was absent. He was a diamond dealer; he was doing wonderful things in the background, and women were left at home. So my mother really was in charge of everything: the ballet, dance lessons, piano lessons, and latkes.’ – Maira Kalman

‘I taught myself to read music at a very young age, so when I started to take lessons in school, the teachers used to give me other instruments to keep me busy, because I was more advanced than the other kids.’ – Stefon Harris

‘To fully absorb the lessons of the Internet, urge the Internet-centrists, we need to reshape our political and social institutions in its image.’ – Evgeny Morozov

‘The one man other than my father who made the most lasting impression was an uncle, Serge B. Benson. He taught me in three different classes – but above all, he taught me lessons in moral, physical, and intellectual courage that I have tried to apply in later life.’ – Ezra Taft Benson

‘I remember being, like, 5 years old, and my dad took me to a Yankees-Mets game. My dad had me on his shoulders and taught me one of the most important lessons about sports. He said, ‘Jesse, just remember one thing, the Mets suck.” – Jesse McCartney

‘I really loved working with Michael Caine. He’s a really skilled and experienced actor. I learn something from everybody, but when you work with somebody like that, you actually learn things you can put in your toolbox, things about craft. Not necessarily life lessons, but actual things he knows that you can pick up.’ – Bruce McGill

‘The lessons I learned from my mother and her friends have guided me through death, birth, loss, love, failure, and achievement, on to a Fulbright scholarship and Harvard Business School. They taught me to believe that anything was possible. They have proven to be the strongest family values I could ever have imagined.’ – Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

‘Many people leave government disillusioned about its ability to achieve change and cynical about politicians. I left with rather opposite lessons.’ – Geoff Mulgan

‘My own mother, my sister and nearly all the women in my family had full-time jobs as mothers. They were wonderful at it. They drove their children back and forth to soccer, skating lessons, piano lessons, private schools, but I sensed, even in my own mother, a kind of distant dissatisfaction.’ – Janine di Giovanni

‘I learned two basic lessons on Everest. First, just because something has worked in the past does not mean it will work today. Second, different challenges require different mindsets.’ – Lewis Gordon Pugh

‘If there is an art of living, it is not something that can be taught timelessly. We have lessons to learn from Aristotle et al, for sure, but not if we simply uproot them from their epoch and stamp them into 21st-century soil.’ – Julian Baggini

‘One can never anticipate how audiences will respond. One of the lessons that I’ve learned over the years is to that no matter what my feeling or opinion might be about a given film, once you give it to the audience, they own it.’ – Delroy Lindo

‘There are a lot of little lessons that can be taught around the home without sitting a child down and boring them to death with your philosophy of life!’ – Helen McCrory

‘I love babies, and I have my nephews that I love. I have a great mom and she has raised three kids, so if I take lessons from her, I think I’ll be great. All my friends have little brothers or sisters.’ – Jamie Lynn Spears

‘I took some voice lessons here and there as a teenager but nothing too serious. I started taking it more seriously when I was in Miss Saigon. I needed to improve my technique in order to survive doing that show as many time a week as I was doing it. It’s not an easy show to sing, so I needed all the help I could get.’ – Lea Salonga

‘Though there are lessons that can be learned about becoming a great leader, most exist inherently in the bellies of those who lead.’ – Simon Sinek

‘Academic experts may not be good at doing what they are experts in themselves, but they are good at explaining the subject matter to others. They write books, teach courses and offer lessons and give steps others can follow.’ – Simon Sinek

‘I would like to learn so many things: I’d like to take tennis classes, I’d like continuing vocal lessons, and I’d definitely like taking more ice skating and more tap.’ – Sofia Vassilieva

‘I was always super, super musical. So my parents recognized that and put me in choirs, piano lessons, and all that.’ – Bonnie McKee

‘Some lessons take years to learn, with repeated exposure to the same path sometimes shadowed by the inner conscience of own souls. But eventually we learn, and our journey continues in another direction.’ – Matthew Underwood

‘I love New York. I’m taking English lessons there for the first time. I used to live in Tokyo, but I needed something new. I’m really close to my family. I miss them all the time, but we Skype a lot.’ – Rinko Kikuchi

‘My career as an actor started when I was six years old, taking dancing lessons. Then I started getting paid jobs to dance at the age of seven.’ – Sid Haig

‘Summer I was 13, my grandfather and my father taught me how to play golf. I took lessons that summer, and I played every day that summer. I probably would’ve kept playing, except I realized that girls don’t watch golf; they watch tennis. So I let my golf game go dormant and started playing tennis.’ – Thomas Gibson

‘My style is an extension of acting and an outcome of some serious lessons I picked up learning when I did theatre in my early days.’ – Kapil Sharma

‘Sometimes you just have to get a shock to grow up and wake up, and I’ve had lots of shocks because it’s as though I don’t learn the lessons, so something new comes and hits me.’ – Marianne Faithfull

‘I came from a very musical family, so I grew up singing karaoke with the family. My family said ‘do this’ and brought me to singing lessons. I had always been writing poems and songs.’ – Cassie Steele

‘I started classical and operatic lessons when I was 8 and become an operatic singer and went to competition. I write my own music. A lot of the songs, growing up, I was into writing dark stories and poems, and one day I started putting melodies to them.’ – Cassie Steele

‘Back in Rome I did some acting lessons and I realised I loved it more than anything else I had ever done before.’ – Caterina Murino

‘I still believe the lessons I learned when I was raised in a Roman Catholic household. Like, it’s harder for a rich man to get into Heaven than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle.’ – Michael Moore

‘I loved riding bikes and horses. I was eight when I started having lessons, and when my father bought me my own horse I couldn’t wait to go off on my own.’ – Andrea Bocelli

‘Films are meant solely to provide entertainment. There are no lessons to be learnt and and inferences to be drawn. Has anyone become dutiful and law abiding after seeing a film that espouses these very virtues? Films can do no more than influence fashion, decor, and hairstyle trends.’ – Madhur Bhandarkar

‘You can’t start changing things in your past. Everyone has challenges and lessons to learn – we wouldn’t be who we are without them. I certainly wouldn’t be who I am.’ – Sean Combs

‘When I was a kid, my parents gave me piano lessons and guitar lessons for a while, but I was never very good at it. I have big, sort of awkward hands. It’s hard to keep going when you don’t get any better.’ – Christopher Walken

‘When I turned 45, I lay in bed reflecting on all life had taught me. My soul sprang a leak and ideas flowed out. My pen simply caught them and set the words on paper. I typed them up and turned them into a newspaper column of the 45 lessons life taught me. When I hit 50, I added five more lessons and the paper ran the column again.’ – Regina Brett

‘Somebody who has been in a very bad wreck is going to be very conscientious about not speeding through a yellow light… You just learn so many good lessons when you go through a failed marriage.’ – Amy Grant

‘I found golf late in life, in 1990. I took some lessons and struggled. Then one day, I hit a drive that was so crisp and clean, with no vibration. There’s no feeling like it. I was hooked.’ – Dennis Quaid

‘I do know that I like to play characters that are sometimes a little on the outside – that’s because it feels kind of romantic and sexier to me. I really think they are the people that we learn lessons from.’ – Willem Dafoe

‘My mother always took my brothers and me to music lessons. There were six children. Our parents attended our concerts and encouraged us to study and enjoy many different types of music.’ – Wynton Marsalis

‘No one ever said ‘no’ to me about anything. No one ever told me anything was wrong. Never. No one ever said, ‘You can’t be a fashion designer.’ No one ever said, ‘You’re a boy and you can’t take tap-dancing lessons.’ No one ever said, ‘You’re a boy and you can’t have long hair.” – Marc Jacobs

‘I took some lessons as a kid but trained myself by ear. I did it the way jazz musicians used to learn years ago, which is to play records and slow them down to figure out the notes. At first I tried to imitate Red Garland, who was my favorite jazz pianist.’ – Donald Fagen

‘At school I used to avoid dance lessons. They were the worst.’ – Kate Winslet

‘You don’t have that much choice in your life, which is one of the big lessons I’ve learned. I was going to be a designer whether I wanted to be a designer or not.’ – Donna Karan

‘I remember thinking that people were crazy for reading the same book more than once, but I now have a new-found appreciation for the re-discovery of literature. The lessons we learned from books in the school curriculum are reinvented and updated when we read as adults.’ – Rachel Nichols

‘There are many lessons people can learn about the left. One of the key lessons is they never give anything up. Once they begin a quest, they don’t stop until they’ve got it. The other thing that you need to learn is, they’re never happy even after they succeed. They are never happy because there can never be enough to satisfy them.’ – Rush Limbaugh

‘My history teacher was utterly terrifying, but her lessons were very inspiring. She got me interested in people and stories, which then led me to acting.’ – Laura Carmichael

‘When I was a teenager, my biggest lessons came from Kenny Chesney, Tim McGraw, George Strait, Rascal Flatts and Brad Paisley. I learned so much from opening up for those artists, and it also taught me how to treat your opening acts and make them feel like they’re part of a family, not just a tour.’ – Taylor Swift

‘I learned at Yale, one of the biggest lessons was to learn how special I am and therefore how totally unspecial I am. I was special among everyone else who was special. The fact that we’re all so individual and that’s what makes us special.’ – Lupita Nyong’o

‘I never got lessons. I took influence from Chet Baker, Ian Dury, and Joe Strummer. I don’t hear my voice and think, ‘Yeah, that’s a banging voice!’ It’s more about putting the right emotions into the right words and the lyrics than anything else to me.’ – King Krule

‘All of the most important lessons about writing I learned from my father. He never set out to teach me anything, it would just be something he said casually in conversation.’ – Joss Whedon

‘I saw the film ‘Amadeus’ from when I was five, which made me want to take piano lessons.’ – Mark Salling

‘I decided I wanted to be a musician when I saw the movie ‘Amadeus’ around 1987. I was five years old, so it was a good time to start piano lessons after seeing Tom Hulce who played Mozart play the harpsichord on his back with his hands crossed. Such a great movie to inspire a five-year-old.’ – Mark Salling

‘We have a lot of pressures on children very young. We have ambition. We over-schedule our children. We want them to have soccer lessons and violin lessons… I think children need to have at least an hour of fun a day.’ – Julia Cameron

‘One of the lessons from Sept. 11 is that America requires a long-term presence in those parts of the world that endanger us. This notion has become controversial, but frankly, the need could not be clearer.’ – Rudy Giuliani

‘The opportunity here in the U.S. is so unique because we are so diverse, with so many different cultures living together. Christians, Jews, Hindus, Muslims and Buddhists, all with their own connections to the spiritual aspects of food and with lessons that we can learn from each other.’ – Marcus Samuelsson

‘My parents were there: in front of me, behind me, in the middle of my life at all times: reprimanding me, giving me confidence, teaching me valuable lessons, to help make me the man I am today.’ – Marcus Samuelsson

‘I always performed as a kid to make my family laugh and was more concerned with making kids at school laugh than I was about the lessons.’ – Mathew Baynton

‘I started elocution lessons because I was being teased, and I had a brilliant drama teacher. At the age of 14, I appeared at the National Theatre in ‘The Crucible.” – Gina Bellman

‘While I circled around and around in my brown rental skates, I studied a group of skaters spinning in the center. I was fascinated! When my mom picked me up, I began a campaign for skating lessons.’ – Gracie Gold

‘Figuring out how to eat healthfully on your own without your parents’ guidance is one of the hardest lessons you must learn when you leave home for college.’ – Daphne Oz

‘There was always a piano in the house when I was growing up – my dad played, and I thought it was cool – and when I was eight, I begged my parents to let me have lessons. After a couple of weeks, I wanted to give up, but my parents were very focused and made me keep going, which I’m very pleased about now.’ – Laura Mvula

‘I thought about tennis. But the more I thought about the whole thing – lessons, equipment, going to the courts – I said screw it, I’m just going to go buy a pair of sneakers and go running.’ – Biz Stone

‘I teach my children that in life, there is no control of what tomorrow is going to bring. There really isn’t. But in whatever it brings, we have choices, and I’m glad because I made more right choices than wrong, but in the wrong choices, there are lessons to be learned.’ – BeBe Winans

‘Look at where I lived! Four blocks from Lincoln Center. I used to play in the fountain. And then I started taking dance lessons. I was in ‘The Nutcracker’ for the N.Y. City Ballet when I was 8 and dancing in ‘The Firebird’ for George Balanchine when I was 9. Believe me, that’s something you don’t ever forget.’ – Diane Paulus

”Restaurant Man’ is kind of the story, an unabridged story of what happened in my life, the good bad and ugly. Some people might glean some life lessons. It is honest, not written as a press release.’ – Joe Bastianich

‘One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned during my time on ‘Oprah’ is that everyone wants to be heard. We all want to have our humanity acknowledged – to have others see us for who we truly are. We all want to know that we are valued, we are heard, we are understood.’ – Nate Berkus

‘I love exercise, but I find it boring doing the same thing all the time, so I fluctuate between going to the gym, doing Pilates, and taking dance lessons.’ – Twiggy

‘My father taught me many important giving lessons, but two stand out. First, always give as much as you possibly can. And second, give equally from among your resources – your time, your mind and your capital. These are principles I live by.’ – Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen

‘I took vocal lessons for the first time and actually learned a lot about using my voice as an instrument as opposed to just doing what I’ve always done and going by feeling. I’m still doing that, but I’ve learned a lot of tricks and how to manipulate and play with my voice a little bit.’ – Travie McCoy

‘I think it’s a very dangerous game to play when you assume that just because someone’s an entertainer, they’re automatically a role model. Entertainers are there to entertain. They aren’t there to teach your children the lessons that you haven’t bothered to teach them at home yourself. They’re just doing their own version of entertaining.’ – Wentworth Miller

‘I have spent more than a decade trying to improve the lives of some of the most vulnerable people on earth, and they’ve taught me countless lessons.’ – Howard Graham Buffett

‘My duty is that of a chronicler; and if I perform that conscientiously, the lessons which my observations suggest will need no pointing out.’ – Bayard Taylor

‘There are no moral lectures in ‘Lookaway, Lookaway;’ there aren’t even any lessons. But there is passion. It is a work that hides its craft but never its beauty, that is ambitious but never pretentious, that does not sacrifice nuance for power or power for nuance.’ – Cathleen Schine

‘One of the great lessons I learned about historical fiction from writing ‘Loving Frank’ is that you don’t try to disguise what people did; my approach was to try to understand the characters and why they did what they did.’ – Nancy Horan

‘From the time I made my announcement that I was going to be an actor, I auditioned for community theater, did shows at Greenbrier, interned at the Cleveland Play House for a summer, took voice lessons, took ballet lessons. I did everything that Cleveland allowed me to do – everything that was available to me.’ – Reggie Lee

‘I think I am very hands-on mother. I am very strict, and my daughter keeps telling me, ‘You are too hard on me,’ and I keep telling her, ‘I have to be hard because if I am not hard, you will not learn the lessons that I want you to learn.’ I think it is really important to be that way.’ – Kajol

‘I think people come into our lives for a reason, and we can learn from them, and they have lessons to teach us.’ – Danielle Panabaker

‘For me, one of the lessons from 9/11 is that you have to give the organization context for how you’re acting, and you’ve got to communicate constantly, in this case particularly with all the changes that were occurring in the financial marketplace and in the economy.’ – Kenneth Chenault

‘I think you accidentally learn things in high school that turn out to be life lessons when you are able to step back a bit and study them in more depth.’ – Megan Fox

‘For ten years, I went to piano lessons. I don’t think I’m a very musical person, and the theory quite defeated me, but I had a freak aptitude for Debussy and Ravel.’ – Ronald Frame

‘My dad always played a lot of music, so I heard him playing all the time, and then I decided that I wanted to learn to play guitar, so I got an acoustic and started taking lessons. I wanted to be able to shred like Yngwie Malmsteen.’ – Oscar Isaac

‘Discussions of the economy, especially during times of crisis, are often framed in terms of lessons we supposedly learned during the Depression of the 1930s. If we are not to endure terrible times like those again, we are told, we must support whatever form of state intervention is currently being peddled.’ – Thomas Woods

‘My mum said she remembers me asking her if she’d take me to ballet lessons when I was about two and a half. She said I could barely speak, and yet was asking for ballet lessons.’ – Joanne Froggatt

‘I love directing; it felt right to me when I did ‘Flying Lessons’. It’s something I will do again. Really, you can always be working and developing. That’s something that’s kind of ever constant.’ – Derek Magyar

‘There are some good teachers out there, but the only one who is a genius at diagnosing my swing is my mom. She took up golf late, when she was 39, but in her younger days, she was an amazing athlete. She never read an instruction book or took lessons, but she has a remarkable eye for motion.’ – Boo Weekley

‘The topic ‘Farm Wisdom’ is not a gospel doctrine or scriptural topic, although I found considerable scriptural support for the lessons learned on the farm.’ – John Bytheway

‘Young children need to develop good habits that will be useful to them the rest of their lives. It is important to keep the lessons age-appropriate. For example, when your children start earning allowances, that would be a good time to teach them how to put some money in the bank instead of spending it all.’ – Bill Rancic

‘In one of my recent books, ‘The Success Principles,’ I taught 64 lessons that help people achieve what they want out of life. From taking nothing less than 100 percent responsibility for your life to empowering others, these are the fundamentals to success – and to great leadership.’ – Jack Canfield

‘I have to have three or four books going simultaneously. If I’m not impressed in the first 20 pages, I don’t bother reading the rest, especially with novels. I’m not a book-club style reader. I’m not looking for life lessons or wanting people to think I’m smart because I’m reading a certain book.’ – Chris Abani

‘Maybe there’s a little girl who thinks she can be an Olympic athlete, and she sees all the things I struggled through to get here. Yeah, I didn’t walk away with a medal or run away with a medal, but I think there’s lessons to be learned when you win and lessons to be learned when you lose.’ – Lolo Jones

‘I’m probably the only kid in history whose parents made him stop taking music lessons. They made me stop studying the accordion.’ – Ricky Jay

‘I think one of the bigger lessons the Internet has taught us is that ‘niche’ or ‘subculture’ are a lot bigger than anyone ever thought.’ – Warren Ellis

‘I can play the piano. I started off with lessons, and then, as we always had a piano in the house, I would play around and became quite good.’ – Louise Nurding

‘One of the main lessons I have learned the last five years as Secretary-General is that the United Nations cannot function properly without the support of the business community and civil society. We need to have tripartite support – the governments, the business communities and the civil society.’ – Ban Ki-moon

‘One of the lessons of leadership worth emphasizing is that you want to get to know other great leaders and take their advice. At some point in your development, it’s only people who’ve been in the seat of having to be leaders who can help you in a deep way.’ – Jim Yong Kim

‘One of the lessons of Vietnam, which we failed to heed in the Iraq war and the Afghanistan surge, is that before you commit U.S. military forces to aid or assist, it is essential to know what you want them to achieve.’ – Kathleen Troia McFarland

‘I have enormous respect for the human being because they’re asked to take on a lot. And I don’t think there’s any easy solution. But I think the journey is what you have to finally be satisfied with, but not be afraid of the lessons one has to learn… it ends up as grace. And you grow; you find a way to continue.’ – Horton Foote

‘I think the most important leadership lessons I’ve learned have to do with understanding the context in which you are leading. Universities are places with enormously distributed authority and many different sorts of constituencies, all of whom have a stake in that institution.’ – Drew Gilpin Faust

‘My years of ballet and jazz dance lessons didn’t make me any more graceful – they just helped keep me from bumping into the furniture on stage.’ – Toni Tennille

‘Many of the most important and life-changing moments of my life occurred when I was a young man. The lessons I learned then formed my character and shaped my destiny.’ – Joseph B. Wirthlin

‘I learned Hebrew from a high school teacher named Mr. Cohen. We would drive down the highway to meet his car, and Jewish boys from these Massachusetts towns would sit in his car and learn the lessons.’ – Israel Horovitz

‘When you’re at a public pool or in your friend’s backyard, knowing that your kids can get in and out of the water and protect themselves can make all the difference in the world. Something as simple as being able to flip over and get to the ladder can save a life. You can start your kids in lessons as early as you want – it’s never too soon.’ – Summer Sanders

‘My parents wanted us to be pool-safe, so I had lessons when I was 18 months old. I would like to share with all the parents out there that I was that kid who cried during every one of my lessons. But it wasn’t an option for my parents; we had a backyard pool, so I needed to learn how to swim.’ – Summer Sanders

‘Nutrition doesn’t have to be complicated. It goes back to the lessons you learned as a kid. Start with a real breakfast; don’t ever skip that. If you’re waking up early for a run, make sure you drink at least a glass of water and put something healthy into your stomach before you go out the door.’ – Summer Sanders

‘It is truly not fun to be the family that sticks out in an all-white community. On the other side, I have five brothers and sisters; we all look exactly the same, and we’re very, very tight. The lessons about race were not pleasant, but there are things that I loved about my childhood.’ – Soledad O’Brien

‘Every election matters. Anyone that tells you otherwise doesn’t understand politics. That said, not every election sends sweeping messages that are easy to discern, but every election provides lessons worth learning.’ – Chuck Todd

‘I did want to share with you one of the greatest lessons I’ve learned over the years cooking for my kids – there is enormous value in bringing children into the kitchen.’ – Michael Mina

‘I tried a little of everything when I was little. I tried karate, I tried ballet, I tried piano lessons and singing lessons… I was a pretty normal kid, for the most part.’ – Cassie Ventura

‘I have learned that, although I am a good teacher, I am a much better student, and I was blessed to learn valuable lessons from my students on a daily basis. They taught me the importance of teaching to a student – and not to a test.’ – Erin Gruwell

‘As for the once-revolutionary ‘Agon,’ after more than half a century, its lessons and revelations have been so absorbed into the language of ballet that it now seems almost conventional.’ – Robert Gottlieb

‘When you’re a child, you take things for granted. For instance, my mum didn’t have a lot of money, but I went to piano, ballet and gymnastics lessons, and tae kwon do.’ – Holliday Grainger

‘There have been a few friends who have taught me some great lessons in life. I wouldn’t like to name them. They did things that I never expected out of them that left me heart-broken. It was during these rough patches in life that they left me alone. I know now that it was only my position that they were interested in.’ – Harbhajan Singh

‘I find the education I got from living in Derby and being streetwise and knowing the people that I know, the lessons that I had to learn growing up, have set me in good stead for this kind of working life.’ – Jack O’Connell

‘One can have many regrets in life, but they are temporary. There are lessons to learn from every mistake.’ – Jeev Milkha Singh

‘What if the slowdown in merger activity isn’t cyclical, but secular? What if corporations have learned the lessons of so many companies before them that the odds of a successful merger are no better than 50-50 and probably less? Is it possible that the biggest deals have already been done?’ – Andrew Ross Sorkin

‘I think one of the most important lessons that I’ve learned is to put your head down and work. Don’t look at other people and compare yourself. Just do the work. Because when the opportunity is there, you have to be ready. Make sure your craft is refined and you’re constantly working on it.’ – Tika Sumpter

‘You know, I only claim to play three instruments. My dad is a banker, but a drummer at heart; and my mom used to teach piano lessons when she was younger. So I can play some piano, play a little drums, and fake the bass – but banjo, mandolin, and guitar are my thing.’ – Charlie Worsham

‘I wanted to be Whitney Houston at first, and when I started taking voice lessons, my voice teacher kind of geared me more towards opera.’ – Megan Hilty

‘I think relationships are really hard. Each one gives you lessons that you need.’ – Jennifer Grey

‘I was always singing around my house, and my parents thought they should put me into voice lessons just for fun.’ – Jennifer Damiano

‘I think gymnastics trained me as a person, too. Without the lessons I learned in gymnastics, I would be crushed.’ – Liang Chow

‘Teachers today are breaking down obstacles, finding innovative ways to instill old lessons, proving that greatness can be found in everyday places.’ – Taylor Mali

‘I spent a lot of time taking acting lessons… Actors have no inhibitions, and I’m inhibited by everything. To be able to make fun of yourself is a skill and a liberating experience.’ – Maksim Chmerkovskiy

‘My parents worked for Exxon, and they gave me every chance to take part in music. I took guitar lessons, and I was in the choir at school.’ – Lyle Lovett

‘My lessons didn’t come at my father’s knee. Like all good lessons, they were learned from example.’ – Ted Danson

‘The first two lessons, which we learned early in our efforts to be good member missionaries, have made sharing the Gospel much easier: We simply can’t predict who will or won’t be interested in the Gospel, and building a friendship is not a prerequisite to inviting people to learn about the Gospel.’ – Clayton M. Christensen

‘I didn’t study dance. I had some ballet lessons because I needed it for posture and for my arms, mostly. My skating coach said I really needed it, from the belly button up, as opposed to the footwork. In skating, the shoes don’t move.’ – Dorothy Hamill

‘One of the first things a British visitor to Southern California discovers is that he must have a car. Freeways. Bad public transport. I took driving lessons.’ – Christopher Lee

‘Since babyhood, I’ve always evolved from one thing to another. My mother gave me ballet lessons at 6 as part of her enthusiasm for the arts and for life. We went to museums, to the theater. While her own talent was untapped, she worked for church causes.’ – Judith Jamison

‘My dad died in 1980, and I found out afterwards from mum that my piano lessons, which cost ¬£2 a week, took up nearly a third of his income.’ – Rick Wakeman

‘Being poor with three small children is terrifying. You can’t make any plans. You know you’re not going on holiday, ever. There’s no way you could ever afford driving lessons or a car. And the guilt I used to feel: they had holes in their shoes, and at one point, I had to send them to school wearing Wellingtons when the sun was shining.’ – Sue Townsend

‘I have enjoyed most particularly reading the correspondence between Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss. The genuine friendship, competitiveness and support that thread through their communications are life lessons for us all.’ – Jessye Norman

‘I view the experiences that I have had – both tough ones and the pleasant ones – as gifts. They’ve been full of lessons. And I’ve learned to be open to those lessons.’ – Deval Patrick

‘My mother made me take piano lessons, and because I am her oldest and she had not yet been worn down by the task of prodding five children to practice every day, she kept me practicing despite my whining.’ – Sheri L. Dew

‘I was a natural skater, but I also took private lessons to enhance my skills.’ – Paul Coffey

‘I knew I wanted to be an artist, but I never took music lessons. I was just playing around in front of the mirror and being silly, then suddenly I started making songs.’ – Lykke Li

‘The more I got into playing guitar, the more I enjoyed music, and the broader my listening became. The instrument itself became important to me, and I started messing around with classical guitar and took classical lessons.’ – Alex Lifeson

‘I’ve learned several lessons over the years. First, never take yourself too seriously, or work is boring. Next, people make the difference. You can have great technology, but if it’s not complemented by great people, it won’t go anywhere. Finally, customers buy from people they like.’ – John W. Thompson

‘I was a lifeguard, camp counselor, the president of the YMCA Leaders Corps. I also took piano lessons. I was a dancer.’ – Chirlane McCray

‘I’ve had plenty of lessons about film acting and theatre acting.’ – John Boyega

‘One of the most important lessons we can glean from the environmental movement is to ‘think globally and act locally.” – Mike Love

‘My dad worked for Nestle for 26 years and ended up being the mayor of our hometown. One of the lessons I learned from him was to never mistake kindness for weakness.’ – Brad D. Smith

‘I played the piano as a boy for six years, from the time I was six to 12 years old. My piano lessons ended when my father died because our family had no more money. I used to have a mestiza teacher. She’d come once a week to teach me piano lessons, and she’d bribe me each time with an apple; otherwise, I wouldn’t play.’ – John Gokongwei

‘I remember my mom threatening me, half-serious: ‘You know what? I should take you to Pittsburgh and put you in dance lessons just to keep you occupied.’ Well, that brought everything to a screeching halt. ‘Jeeze, dance lessons.’ In retrospect, it would have been awesome, but then, ‘Ugh, dancing – dancing’s for sissies.” – Michael Keaton

‘One of my earliest memories is of seeing my mother in her beach chair, reading a book under an umbrella by the water’s edge while my sisters and I played beside her. Of all the life lessons she taught me, that is one of my favorites: to take time at a place I love, restore my spirit with books and the beach.’ – Luanne Rice

‘First, I started taking dance classes, and then I started taking singing lessons. Then my mom put me into a year-round theatre program where I did seven shows.’ – Lilla Crawford

‘In my son’s kindergarten, they’re telling us how to get him into Stanford. By their advice, I’m doing everything wrong, because I’m trying to make him happy rather than putting him through as many piano lessons as possible.’ – Sebastian Thrun

‘I made about fifty-four dollars a week and spent it on two flying lessons every week at the age of sixteen and was able to get a license then pretty early and knew that that’s what I wanted to do, some kind of a career in aviation. I did know about space flight, but at that point, it was still pretty far out there.’ – Kevin A. Ford

‘I bought a guitar CD-ROM because we had a new computer, but I had no attention span for that. I spent about three hours on it desperate to be brilliant. Eventually, I got some proper lessons.’ – James Bay

‘I never took any guitar lessons or anything; I never really learned to play covers. I’m actually happy that I never took lessons as a kid. Now, I’d like to take lessons to kind of go deeper. But I think sometimes lessons can steal a person’s personality away, because they’re trying to do things so technically.’ – King Tuff

‘I created an online program that has audio lessons and PDF worksheets and two hours of video. So it’s like a course you can do at home. And people are loving it and getting jobs from it.’ – Josh Pais

‘Although I don’t come from a musical background, I was given piano lessons along with my sisters, but I wasn’t what you would call a good student. I tended to write songs rather than do scales.’ – Vonda Shepard

‘A lot of the lessons that are taught in football will promote success in anything you get into after football; for me, it just happens to be music. Being disciplined. Good character. Trying to do the right thing, and working hard.’ – Sam Hunt

‘I learn lessons with every interview I give.’ – Jenny Lewis

‘At school, I’d refuse to take part in biology lessons when animals were being dissected. One time, the teacher announced that we would be gassing worms. So I ran around the room, gathered up all the worms and set them free in the fields. I just loved animals and couldn’t bear the thought of them suffering.’ – Imelda May

‘My grade 3 teacher put on a kids’ Christmas concert, and I played the kazoo, so my mother bought me a trumpet. I took lessons for eight years, was in the Kitsilano Boys Band, and I played in the Vancouver Junior Symphony for two years.’ – Jim Pattison

‘It’s very important to learn quick lessons from your failures, very important to recognize symptoms of failure pretty early, and it is very, very important to not to be attached too much to the idea – you have to know when to give up an idea.’ – N. R. Narayana Murthy

‘One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is that there has got to be a reason for what you’re doing. You actually have to care about what you’re doing. The business has to be about something. Whatever the point of it is does not have to be inconsistent with making money, but usually if that’s the sole reason, it is not very successful.’ – Stewart Butterfield

‘I’ve always been a bit of a poser. I was chucked out of ballet lessons for looking in the mirror.’ – Abbey Clancy

‘You spend your life having lessons, practising and competing as an amateur, and working during the day. As you get to the top end of the amateur field, you try not to work anymore; you earn your living through dancing, maybe by doing a bit of teaching. It’s an ongoing life’s work.’ – Anton du Beke

‘I think there’s a reason that horror appeals to teens. There’s a lot of useful lessons to take away from reading horror. We get to be scared in the comfort and safety of our own homes. We can put the book down if we get too scared, and no one will ever know if we decide not to pick it up again.’ – Holly Black

‘Your soul’s mission is to serve in the grandest way it can. Divine plans lie imprinted in your inner world, and there are important lessons for you to learn and share on this journey to your most magnificent self.’ – Debbie Ford

‘Of course the decision to commit British forces in Iraq was, for many MPs, a wrenching choice. However, our responsibility in the face of a growing ISIS threat is not to be paralysed by history, but to learn the correct lessons from it.’ – Douglas Alexander

‘There’s this tradition of women’s magazines – which have been my bread and butter as a freelancer – where the paradigm is that the writing is about relationships, body image, lessons, and it’s always redemptive.’ – Meghan Daum

‘When I was seven we moved to Orpington, and in my new school, I was kept in for extra lessons to learn ‘joined-up’ writing instead of playing football. I still think that my poor handwriting and lack of soccer skills date from that period.’ – Martin Evans

‘I was a competitive swimmer as a teenager, only stopping when I got persistent ear infections. Every day was a 6 A.M. start to swim before lessons, then choir or dance classes after.’ – Ella Eyre

‘There are three lessons in philanthropy – one, involve the family, especially the spouse. She can be a remarkable driver of your initiative. Two, you need to build an institution, and you need to scale it up. Choose a leader for philanthropy whom you trust. Three, philanthropy needs patience, tenacity and time.’ – Azim Premji

‘Every time we meet a new terrorist group, we argue they are utterly different and we can learn nothing from the last time. Of course they are different, but some lessons on how we deal with them seem to apply in all cases.’ – Jonathan Powell

‘There are lots of lessons to learn from Amazon. Never stop innovating or questioning the fundamentals of your business. Disrupt yourself before others do. Continually motivate employees so that they never get too complacent – see Yahoo, AOL and many other Internet companies for evidence of what happens when they do.’ – Brad Stone

‘Over the course of 19 years on the Supreme Court, I learned some lessons about the Constitution of the United States.’ – David Souter

‘Useful lessons can be learned from our more successful local authorities – as you move into government, it is even more imperative to communicate speedily and persuasively with your members and your voters.’ – Charles Kennedy

‘When Pandora doesn’t pay, and bars don’t pay, and weddings don’t pay, and nobody buys CDs or shirts or concert tickets or lessons, then the musician can’t make a living making music.’ – Kent Beck

‘Music is something I couldn’t live without. My dad was into music, he played for pleasure – guitar, piano. I started off doing jazz, singing with a lot of fabulous musicians here in London before I went to the States. And I still take piano lessons every Wednesday.’ – Marianne Jean-Baptiste

‘I took piano lessons as a kid, and my daughter’s played piano since before she started kindergarten, so classical piano is something I really love.’ – Kristan Higgins

‘Sometimes people ask if my books have morals or lessons for readers, and I shudder at that thought. I always say that I have more questions than answers.’ – Robin Hobb

‘When I’m working, I try to be serious and rest where I can. I just mark in rehearsals. I still train. I warm up. And I still take lessons from this unbelievable teacher in New York, Joan Lader. I try to be stretched and ready to go.’ – Max von Essen

‘I’m the youngest of four, and they were all very into sports. I was the first one to express an interest in the arts. I took piano lessons and singing lessons, acting lessons. So it was all new to them, but my parents were great.’ – Max von Essen

‘I used to wait tables at Gladstone’s, a seafood restaurant, day in and day out. I made some of my best friends there. I taught dance and acting lessons to kids. It was awesome – an outreach program, Voices Unheard. I was a messenger for a couple of months.’ – Sufe Bradshaw

‘I have a word quota I try to fulfill every day, and I try to do that in the morning and into the afternoon and then go out with friends at night. I love singing and have lessons and enjoy drama, and so I am involved in that.’ – Alexandra Adornetto

‘No one around me was obsessed with Fred Astaire except for me. It just snowballed, really. I started with tap lessons. When I didn’t have tap shoes, I taped nickels on the bottom of my penny loafers.’ – David Hallberg

‘In my classroom, I would start my lessons with a quick review of an old topic. Then, I would introduce a new topic. Finally, I would give my students a problem to solve on their own, one that would reinforce what I’d just taught.’ – Gene Luen Yang

‘I love Jimi Hendrix obviously, and Jimmy Page and Prince. And also Elvis Presley is a really great guitar player. I don’t think he ever took lessons; he was piecing it together himself. But he has great rhythm. And rhythm, to me, you can use it to your advantage if you’re not all over the fretboard.’ – Brittany Howard

‘Literature seems to offer lessons in human nature that help us decode the world around us and be better friends.’ – Nicholas Kristof

‘If I can iron out my accent, it opens up another world of possible jobs. Whereas if you have that very strong European accent, it leaves you always being cast as the Hungarian maid or the stripper or whatever. I have voice lessons, and my coach has given me different tongue-twisters to rehearse at home.’ – Birgitte Hjort Sorensen

‘In the years that I worked in museums, first as a summer student and eventually as a curator, one of the primary lessons I learned was this: History is shaped by the people who seek to preserve it. We, of the present, decide what to keep, what to put on display, what to put into storage, and what to discard.’ – Susanna Kearsley

‘When a medium like games or comic books whips up such a rapture of enthusiasm, naturally we look for lessons we should be learning.’ – Dave Morris

‘I took vocal lessons all through my childhood and still do. I was classically trained.’ – Sofia Carson

‘I first picked up a guitar when I was ten years old; my parents surprised me with it for my tenth birthday. I started taking lessons when I was thirteen, but only for a few months, and then I just kept teaching myself.’ – Alessia Cara

‘I was too shy to do any vocal lessons or go to choirs; I just didn’t want to be seen doing it. It’s something that I kept to myself. I started easing into it, and I started doing talent shows, and YouTube really helped with that, too.’ – Alessia Cara

‘My father left me with his love of Jewish studies and cultural life. To this very day, along with several physicians and scientist colleagues, I take regular periodical lessons taught by a Rabbinical scholar on how the Jewish law views moral and ethical problems related to modern medicine and science.’ – Aaron Ciechanover

‘Through the misguided notion that writing about flying was easy, I had McCone become a pilot. When I learned that research in books wasn’t enough, I forced myself to take lessons.’ – Marcia Muller

‘Listening to the stories my colleagues are researching and grappling with – in terms of access to documents, psychological understanding of their subjects, artful composition and determination to extrapolate from an individual’s life lessons and insights that we can all learn from – I am each time overwhelmed by joy.’ – Nigel Hamilton

‘I’m not sure I’d go back and do anything over in my life. I’ve definitely had my fair share of failures and moments where I wasted my time or that of other people, but if I did those moments over, I’d have missed out on so many lessons.’ – Trip Adler

‘The person earning the federal minimum wage of $7.25 isn’t going out to eat at restaurants. They’re not taking piano lessons. They’re not going to the gym or the yoga studio. They’re not sending mom flowers on Mother’s day. What good is this person in the economy? If you raise it to $15 an hour, they’re doing all of those things.’ – Nick Hanauer

‘My grandmother was fond of painting and playing the piano. She had been given lessons by Emmanuel Chabrier, who used to spend the summer months in nearby Membrolle.’ – Yves Chauvin

‘When you’re in the throes of writing, I find, the lessons you’ve casually imparted to others are not in the forefront of your mind. Which may be good or bad. Probably both.’ – Jonathan Galassi

‘I have been taking voice and singing lessons since age 10 and originally got into it because I was really interested in musical theater. After writing my first couple of songs and performing at age 14, I knew that I really wanted to be a singer.’ – Daya

‘Over the years, my students influenced me greatly, and I’ve learned many lessons from them. I have an immense amount of respect for them, and I think that respect for your audience is the foremost requirement for anyone who wants to write.’ – Susan Campbell Bartoletti

‘That’s the best thing that classic can do, is it can return to us from our own past to give us lessons about the future, and it can give us a sense of both who we were and who we could become.’ – Bartlett Sher

‘I never had vocal lessons, dance classes, or any of the things my peers had.’ – Ciara

‘It was by a Maryland colonel in the year 1777 that the British received, in the gallant defense of an important fort, one of the first lessons of what they were to expect from American valor and patriotism.’ – Marquis de Lafayette

‘As a reader I want to be present and entertained. I don’t want to be taught lessons, and I don’t want to be spoken down to. I want to be treated as a peer and to be made to feel welcome.’ – Patrick deWitt

‘My two biggest lessons learned as a trader are take risks and get comfortable with taking losses and setbacks to help move you forward.’ – Brandon Stanton

‘I attended public school in Houston. I took piano lessons for several years, and in high school, I played trombone in the marching band. I remember especially enjoying two seasonal activities: ice skating with the Houston Figure Skating Club in the winter and visiting an aunt and uncle’s farm in West Texas in the summer.’ – Robert Woodrow Wilson

‘I was the first and only person in my family to go to university, and I spent two decades redesigning myself: even my voice is the product of elocution lessons.’ – M. J. Hyland

‘The lessons of slushing and editing build up over time, and you’re not necessarily thinking about them while you’re working, but they’re in the back of your mind, probably influencing your choices.’ – Ann Leckie

‘Innocent parents might have thought that a musical cartoon version of a fairy tale would be a child’s ideal introduction to movie magic. Yet Walt Disney taught moral lessons in the most useful way: by scaring the poop out of the little ones.’ – Richard Corliss

‘I’m proud of Larry Sanders and proud of every single person who went on that journey. It’s a very special show to me, and I’ve learned a lot of lessons from it. I need to find something where I can learn some more lessons, and then I’ll do that project.’ – Garry Shandling

‘I started taking piano lessons when I was about 5, and there was always a lot of music in my family: my parents both play instruments, my grandparents were classical violinists, and my grandfather was actually a music professor and a conductor.’ – Adam Schlesinger

‘I just want to be entertained. The stories that have aged the best are the ones where the wolf eats grandma, or the woman is going to bake children in an oven, or the bear is going to eat the girl for eating the porridge. There are lessons in there, but they’re deeply engrained and hidden.’ – Drew Daywalt

‘I grew up studying dance, taking ballet lessons.’ – Jane Hamilton

‘For my brother and me, there would be no ‘Field of Dreams’-like playing catch, no nature lessons with our old man. Instead, it would be a darkened theater, the projector light coming on, and a new adventure unfolding.’ – Bob Weinstein

‘My book ‘The Exciting Adventures of Boo’ was first published when I was fifteen. It is a children’s book with ten different stories. In each story, the main character Boo learns a lesson – one of the ten most important lessons I learned as a kid. I also donated all the money from my books I personally sold to my local ASPCA Animal Shelter.’ – Manika

‘Of all the things people have taught me regarding life lessons or anything that would benefit me, I don’t think anything helped me learn more about life than football. You go through so many different things: adversity, how to handle adversity, how to handle success, how to lead, how to be a teammate, how to communicate.’ – Josh McDaniels

‘I went to school to learn guitar, solfeggio, and harmony. I wanted to know more about music, how it works. I wanted to take voice lessons, too, and that’s when I discovered what I could do with my voice. At the beginning, I thought I would do classical and pop, but then I learned that I really liked the classical music.’ – Juan Diego Florez

‘The mistakes you make and lessons you learn at a young age are what gets you to an Olympic level.’ – Caroline Buchanan

‘I learnt my lessons very early on that it’s probably a good thing to be humble in victory as well as defeat.’ – Bronte Campbell

‘Washington, D.C., could learn a few budget lessons from Florida. The contrast between our state and the nation’s capital is remarkable.’ – Rick Scott

‘I am grateful for the lessons I learned from my parents’ sacrifices. They often had trouble making ends meet, so we moved for them to find work. I remember my mom would sometimes take on second jobs, like ironing, just so we could buy groceries.’ – Rick Scott

‘When I was nine, my father said ‘You can take piano lessons or do karate’ – I had a black belt and was competing before I was 19.’ – Elodie Yung

‘I learned piano off YouTube and still do a lot. It’s hard to find contemporary indie music on there, at least lessons, because the reach is smaller. I did it so people like me out there could learn my songs if they wanted to and maybe, in a small way, to pay forward all the free lessons I’ve had over the years.’ – Tobias Jesso, Jr.

‘One of the lessons learned in the Middle East is to never try to anticipate the other side’s moves.’ – Ehud Barak

‘I’m trying to learn the lessons of the past, but not to make speeches about the past.’ – Yitzhak Rabin

‘My grandfather played a big part in raising me, and he taught me how to be a gentleman. Since he first told me those types of things when I was 13 years old, I’ve taken all those types of lessons from him to heart. I’d like to keep that with me.’ – Tyler Shaw

‘As a practicing Catholic all my life, my faith and the church are never far from my mind. The lessons I learned in the church have structured the way I’ve approached my life and my career. They were lessons of grace, kindness, forgiveness, and compassion.’ – Donna Brazile

‘I regret not paying a bit more attention to Welsh lessons at school. My Welsh is pretty ropey, as back at my school, people didn’t take Welsh lessons seriously. My dad can speak it, so I wish he’d taught me some growing up.’ – Geraint Thomas

‘One of the lessons I learned was that there are good people everywhere. That village, Sabray, saved my life.’ – Marcus Luttrell

‘I learned one of the very important lessons in life in the 9/11 attacks. It’s good to have a plan for your future; it’s even better to write your plan in pencil.’ – Tom Cotton

‘Every day, I start with a workout; I do vocal lessons, I do piano lessons.’ – Selena Gomez

‘In Sydney, I gave what was billed as a masterclass to bright students of writing at the University of Sydney. But the term ‘masterclass’ was possibly over-egging the pudding. All I could do was pass on some lessons from my own life, and the most obvious is that if you want to be a writer, you must first have been a reader.’ – Justin Cartwright

‘I was taking singing lessons, and they’d say, ‘Your voice is too hoarse. You have to do more exercises.” – Carole King

‘I never really sang for anyone, apart from in the shower or with my best friend. I was shy. I didn’t want to take voice lessons. I knew I could sing, but I just didn’t tell anyone.’ – Jillian Hervey

‘Mum and Dad sent us to a bilingual school, so we had half the lessons in English and half in French. But I remember being hugely lost.’ – Rose Leslie

‘The thing that’s wonderful about social media is that we are able to give a voice to the voiceless and to help educate each other. I benefit from it as much as I provide those lessons.’ – Olivia Wilde

‘I didn’t really like opera. I liked cheerleading and boys and, later, smoking. So my opera career was cut short when I was 15. My dad got sick, and we couldn’t afford the lessons, so I stopped and became a cheerleader and wrecked my voice.’ – Meryl Streep

‘We have not learned the lessons of 9/11. This wrongful suspicion, racial hatred, and profiling is what I keep seeing.’ – Mira Nair

‘I’ve given many lessons in many sports over the years to many different people.’ – Martina Navratilova

‘I didn’t get into the music business because somebody made me take piano lessons, you know. I got into music because I was a natural writer and had a lot of curiosity about sound.’ – Buffy Sainte-Marie

‘After the attacks on September 11th, we all learned lessons.’ – Michael Hayden

‘Whoever resorts regularly to the lessons of Holy Scripture as an apt pupil will take the Savior into her group, and the children will perceive that He is present and that He assists in their work; thus, He will take possession of their souls.’ – Edith Stein

‘We all have to strive to learn what motivates us, learn from our experiences, and what feels right and what feels wrong. There’s a strong component over the years to having formal processes that help to identify lessons that need to be learned, and actions that need to be taken. In other words, how do you find the big idea?’ – David Petraeus

‘I felt that if I shared the lessons that I learned – both the good ones and the bad ones – that I might make the climb a little less painful for other women.’ – Dawn Steel

‘When I got out of high school, I was working in restaurants in New York City, when I heard Bill Anderson from The Neighborhood Playhouse was doing private lessons. I started taking classes, and it was a lot of improv and Meisner and repetition.’ – Ian Gomez

‘I never took any elocution lessons, no diction lessons. I might have been a pretty decent broadcaster if I had, but what you see, I’m afraid, is what you get.’ – Walter Cronkite

‘All the money my mom spent on lessons paid off.’ – Alexandra Daddario

‘I’m taking dance lessons and getting stuck in. It’s a great way of keeping fit, and it’s obviously a big part of Bollywood movies, so I need to learn.’ – Amy Jackson

‘I have learned some core lessons along the way. Among the most important, I have become a firm believer that a strong geopolitical relationship can be born out of a strong economic relationship, which often begins with trade.’ – Max Baucus

‘I am big on – even with our whole team – it’s always about, well, what were the lessons learned? Something didn’t work out? What are the lessons learned? What are the lessons learned?’ – Ginni Rometty

‘I’ve learnt some important lessons: I never rely on the opinion of one doctor alone. I do my own research; I read up and am ready with questions I need answered.’ – Nargis Fakhri

‘I realize that I’m not a great dancer. I’ve given up the hip-shaking. I don’t pelvic thrust anymore. Those were the beginning days of T. R. learning how to dance. But I love it, and I’ve taken a few choreography lessons. But other than that, I kinda just feel it, I guess.’ – Thomas Rhett

‘I see it as this: I send my kids to school not only to learn how to read and write and do math, but also to develop socially. So if there’s a negative interaction between my child and another child, what I want to know is, how was it handled, what lessons came out of it, and, of course, is my child okay?’ – Megyn Kelly

‘I think you can always learn lessons by the guys who came before you.’ – Mick Foley

‘Maybe I was just born with a little bit of vocals or natural talent, but I feel like I taught myself. I just started taking vocal lessons to just work on my breathing, my vowels and stuff.’ – Bryson Tiller

‘We want the big stories, of course, of the great men, but there’s as much drama and interest and lessons to be learned in actions that people like us take on a daily basis.’ – Margot Lee Shetterly

‘I have learned lessons in America about how you go about things, and what I know is that you find the best people, empower them, give them the resources, and hold them accountable.’ – Shahid Khan

‘You go through life and learn valuable lessons.’ – Shahid Khan

‘I learned some big lessons on my first film, a horror film which was never released in the U.S., even though we sold it to Harvey Weinstein for a lot of money.’ – Jonathan Levine

‘As fathers, we all have great lessons to teach our children.’ – Naveen Jain

‘Philanthropists can learn important lessons from business entrepreneurs. They both spend their time solving problems. And to be successful, they both must overcome physical challenges and create self-sustaining operations. And ultimately, they must allow people to take action for their own benefit.’ – Naveen Jain

‘Let us learn from the lessons of September 11 and not wait for a major strike before we act. We must work together – Democrats and Republicans, Congress and the White House, government and the private sector – to make our country a safer and more prosperous place.’ – Dan Coats

‘When I was younger, I believed my inconsistency was due to my youth. I believed that age would teach me all I needed to know and that when I was older, I would have learned the lessons of life and discovered the secrets of true spirituality. I am older – a lot older – and the secrets are still secret from me.’ – Mike Yaconelli

‘When I attained my seventh year, my father, whose ear was unmusical but who was nevertheless passionately fond of music, gave me my elementary lessons on the violin; in a very few months, I was able to play all manner of compositions at sight.’ – Niccolo Paganini

‘The 9/11 attack itself played out around the world, with planning meetings in Malaysia, operatives taking flight lessons in the United States, coordination by plot leaders based in Hamburg, and money transfers from Dubai – activities overseen by al-Qaeda’s senior command from secure bases in Afghanistan.’ – Peter Bergen

‘My mum enrolled me in this free dance class because I had so much energy in the night-time, and she just wanted me to go to sleep. I ended up falling in love with dancing, singing, acting, the whole entertainment world. Then, my mum ended up taking on an extra job so she could fund me to take singing lessons or go to drama classes.’ – Mel B

‘I learned to read music when I was 10 and did piano and took lessons.’ – Chris Cornell

‘We need to take lessons learned from fighting terrorism and apply them to cyber crime.’ – Robert Mueller

‘The future is inherently full of discontinuities, and lessons of the past must be applied with enormous caution.’ – Zbigniew Brzezinski

‘When I was eight, an uncle, great uncle, gave a violin to me, and my father took me off to have lessons. After about six weeks, the violin teacher told my father he was wasting his money, wasting his time, and wasting my time, and it’s one of my big regrets.’ – Roger Moore

‘I got taught a lot of great lessons by superhero comics as a kid about virtue and self-sacrifice and responsibility. And those were an important part of imprinting my DNA with ethical and moral values.’ – Mark Waid

‘It’s great that we can, however subtly, offer important lessons through cartoons that it’s important to protect the environment.’ – Michael T. Weiss

”The Custodian’ was my first film, and there were so many lessons to learn in that week. It was really fun, but for me, I look at it as a training film, and I’m not really proud of my work in it.’ – Essie Davis

‘While entrepreneurs spend a lot of effort trying to avoid failure, sometimes the lessons one learns from those missteps can be invaluable.’ – Lewis Howes

‘You would hear stories of people that lost their houses. I remember people who had their whole lives turned upside down. I think people did learn lessons from the ’80s.’ – Marc Veasey

‘In every job and position, there are valuable lessons to be learned. Even in a nasty, abusive, toxic workplace, you’re being taught precisely how not to run an organization.’ – Ryan Holiday

‘Based on my experience, I would say that rather than taking lessons in how to become an entrepreneur, you should jump into the pool and start swimming.’ – Travis Kalanick

‘Libraries are not just places where people go read a book, but places where an immigrant goes to take English lessons and where folks out of a job search for community.’ – Matthew Desmond

‘What I’m proud of, we learned from our lessons.’ – Tionne Watkins

‘I took piano lessons when I was really young, like five years old, and I didn’t really enjoy that very much. It was kind of too strict. So when I was probably 11 or 12, I started playing guitar and just kind of taught myself.’ – Washed Out

‘Imagine if the people who have lived and learned still had the vitality to act upon the hard learned lessons – and not just share in a conversation, but lead.’ – Ron Howard

‘Americans cannot afford to turn a blind eye to Russian interference in our democracy. We need to get to the facts and learn lessons to prevent future misconduct by foreign governments.’ – Jack Reed

‘Avoiding the all-too-typical divisive trappings of a takeover and creating instead a shared transnational culture – this is one of the most important lessons learned from combining Fiat and Chrysler to create FCA.’ – John Elkann

‘I believe giving back is one of the greatest life lessons we can teach our children: that the world isn’t all about them and that, through our actions, people will really discover what kind of a person we truly are.’ – Gretchen Carlson

‘You can’t look back at the worst financial crisis of our lifetimes that started in 2008 and not have some important lessons about the critical nature of oversights in financial markets and institutions.’ – Austan Goolsbee

‘We learn our lessons only when we are ready.’ – Sean Hayes

‘I kind of connected the dots, like, ‘Oh, we’re just saying stuff. We’re just saying things that make sense, so let’s just say them like you say them in real life.’ It was my first and one of my only acting lessons ’cause I never really studied acting.’ – Megan Mullally

‘One of the technology lessons was to work inside the cost envelope of the developing world to lower costs overall. What’s even more important and useful is dramatically lowering power consumption. Everyone wants batteries that can last 10 times longer.’ – Mary Lou Jepsen

‘I’ve learned my lessons, but I’m also still learning them.’ – Benjamin Clementine

‘I have a guy who does my hair. He’s a car nut. And he was taking motorcycle lessons. And, what was my point?’ – Fred Willard

‘One of the early lessons that I learned in leadership is that it’s the leader’s job to always go against the flow.’ – Dara Khosrowshahi

‘One of the big lessons I have learnt from my life is that things are never as difficult as they seem. When you actively plunge into it, you realize you can easily do it.’ – Arundhati Bhattacharya

‘I am a great believer in jobs for teens. They teach important life lessons, build character, and inflict just the right amount of humiliation necessary for future success in the working world.’ – Gillian Flynn

‘In my early career, there were more negative lessons than positive ones. But I don’t think I was looking for the positives enough.’ – Mark Pincus

‘I think I give myself high marks being an entrepreneur and entrepreneuring a big idea about how popular social gaming could be. But I learned a lot of hard lessons on the CEO front… and do not give myself very high marks as a CEO of a large-scale company.’ – Mark Pincus

‘All the lessons I learned from my grandfather from the day I was born until the day he passed away served me well, and I think about them and use them every day. It was much more valuable than any business school could have provided.’ – Casey Wasserman

‘It was right after I did Piaf, ‘La Vie en Rose’. I started to take singing lessons and finding where I could go.’ – Marion Cotillard

‘If our country is to advance, let it be upon the legs of lessons well-learned.’ – Jared Polis

‘We will never forget the lessons that we learned as a result of San Bruno. It’s really caused us to focus on safety with a laser-like sort of manner. There’s always more work to be done.’ – Geisha Williams

‘We share the USTA’s vision to promote and expand the game of tennis. I have been playing the game since I was 6 years old with my dad and five brothers, so I know firsthand how it teaches life lessons: integrity, dedication, and competitiveness.’ – Cathy Engelbert

‘Many of the basic lessons of business, such as the critical value of customer service or measuring risk against reward when investing capital, have essential application in government, but not in a vacuum.’ – John Hickenlooper

‘I started playing golf when I was just out of college and starting my career with KPMG. I took a few lessons, and my husband has always loved to give me pointers – for better and for worse! I realized that you could really enhance relationships by being on the course with clients. In fact, my very first golf game was with some clients.’ – Lynne Doughtie

‘I didn’t know how to pass a major piece of legislation; I didn’t know how to get colleagues to support my views. It took a lot of asking for advice and learning. One of the lessons is that you have to be able to tell people why you care, and you’re only going to be able to do that if you talk to someone whom an issue is affecting.’ – Kirsten Gillibrand

‘Bollywood has taught me a lot of lessons. Sometimes it has been very hard, but every struggle and obstacle that I overcame made me stronger and made me more aware.’ – Hazel Keech

‘I do believe in lessons learned. I have learned that you work with gang members and not with gangs; otherwise, you enforce the cohesion of gangs and supply them oxygen.’ – Greg Boyle

‘The media should probe and challenge candidates to help voters understand their views on foreign policy. Questions should include, ‘What lessons have you learned from past foreign policy decisions? How will they shape your vision as commander in chief? What is America’s role in the world?” – Pete Hoekstra

‘America needs to fully grasp the lessons learned from our history of fighting radical jihadists. There have been successes and failures.’ – Pete Hoekstra

‘Pretty much hated school. I never really found my footing. I just didn’t like lessons.’ – Giles Deacon

‘When you give your children certain life lessons, and they come and ask you for additional advice, you say to yourself, ‘I’ve done my job,’ and you’ll continue to do your job.’ – Joe Morton

‘I had piano lessons when I was five or six years old, so my mom got me this little keyboard in my room. And then it progressed from that to classical guitar and drums and oboe.’ – Lapsley

‘The best times I’ve ever had and the greatest lessons I’ve ever learned were when my feet were out over the edge of the line, and I was at risk of getting a little beat up, physically and emotionally.’ – Frankie Ballard

‘One way Groupon hopes to gain an edge is by using software to learn about its members so it can deliver more relevant offers: my wife will get the manicure-pedicure deal, but I’ll get an offer on fly-fishing lessons. The key now is execution – delivering great customer service and keeping everybody happy on both sides of the transactions.’ – Daniel Lyons

‘I remember, in school during English lessons, I would ask the teacher what were the most difficult books to read, and when she’d say ‘Ulysses’ or something, I’d run off to the library to check out a copy, eager to attempt the most difficult mountain.’ – Stephen Hough

‘I just found the piano so fascinating and wonderful, and I begged my parents to buy me one. In the end, they bought me a toy piano and eventually an upright piano, and I started lessons.’ – Stephen Hough

‘One can only hope that America, and other countries, will not need more natural persuasion before taking to heart the lessons of Hurricane Harvey.’ – Joseph Stiglitz

‘Even though ‘Star Wars’ takes place in another galaxy, a lot of the themes and things that characters deal with in terms of lessons that they’re learning are things that are completely relatable to real life.’ – Kelly Marie Tran

‘There are certainly times when baseball is much more than bread and circus, times when baseball resonates deeply and meaningfully with many, many people, and times when a game that is built around overcoming failure can teach us all a few important lessons.’ – Theo Epstein

‘I’ve been playing piano since I was 7. I took 15 years of lessons. I’ve got a lot of miles on these hands.’ – David Bryan

‘I wanted to start doing more music, doing more things than just playing guitar. I started taking singing lessons and piano lessons. I need to learn more things, to be an artist or whatever, and then transfer that back into writing songs.’ – Mike McCready

‘I think I’ve certainly learned a lot of lessons in humility and continue to work on that part of myself.’ – Laurence Fishburne

‘I have always wanted to learn the piano, but because I travel so much, I can never get any consistency of lessons. So everywhere I go, if I can find a piano, even if it is in the lobby of a hotel or something, I go on YouTube and pick some songs to learn.’ – Lewis Hamilton

‘That was one of the lessons I had to learn – just relax and play. Don’t worry about what’s happened in the past; don’t worry what’s going to happen in the future. You are playing a game you dreamed your whole life about playing. There’s no sense in ruining it by worrying or doubting.’ – Case Keenum

‘It’s a human desire to be scared. On some level, that’s how we survived – that sense of fear and danger. Our lives are much safer, so we gravitate to those stories that makes us feel those things and learn lessons, even if it’s just, ‘What are you doing? Don’t go in the basement!” – Noah Hawley

‘I used to lie in bed and imagine I was performing at the Albert Hall, not that I’d ever been there. I took lessons with a German teacher when I was quite young. But it turned out I had a very high soprano voice, which I didn’t like at all.’ – Anne Reid

‘My dad was somewhat of a naturalist and used to teach us about different birds and trees. So did a fifth grade teacher who made a lasting impact on me; to this day, I remember his lessons about counting the needles on pine trees, seeing if they are twisted or straight, and about checking the tips of oak leaves to see if they are pointed or lobed.’ – Henry Paulson

‘I started playing the piano when I was 6 years old ’cause my folks tried to get me away from the gramophone. And I just – I lived for music since I could think. And they got me piano lessons. So by the time I was 13, I was quite an accomplished piano player and musician.’ – Hugh Masekela

‘The first music-learning thing that I took seriously was piano lessons when I was a kid. I guess that was probably the only time that I was forced to perform music, because I had piano recitals, and my school also had mandatory music classes that had some performing required.’ – Frankie Cosmos

‘In our family business, the Edelman children must earn their way – there were and will be no promises without performance and leadership. That may lead to some skinned knees, but it is certainly the best way to learn life lessons.’ – Richard Edelman

‘Some of the best lessons that I’ve ever learned are on a ball field – basketball, football, baseball, golf. And I learned great lessons from my coaches – being on time, being mentally tough, having some discipline, and being part of a team.’ – Jon Gruden

‘During the couple of years it took to write ‘At The Bottom of Everything’, I decided, on the sort of hopeful whim that occasionally overtakes me, to sign up for piano lessons.’ – Ben Dolnick

‘It might be expensive to make music lessons available. But it’s even more costly to deal with human beings who have half their intellect and spirit left undeveloped.’ – Andris Nelsons

‘All businesses should have an element of social enterprise, and all social enterprises should not ignore the most important lessons from successful commercial businesses.’ – Holly Branson

‘I want people to have learned from me. When you watch movies that we grew up on, they teach you life lessons about friendship, brotherhood, integrity, but it’s still funny and something you can watch as a family. I want to bring that back to our culture in general.’ – Jason Mitchell

‘History is full of lessons for how water crises could have been avoided or better managed.’ – Jose Angel Gurria

‘We never learnt the right lessons. We never went to the root of the problem. Once you start politicising religion, you play with fire and get burnt as well. Another lesson we did not learn is that Muslims are not homogenous.’ – Asma Jahangir

‘The hardest moments of your life in your 20s will provide some of the greatest lessons that will come in handy later.’ – Stacy Brown-Philpot

‘I took a few piano lessons as a kid, but it didn’t last; I just learned piano from doing it over and over on my own, because I didn’t have many friends, and there was always a keyboard in the house.’ – Mitski

‘One of the biggest lessons that we hope to model for several folks, including some of the young women of color who come to me, is the value of understanding your worth, standing up, and demanding the best for yourself and not taking less.’ – Kimberly Bryant

‘I was put through piano lessons when I was a kid. I say ‘put through’ because it was fun and I loved it, and it’s been beneficial now, but it was difficult because, although I can read music, I much prefer just playing and improvising and at least finding my own way to play an instrument.’ – Jack Garratt

‘I taught guitar lessons for a long time for a living before I got on the road. I really enjoyed hanging out with kids, talking about music with them, and trying to influence them in a positive way.’ – Coy Bowles

‘Duane Allman might be my favorite guitar player ever. I’d say I’m influenced by the Allman Brothers more than any other band. When I taught guitar lessons for a living, the students that were interested in soloing had to learn the intro to ‘It’s Not My Cross to Bear’ first thing.’ – Coy Bowles

‘Inasmuch as there is a useful purpose to what we do as VCs, I tend to think it’s our duty not only to mentor entrepreneurs and executive teams, but also to learn from them and the others involved. We can then pass on lessons to aid the startup ecosystem and help businesses succeed and grow their impact.’ – Joe Lonsdale

‘At a horror movie, you can see other people dealing with the scary things. They can bolster you. You can think, ‘Okay, if that guy can deal with it, I can deal with it.’ There are lessons to be learned there, as opposed to having a frivolous popcorn experience. I think some of this stuff is good for your soul.’ – Dan Trachtenberg

‘Kindness to animals seems to me to be one of the most rudimentary lessons of all.’ – Suzy Shuster

‘Competing in junior fencing requires lessons, equipment, and travel that may cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars a month, keeping talented athletes from wielding sabers or masks.’ – Mary Pilon

‘One of the most powerful lessons I learned is when you make an argument in a film, you have to make sure both characters are right.’ – Justin Simien

‘I’ve been taking lessons in Damehood from Judi Dench. Being a Dame is useful in restaurants, hotels, and restaurants, Judi says, but you have to get someone else to do the booking.’ – Harriet Walter

‘I’m old fashioned. I’m not one of these young guys who think they are so smart that they can prescribe what humanity ought to do. Humanity never learns any lessons. Prescriptions don’t matter. We already know exactly what to do. We just don’t do it.’ – Vaclav Smil

‘At a young age, I learned from my grandmother that I should respect all people. Her lessons were defining moments in my life and determined the type of leader that I would become.’ – Frances Hesselbein

‘Team sports is the best for bonding. These sports lessons are also true for startups. You want to be at the top of every endeavour, but you win some and you lose some. As a team, however, you always pump each other up and move forward.’ – Naveen Tewari

‘I’ve never had anything as formal as vocal lessons.’ – Paolo Nutini

‘By the time you’re in your 30s, unless somebody makes the god-awful decision to gift you with a cooking class or salsa lessons, it may have been a while since you learnt something new.’ – Mary H.K. Choi

‘My playing is all about feel. I’m completely self taught: I never took any lessons or anything.’ – Joey Kramer

‘Putting any show on television is a challenge. I’ve been very lucky to work with incredible showrunners on ‘Smallville’ and ‘Lost’ and ‘Heroes.’ I hope to bring a lot of those lessons to Marvel live television.’ – Jeph Loeb

‘I think the really significant part of it for us, for the western world, is we have a lot to gain from the Tibetans – there are certain lessons that are within Tibetan culture. I mean understandings of compassion and of nonviolence that are things that we really lack in our society.’ – Adam Yauch

‘I would encourage women to think about leaders in different fields or companies who they can draw parallels with. For example, I am constantly studying the lives and lessons of leaders in fields outside of technology, from the arts to politics. There is always something to learn.’ – Caroline Ghosn

‘Big failures hold better lessons than any success – as long as you are in tune with yourself and are open to learning from them. I can trace every one of my accomplishments to earlier failures that I learned from.’ – Daniel Lubetzky

‘I know that when you are experiencing failure, it’s pretty damn painful. It is easy in retrospect to wax poetic about it. But in the moment, you don’t think you will survive, let alone have the time to reflect on how valuable those lessons will be for you in the future.’ – Daniel Lubetzky

‘When you have something that you did so many jobs on and were so front and center on, and then people dislike it, you want to learn lessons from it, and you want to move on, and you want to move on too fast.’ – John Mulaney

‘My formal speaking career began before a group of 10 third-graders. We drew pictures of my home in Rwanda. I told them about my mother’s huge garden and our mango tree. The lessons I taught were simple. Play nicely. Take care of plants. Take care of people.’ – Clemantine Wamariya

‘Folks who blithely disregard the benefits of football likely haven’t played or are being intellectually dishonest. The game, perhaps more than any other, requires absolute dedication and teamwork. Yes, I ultimately quit, and if I ever have a son, he won’t play, but I’ll always cherish the lessons I learned from football.’ – Chris Borland

‘Generations of black women have anxiously watched as our children walk out into a world set against them. We teach them how to respond to police and how to react to racist comments, knowing that these lessons are not guaranteed to protect our children.’ – Patrisse Cullors

”The Walking Dead’ has allowed me to experience success and remain myself and develop some of the closest bonds, both professionally and personally, that I could ever have imagined. It’s taught me a lot of life lessons.’ – Lauren Cohan

‘When I look at my own career, growing up, I was doing really well at age 11, but it was kind of isolating because back then, people weren’t hanging out with me. My mom was always there. She had my back and was like, ‘You keep focused. You gotta keep focused.’ And I think those kinds of lessons were hard.’ – Michelle Kwan

‘As long as you walk away from any experience, good or bad, with lessons and things you can take into the next experience, I don’t think you can do anything but look back on it with an appreciation.’ – Wyatt Cenac

‘I very rarely go back to do shows again. I’m done once I’ve learned the lessons I need to learn.’ – Brandon Victor Dixon

‘My father was a very fun dad. He was always coaching our soccer sports teams; he made sure that we had activities to do. He was kind of goofy and fun. But at the same time, he had a lot of lessons to teach us so that we didn’t grow up and just not be good people.’ – Milo Ventimiglia

‘I started playing piano and guitar when I was in elementary school, and then I was finally like, ‘I want to sing.’ So I started taking voice lessons and decided I wanted to go to an art school and take music seriously.’ – Ravyn Lenae

”,Alive’ stems from emotional growth and contentment. Before writing the song, I was swimming in a pool of hurt, guilt and spiritual discomfort. Instead of drowning, I decided to embrace these feelings and express gratitude for the lessons learned. With this new-found sense of life, I am stronger and happier than ever.’ – Ravyn Lenae

‘My mom was always driving me back and forth to guitar lessons, growing up. She was super supportive and probably my biggest cheerleader.’ – Chord Overstreet

‘I started with the piano-accordion and rebelled against it, but I could not afford piano lessons.’ – Richard McCabe

‘My family was always playing music; I always enjoyed it. My cousin, who is a little older than me, he started playing music, so I wanted to, also. I asked my dad for a guitar, and he got me a banjo, so that was my introduction to playing. I played it like a guitar. I had a few lessons, learned out a few chords, and figured it out right away.’ – Kurt Vile

‘I’m a good dad. I’m an evolved dad. You know, you see a lot of guys when they’re in training camp, they go off, do their own thing. But I’m in the midst of it. Swim lessons? I’m there. Changing diapers, teething, doctor’s appointments, I’m there 24/7.’ – Demetrious Johnson

‘I got a toy guitar at a fundraiser and was trying to write songs with it that were ridiculous. After a week, my parents bought me a real acoustic guitar, and I started taking guitar lessons.’ – Soccer Mommy

‘I started taking vocal lessons steadily. I started taking it seriously.’ – Syd

‘Sometimes you have to experience things for yourself to learn the lessons that you need to learn.’ – Yvonne Orji

‘I used to take circus lessons. I dreamt of being picked up in the street because they saw me doing something circus-like.’ – Lotte Verbeek

‘I’d encourage anyone at any level to take lessons, as it really can turn you into a different kind of skier.’ – Dean Cain

‘One of my earliest lessons in guilt was imparted in childhood through the story of the death of Mahatma Gandhi’s father.’ – Amitava Kumar

‘If I wanted to be a celebrity, I would have taken guitar lessons.’ – Ron Dellums

‘I got a classical piano training when I was little, and we also had music study lessons where we’d have to listen to a lot of classical music.’ – Kerli

‘One doesn’t have to just roll over once the wrinkles show: that’s when I think one should really start living it up… the lessons are learned, the cities have been built, so one can finally go super cray!’ – Kerli

‘At 16, I was going to church and playing music for church, and Dad would only pay for piano lessons so I could play at church.’ – Lizz Wright

‘In high school, I started training, singing with choirs, and getting voice lessons and doing a lot of creative writing and decided that that’s really what I wanted to pursue as a career, and that’s what I was going to study.’ – Goapele

‘Everything don’t work out for the best. You have to use a lot of those things as lessons in order to build yourself up.’ – Freddie Gibbs

‘I had to use a lot of the lessons I learned from fighting Samoa Joe and apply them to Bray Wyatt.’ – Finn Balor

‘Pretty much everything I carry with me, I learned I needed the hard way. I sweated, dry-lipped, dry-mouthed, soaked-to-the-skinned my way through all of these lessons.’ – Janet Varney

‘I have been hugely successful at times in my life, and I have also been in ruins. But the lessons I learned on the way up were just as valuable on the way down.’ – Molly Bloom

‘I’ve had some bad business lessons and learned some things. It’s not always about going platinum. So long as I know who is buying my records and I generate revenue that’s mine, then it’s cool.’ – Mannie Fresh

‘I’m always wary of the lessons of the past. There’s a lot of past out there, and you can draw whatever lessons you want.’ – Margaret MacMillan

‘Never ask yourself what you have learned… only ask yourself what are the circumstances which are different from last year. In that way, you can apply last year’s lessons.’ – Peter Brook

‘I like the New York style of funk, the California style of funk, but the South I never felt like – and Atlanta particularly – got the credit for taking their lessons and progressing on it.’ – Killer Mike

‘I could have hidden in Boston and lived at home for three years, gone through my transition, taken voice lessons to make my voice more feminine, gotten gender reassignment surgery, and spent time to complete my transition, but I didn’t want to wait. I wanted to be in the world.’ – Hari Nef

‘I believe, whether it is the United States or Europe, they will all end up as multicultural societies. So India’s this great experiment of a billion people of such great diverse persuasion, working together, seeking their salvation in the framework of a democracy. I believe it will have some lessons for all the multicultural societies.’ – Manmohan Singh

‘I play the sax, piano, guitar, bass… I started as a kid with piano lessons.’ – Mike Dean

‘Many beach locales offer surf lessons, and you get a different perspective of the ocean when you’re out on the water.’ – Katie Lee

‘I think the greatest mistakes have been my greatest lessons.’ – Jon Taffer

‘On ‘Queer Eye’ I come in with what I know, and I try to parlay that into lessons for our ‘heroes.’ But that’s really listening to what they need. Sometimes it’s a little more ambitious. Sometimes it’s very simplistic. But it’s got to be something that’s condensed into a short amount of time.’ – Antoni Porowski

‘My mother always taught me a lot of important life lessons, and she would always tell me how important it was to tip. We didn’t have much money, so we would tip what we could. Now, it’s at the point I’m financially stable. When I’m out eating, I hope I have the cash, but if I write it on the receipt, I’ll leave a big tip.’ – Lil Yachty

‘If you regret anything in your life, then you haven’t learned any lessons.’ – Debbie Rowe

‘Ever since I was a little kid, I got bored, so I learned to sing, and I started singing lessons. And then anytime I was bored, I would start writing and start messing around on my computer, making beats. Then I got bored and started making YouTube videos; that changed my life in a big way.’ – Troye Sivan

‘That’s right, I take vocal lessons – done it for years. There’s nothing wrong with it.’ – Joe Bonamassa

‘I feel responsible, as many other people’s lives hang on the success of a drama in which I appear. But in essence, I think having various experiences and dialogues with different people helps me improve my acting more than taking lessons.’ – Park Hyung-sik

‘It’s kind of a crazy thing with kid actors because a lot of them get hired without people really knowing if they’re good or not. They get hired for the way they look at a really young age. You also have your fingers crossed around kid actors… because the lessons they learn on set aren’t always the best. You can really get whatever you want.’ – Ty Burrell

‘Can watching video lessons or using interactive software make people smart? No. But I would argue that it can do something even better: create a context in which people can give free rein to their curiosity and natural love of learning so that they realize they’re already smart.’ – Sal Khan

‘I began making music at the age of four. According to my mother, once I just sat down at the piano and played back a tune by ear. My parents were watching and said to each other, ‘Maybe we should give him music lessons.” – Ramin Djawadi

‘I started training with singing and dance lessons at the same time. Also, I was taking Japanese lessons too, when I was eleven or twelve. After school, I went to the recording studio.’ – BoA

‘There’s a lot to the story. And there are a lot of things I’ve learned about myself and about love, and I’m really grateful for the lessons, and I hope I can share that through art. I look for projects that allow me to do that, whether it’s music or acting.’ – Keiynan Lonsdale

‘I started writing when I was, like, eleven. We couldn’t afford private lessons, so I had to teach myself how to sing through recording songs on GarageBand.’ – Keiynan Lonsdale

‘I have only got encouragement and lessons from my family, so I don’t associate negative things like pressure with them.’ – Ishaan Khatter

‘I took piano lessons and I wanted to play drums when I was six. Luckily enough, my parents let me have a drum kit in my room – which is kind of crazy.’ – Rex Orange County

‘All I know is the same lessons you need to learn at Little League basketball, you need to learn at the upper levels. It’s the little things you learn when you’re little that apply in college.’ – John Stockton

‘One of the first lessons I learned in football is that it takes a team to win a game.’ – Juan Mata

‘In 2012, I promised myself I’d do something each month I’d never done before. So I skydived. I did trapeze lessons. I rode a motorcycle… All stuff that I’d never done.’ – Ashley Roberts

‘Macron talks about values, but he doesn’t recognize the values itself, and therefore, they have no lessons to give to Italy.’ – Matteo Salvini

‘We do not accept lessons on rights or humanity from Mr. Macron.’ – Matteo Salvini

‘We’re taking all of the lessons that we have from New Shepard and incorporating them into New Glenn.’ – Jeff Bezos

‘We were always told not to wear skirts that were too short, because what will the male teachers think of you? Or, when we started sharing classes with boys in sixth form, what will they think of you if you are wearing a miniskirt to lessons?’ – Lucy Boynton

‘I’ve had some unbelievable successes, and I’ve also learned painful lessons through failures so low I can hardly stand to think of them.’ – Shaun King

‘I started dance class when I was a little kid, and then, when I turned 11, I started taking vocal lessons, guitar lessons, and piano lessons.’ – Cailee Spaeny

‘I ended up taking piano lessons at a really young age, I took, like, years of piano lessons, and I always loved to sing.’ – Marc Martel

‘All the kids at the kindergarten had to play, or at least touch, the piano. It was a good start. Then, after kindergarten, all my friends took piano lessons, so I joined them.’ – Ryuichi Sakamoto

‘The most interesting lessons often lie in the mundane – those aspects of everyday life that locals take for granted and tourists tend to overlook.’ – Esther Dyson

‘My parents split up when I was nine years old, and I started taking karate lessons at that point. I was very dedicated to my karate, and I looked up to my karate instructor kind of like a second father.’ – Adam Cole

‘I was very fortunate to take piano lessons from a young age, and the only times that we were able to play on Steinways was at our recitals, which were really nerve-wracking. Partly because we got to play on a Steinway.’ – Andrew W.K.

‘Years and years ago, I sang at a blues bar with a band behind me. It was with my friend, my guitar teacher at the time. I took some sporadic lessons.’ – Josh Holloway

‘When I was young, I took classical ballet lessons, but I wasn’t very good at it. It was really frustrating because I wanted to be good at it. When I stopped having lessons, I began to dance and improvise, and I felt more comfortable.’ – Christine and the Queens

‘I never took lessons. And I never aspired to be a singer until I was one in a band.’ – Alissa White-Gluz

‘I started voice lessons when I was eight years old.’ – Kirstin Maldonado

‘We cannot change the past, only recover from it. And perhaps learn its cruel lessons.’ – Dan Pena

‘I want to take acting lessons first. But I’d love to find the right film, a ‘Breakfast Club’ kind of thing.’ – Tiffany Darwish

‘With some things, karma is good enough. Lessons come back in different ways, you know what I mean?’ – Big Narstie

‘I was perhaps lucky to be born in a single-parent home where my mother, Shirin Mohammed Ali, was the sole figure I revered. My father’s absence in my life in my formative years exposed me to only one person, who was my source of learning the lessons of life. So to me, listening to a woman and her worldly view is almost automatic.’ – Mahesh Bhatt

‘One of the hardest lessons of childhood is reckoning with the instability of the world.’ – Jon Lovett

‘One of the lessons of 2016 is to spend less time worrying about what will happen and more time worrying about what we want to happen.’ – Jon Lovett

‘My role in ‘Kashmora’ required me to take horse riding lessons.’ – Karthi

‘I do have a lot of fire in me and could use some lessons on how to handle things more calmly.’ – Kyle Richards

‘In life, there are always intense battles, and yet we must practise the lessons from the Gita.’ – Ajay Piramal

‘I was in special ed, but I felt like I was a caged bird. I felt like I could do better. I made sure I mastered my special ed lessons. I made sure I listened to my teacher. I made sure I did my homework, but I had to do a little extra.’ – Elijah Cummings

‘When I was about 9, my brother, who’s six years older than me, started getting guitar lessons, and I wouldn’t say that it inspired me to pick up an instrument: it was more me being like, ‘Well, if he’s getting guitar lessons, then so am I. I’m not missing out,’ type of thing.’ – Lewis Capaldi

‘You never say never. That’s one of the lessons I’ve learned.’ – Kamaru Usman

‘When you’re by yourself and not with WWE, you are your own business. And I was very successful in that business because of all the lessons I learned.’ – Drew McIntyre

‘Gymnastics has taught me so many lessons, and I couldn’t be more grateful for everything that I’ve gone through.’ – Katelyn Ohashi

‘My mom says that she caught me one day in front of the TV watching opera. I was trying to sing back the opera. She saw that I really liked music, and so she put me in piano lessons when I was about three years old.’ – Jessie Reyez

‘My mother’s brother is a very good singer. My grandfather took up classical singing lessons and learnt to play the harmonium.’ – Urmila Matondkar

‘I wrote the children’s books, and those were wonderful tributes to my life as a daughter and a mother and just a thank-you to my parents for all the lessons in life they had passed on to me that I could pass onto my child and to other kids around the world.’ – Ainsley Earhardt

‘I got a lot of great life lessons from the entertainment industry. The first was being able to feel comfortable taking risks.’ – Jesse Itzler

‘As a kid, I took piano lessons, and I didn’t like it. It wasn’t cool. I was into Duran Duran and rock music. I didn’t have any interest in piano. I did it for three years, and because of piano, I learned percussion. I learned scales. I learned how to sing. Piano gives you all of the basics of those things.’ – Matt Skiba

‘I don’t think what people realize is I’ve been through years and years and years of training – piano, dance, vocal lessons.’ – Brooke Hogan

‘I’m actually thinking about acting lessons. If somebody says to me, ‘You can be in the movies,’ I’d be pretty happy.’ – Joe Calzaghe

‘The parenting books didn’t work for me; I got my parenting lessons from everything but the books! And it was about figuring things out. So every time I had a thought, I would put down my conclusions and thoughts.’ – Sonali Bendre

‘I’ve never really spoken French. I didn’t do French lessons at school, so I’m starting from scratch.’ – Nikita Parris

‘Being a footballer was about analysing performance, never being satisfied, seeing what lessons you can learn and who you can learn from.’ – Alex Scott

‘I try and focus on the youth coming up, and I think tennis is a great sport regardless of how far you make it: just, obviously, a lot of good life lessons.’ – Kevin Anderson

‘There was a substantial vinyl collection in my home, and my mom played piano. We, the children, were enrolled in piano lessons very early on.’ – Julie Payette

‘My parents loved music, but they weren’t musicians. So my musical training as a young kid was limited to piano lessons. I was not the best student; I was awful, never practiced. But I was always interested in just messing around on the piano.’ – Michael Giacchino

‘You are the best lessons you learn from life. I have grown up learning from my life.’ – Raveena Tandon

‘In No Limit Hold’em, much like video games and karate lessons, you need to master one level before you can move on to the next.’ – Daniel Negreanu

‘I know that life is full of lessons to be learned, and my children will have to learn their own, but I hope I have broken the cycle of shame and fear that plagued my childhood.’ – Jimmy Barnes

‘Not only do the Amy Schumers of the world and the gun control groups who support her fail to provide real gun safety lessons, they oppose them.’ – Katie Pavlich

‘I actually believe that one of the lessons of 1993 and 1994, as well as 2009 and 2010, is that when a Democratic president has the opportunity – with a Democratic Congress – that you shouldn’t wait to push significant legislation, whether it’s health care, immigration reform, other measures.’ – Julian Castro

‘Every game you play, you gain. There’s always valuable lessons.’ – Jill Ellis

‘You are going to fail in sport, you are going to win sometimes, you are going to be criticised sometimes, you are going to be applauded – so it gives you… well, it’s certainly given me anyway, those real-life lessons that make you bulletproof.’ – Eniola Aluko

‘If all girls turn strong within themselves, men with bad intentions can be taught apt lessons.’ – Geeta Phogat

‘In sports, you deal with disappointment often, but it’s how you handle it and come back from it that shapes you. All these lessons are transferable to life and have really helped me with the adversities I’ve had to deal with in life.’ – Sonya Deville

‘Someone suggested elocution lessons but there is no way I am changing my accent, I’m proud of my roots.’ – Sara Davies

‘As you get older, you should be better at coaching. You learn your lessons. You keep thinking and learning about it, you should be better than you.’ – Jim Boeheim

‘Once my sister was older, she and I would do lots of hobbies together. We took dance lessons and put on shows at home; tap dancing on the granite fireplace, which must have mortified my dad.’ – Katie Piper

‘I do a lot of vocal warmups, which are the same warmups I did when I was a kid, because I had a few classical singing lessons and stuff like that, so I know pretty much how I’m gonna be once I get on stage.’ – Roland Orzabal

‘It’s very important to me to give something back – to pass on my know-how, to give all the lessons I learned onto the next generation so they don’t make the same mistakes.’ – Susie Wolff

‘I came to New York after Bennington College and trained as a singer. I lived on the West Side and I went to my voice lessons. That was a wonderful part of my life and I really thought that I could go somewhere with my voice.’ – Yasmin Aga Khan

‘When I was a player it was not normal that I would cook at home but now that I have more time, I do sometimes. I like it, I like to cook and maybe sometime I would like to have some lessons.’ – Ronald Koeman

‘One of the key lessons I learned at Netflix was the necessity of focus.’ – Marc Randolph

‘The lessons I learned starting Netflix – and over a lifetime of entrepreneurship – are broadly applicable to anyone with a dream.’ – Marc Randolph

‘I use the lessons my father taught me every day. And I believe the simple value of integrity matters, even in a complicated place like Congress.’ – Elissa Slotkin

‘When I went to FC Groningen, I had to take my bike to training – my first wage went on driving lessons. Before I signed my contract, I was 15 or 16 and working as a dishwasher in a Breda restaurant.’ – Virgil van Dijk

‘I’ve no real musical training, although I took some piano lessons a while ago.’ – Denny Laine

‘My first official teaching job was at GIT, which was fantastic because I wanted to pay the rent and I got to stay in the building, which is an inspiring place to be – the vibe was there. My first gig was doing private lessons. It went great. Then they decided to promote me to a classroom teacher. I taught a class called Single String Technique.’ – Paul Gilbert

‘Teaching the guitar is a constant source of inspiration. I sometimes think I get more out of the lessons than my students.’ – Paul Gilbert

‘I’ve certainly enjoyed doing clinic tours for larger audiences, but the most valuable teaching experience has been the hundreds of lessons that I’ve given where I can hear the students play.’ – Paul Gilbert

‘Jeff and Mike had taken drum lessons at a young age. When the Beatles came out in ’64, we all wanted to play guitar.’ – Steve Porcaro

‘Art was a huge passion of Jeff’s from a very early age. He took a few lessons one summer. He always had a huge passion for art. Loved Dali. Jeff drew and sketched constantly.’ – Steve Porcaro

‘I started taking vocal lessons, I always loved the challenge of playing my instrument and trying to sing.’ – Tim Commerford

‘I think a lot of campaigns mis-learned the lessons of Obama 2008. They overly focused on the particular tools, and less so on the fact that the Internet enables a kind of culture of trust to be translated into real power.’ – Zephyr Teachout

‘We should make sure that we are never sending our troops into harm’s way unless they’re sent with a clear strategy to win, and learning lessons of the past to ensure that best path forward with what lies ahead.’ – Lee Zeldin

‘I can write 100 books on the wisdom and lessons from stories in the Bible.’ – Paula White

‘Listen to 100 of my sermons, and 80 or 90 of them will be about overcoming our struggles and the lessons God teaches us in valleys he allows us to enter.’ – Paula White

‘All the valuable lessons I learned from my dad, little questions to big, and that’s what I want my children to do.’ – Philip Rivers

‘I think that liberalism and the centrist governing elite of this country need to learn lessons from the Trump phenomenon. It is part of the way that the country is governed and the country is shaped that induces spasms of populism, including spasms of bigoted populism.’ – Ross Douthat

‘My advice to new artists is to forget about all of this and take acting and dancing lessons and become a video star.’ – Steve Miller

‘I’m always giving life lessons in my music.’ – E-40

‘I think there are a couple of key lessons that come from Judaism that shaped my life. One of them is the idea we have a duty to repair the world, and all of us should play a role in our lives in trying to repair the world and to make the world better for the next generation.’ – Eric Greitens

‘My dad was a really good classical guitarist. He took lessons with a student of Andre Segovia.’ – Jason Becker

‘I was guided into piano lessons and ‘guided’ is a nice way of saying ‘forced.’ I don’t regret it, but I think music theory as a concept doesn’t work.’ – Jon Hopkins

‘All of us make mistakes and one learns from the bitter lessons of the past.’ – Suresh Gopi

‘I’m by no means an expert at coaching high school football. I’m doing the best I can in Year 1. But I’ve already learned a lot of lessons and I imagine I’ll keep learning them.’ – Ed McCaffrey

‘Our brothers and sisters in the trans community, they showed up to every one of our marriage marches when it wasn’t necessarily what they needed. So we have to be there for them, use our lessons learned in the marriage fight – how to win when it’s difficult, how to change minds that are difficult to change.’ – Dustin Lance Black

‘I’d say I’m not sure about Christianity, but I sure do like their Christ and the lessons about turning the other cheek, about forgiveness, of yourself and others.’ – Dustin Lance Black

‘Our parents made a lot of sacrifices because dancing is not the cheapest sport. The dresses are expensive, so my mum learned to sew, and she started a catering company to pay for the lessons and the travel abroad for competitions.’ – Motsi Mabuse

‘Well, for me, I grew up in the Carolinas, and it’s our mythology. Those are the characters that we learn about how to live life and moral lessons. It wasn’t Zeus and Athena. It was Job and Jesus.’ – Samuel Ervin Beam

‘My favourite lessons in college were when we would have a professional teach us, or when we went out of the classroom for the day. You take in so much more when someone who’s been there and done it is telling you.’ – Kano

‘We learn a lot of life lessons in how we play this great game, and I’ve been fortunate enough to be involved in it at every level.’ – Herm Edwards