Last Lecture Quotes

Too many people go through life complaining about their problems. I've always believed that if you took one tenth the enrgy you put into complaining and applied it to solving the problem, you'd be surprised by how well things can work out. ~ Randy Pausch

Failure is not just acceptable, it's often essential. The Last Lecture ~ Randy Pausch

When we're connected to others, we become better people. ~ Randy Pausch

I'm dying and I'm having fun. And I'm going to keep having fun every day I have left. ~ Randy Pausch

There's an academic tradition called the 'Last Lecture.' Hypothetically, if you knew you were going to die and you had one last lecture, what would you say to your students? Well, for me, there's an elephant in the room. And the elephant in the room, for me, it wasn't hypothetical. ~ Randy Pausch

The person who failed often knows how to avoid future failures. The person who knows only success can be more oblivious to all the pitfalls. ~ Randy Pausch

It's very important to know when you're in a pissing match. And it's very important to get out of it as quickly as possible. ~ Randy Pausch

When you do the right thing, good stuff has a way of happening. ~ Randy Pausch

When it comes to men who are romantically interested in you, it's really simple. Just ignore everything they say and only pay attention to what they do. ~ Randy Pausch

Experience is often the most valuable thing you have to offer. ~ Randy Pausch

One thing that makes it possible to be an optimist is if you have a contingency plan for when all hell breaks loose. ~ Randy Pausch

I will take an earnest person over a hip person every day, because hip is short-term, earnest is long-term. ~ Randy Pausch

Find the best in everybody. Just keep waiting no matter how long it takes. No one is all evil. Everybody has a good side, just keep waiting, it will come out. ~ Randy Pausch

We can't change it. We just have to decide how we'll respond. We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand" - From The Last Lecture Randy Pauch ~ Randy Pauch

book called The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch, ~ Will Schwalbe

As Mary delivered what was to be her last lecture about the Galapagos Islands, she would be stopped mid-sentence for five seconds by a doubt which, if expressed in words, might have come out something like this: "Maybe I'm just a crazy lady who had wandered off the street and into this classroom and started explaining the mysteries of life to these people. And they believe me, although I am utterly mistaken about simply everything."
She had to wonder, too, about all the supposedly great teachers of the past, who, although their brains were healthy, had turned out to be as wrong as Roy about what was really going on. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Focus on other people, not on yourself. ~ Randy Pausch

I don't believe in the no-win scenario ~ Randy Pausch

You just have to decide if you're a Tigger or an Eeyore. ~ Randy Pausch

We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand. ~ Randy Pausch

The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. His race can no more be exterminated than the flea can be. The last man lives the longest. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

I have found my today because my tomorrow has already come. ~ Steven Cuoco

Dad followed his I'm-So-Disappointed speech with a lecture on career opportunities.
"You're going to study literature and get a job doing what?" he said. "Literaturizing? ~ David Sedaris

Here and there, plumes of dark smoke reach into the sky like the fingers of a drowning man reaching up for the last time. ~ Susan Ee

A heavy, peppery steam spiraled skyward and the remains of our house spit and stammered like the last stubborn kernels of popping corn. Everyone was so sorry. ~ Sam Harris

I always wanted to be a comedian. I loved comedy since I was a little kid, and while I was at university I started doing stand up shows. Once I realized that I was good at it I quit college and left although I had six months left. I went to England. I could have done the last six months but I realized that I was better at standup comedy than I was at singing opera. ~ Jim Jefferies

I watched as that kid died. In his last few seconds there was pure terror in his eyes. You can't do that. You can't do that to a person. I don't care what anybody tells me, I don't care how many people go crazy and die, I don't care if the whole shuck human race ends. Even if that was the only thing that had to happen to find the cure, I'd still be against it. ~ James Dashner

A gentleman of ambition is aware of the people he wishes to be associated with both socially and commercially. He knows that moving through different levels of society is akin to stepping through different rooms in an enormous house, each door leading to a grander environment than the last. He may, of course, settle for the comfort of any room he reaches. Alternatively, he may continue through successive doors to surround himself with even greater fineries and riches. ~ Chris Murray

This is my third ABC show over the last four years, so we were afraid that nobody would find it. ABC was really struggling and so we just weren't very confident that it would find an audience. ~ James Denton

when i left them, i painted myself burgundy and grey
i stopped saying the words "please" and "i'm sorry"
i walked into grocery stores and bought too many
clementines, ordered too much Chinese, spent my
last four dollars on over the counter sleeping pills
that made my stomach bleed but my soul forget
every time i wanted to tell you "i'm sorry", i wrote
you a poem instead, i said things like "i hope your
mother calls you beautiful" to strangers and when
boys with dry hands and broken eyes asked me on
dates i didn't hesitate no, didn't even stop them
when their hands grazed my breasts and when
they moaned my name against my thighs i cried
i opened the mail and didn't tell anyone for a week
that i got accepted into law school, i stopped watering
the plants and filled the bathtub with roses and milk,
when i got invited to parties, i wore blue jeans with
white shirts, sat alone in some kitchen drinking hard
liquor until some boys mouth made me feel like home
i stopped answering the phone for a month, i didn't
like how my name tasted in his mouth but he was
older and didn't say things like "it doesn't matter"
and i think i went insane, my heart boiled blisters, i
couldn't understand why my bones felt like cages,
i walked around art museums until closing, watched
them lock up the gates and then open them up
again the very same morning, i thought ~ Irynka

I have been mastered at last, sweet Cyn, helpless in the face of that most human of failings, I love you. ~ D.B. Reynolds

To these statements, Socrates, no one can offer a reply; but when you talk in this way, a strange feeling passes over the minds of your hearers: They fancy that they are led astray a little at each step in the argument, owing to their own want of skill in asking and answering questions; these littles accumulate, and at the end of the discussion they are found to have sustained a mighty overthrow and all their former notions appear to be turned upside down. And as unskilful players of draughts are at last shut up by their more skilful adversaries and have no piece to move, so they too find themselves shut up at last; for they have nothing to say in this new game of which words are the counters; and yet all the time they are in the right. The observation is suggested to me by what is now occurring. For any one of us might say, that although in words he is not able to meet you at each step of the argument, he sees as a fact that the votaries of philosophy, when they carry on the study, not only in youth as a part of education, but as the pursuit of their maturer years, most of them become strange monsters, not to say utter rogues, and that those who may be considered the best of them are made useless to the world by the very study which you extol. ~ Plato

When I first started YouTube, I was using an old computer that I had had in high school that stayed with me through college that was on its last leg. The boot-up was, like, 25 minutes. ~ Rosanna Pansino

People carry around with them internalization's fixed-feature space learned early in life. Man is like other members of the animal kingdom , first, last and always a prisoner of his biological organism. No matter how hard he tries, it is impossible for him to the best himself of his own culture, where it has penetrated to the roots of his nervous system and determines how he perceives the world. ~ Edward T. Hall

Creativity may well be the last legal unfair competitive advantage we can take to run over the competition. ~ David Trott

Names are just words. I know that. But learning that the last name I'd used all my life was fake ...
"So what should I call myself, then?" I asked. "Sophie Atherton? Sophie Brannick?" Both sounded weird and made me feel like I was wearing clothes that didn't fit.
Mom smiled and brushed my hair away from my face. "You can call yourself whatever you want."
"Okay. Sophie Awesome Sparkle-Princess it is. ~ Rachel Hawkins

Her adept said: "I'll keep it off you. Nav, show them what the Ninth House does."

Gideon lifted her sword. The construct worked itself free of its last confines of masonry and rotten wood and heaved before them, flexing itself like a butterfly.

"We do bones, motherfucker," she said. ~ Tamsyn Muir

Treasure of my soul," he said. He took one of her hands, brought it to his lips, and kissed it, just above the knuckles, as he had been doing every night for the last month, since their engagement. "You have brought me such peace."
"Ambrose," she replied, amazed by his name, amazed by his face.
"It is in our sleep that we most closely glimpse the power of the spirit," he said. "Our minds will speak across this narrow distance. It will be here, together in nocturnal stillness, that we shall finally become unbound by time, by space, by natural law and physical law. We shall roam the world however we like, in our dreams. We shall speak with the dead, transform into animals and objects, fly across time. Our intellects shall be nowhere to be found, and our minds will be unfettered."
"Thank you," she said, senselessly. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

When you wait to the last minute, you rush to get things done, and the closer you get to the deadline, the less options you have. ~ Dan Webster

Maybe when we got up on the bridge I'd jump, Last of the Mohicans their asses! ~ Kresley Cole

Of all ignorance, the ignorance of the educated is the most dangerous. Not only are educated people likely to have more influence, they are the last people to suspect that they don't know what they are talking about when they go outside their narrow fields. ~ Thomas Sowell

I can't remember the last time I've enjoyed silence in an American theater. It's easy to believe that our audiences spend the day saying nothing, actually saving their voices for the moment the picture begins. ~ David Sedaris

This can't last. This misery can't last. I must remember that and try to control myself. Nothing lasts really. Neither happiness nor despair. Not even life lasts very long ~ Celia Johnson

Personally I'm hoping to spend the last years of my life plugged into a real life MMORPG simulation that makes me think and feel like I'm 18 again while my 90 year old body lies in a tube somewhere getting fed thru an IV. Be a great way to finish up a life. ~ Drew Curtis

Where was the lecture on how slavery alone catapulted the whole country from agriculture into the industrial age in two decades? White folks' hatred, their violence, was the gasoline that kept the profit motors running. ~ Toni Morrison

Kids have little computer bodies with disks that store information. They remember who had to do the dishes the last time you had spaghetti, who lost the knob off the TV set six years ago, who got punished for teasing the dog when he wasn't teasing the dog and who had to wear girls boots the last time it snowed. ~ Erma Bombeck

I mean ... " Levi leaned forward, hands still fisted in his pockets. "I mean, I spent four months trying to kiss you and the last six weeks trying to figure out how I managed to fuck everything up. All I want now is to make it right, to make you see how sorry I am and why you should give me another chance. And I just want to know - are you rooting for me? Are you hoping I pull this off?"
Cath's eyes settled on his, tentatively, like they'd fly away if he moved.
She nodded her head.
The right side of his mouth pulled up.
"I'm rooting for you", she whispered.
She wasn't even sure he could hear from the bed.
Levi's smile broke free and devoured his whole face.
It started to devour her face, too.
Cath had to look away. ~ Rainbow Rowell

My flesh is stone. My blood rages hot as molten iron. I have a thousand eyes. A thousand swords. And one mind.
I have heard the death-cry. Was she kin? She said as much, when first she touched me. We were upon the ground. Far from each other, and yet of a kind.
I heard her die.
And so I came to mourn her, I came to find her body, her silent tomb.
But she dies still. I do not understand. She dies still - and there are strangers. Cruel strangers. I knew them once. I know them now. I know, too, that they will not yield.
Who am I?
What am I?
But I know the answers to these questions. I believe, at last, that I do.
Strangers, you bring pain. You bring suffering. You bring to so many dreams the dust of death.
But, strangers, I am Icarium.
And I bring far worse. ~ Steven Erikson

In a way, I have to have a dictatorship. I can't be told that I'm wrong. That conflicts with what I was saying earlier about listening. It isn't to do with receiving criticism and responding to other views, it's who has that last decision. ~ Trevor Nunn

The last time I read piles of erotica by choice, I was fourteen. At that stage, having no experience with men beyond snogging, I took it all as gospel. Now, after I've lived a little, I read the same works again and think, 'Has this author ever really had sex? ~ Fiona Pitt-Kethley

As I made my way out of the apartment and got in my patrol car I realized that it wasn't too late to stop myself from getting hardened and losing my sense of compassion. It dawned on me that it had been almost two years--almost to the very day--that I had been sworn in as a police officer. And over the last two years, I had seen lots of situations, many of them with tragic outcomes. I had been made completely aware of the degrees to which people would go to get revenge, to get high, to get laid, to get off easy and to get away with something--even to the point of telling outrageous lies about my own conduct. ~ Randy Sutton

However, in those last months of riding across the golden landscape of California she felt she was flying free, like a condor. She was awakened one morning by the whinnying of her horse with the full light of dawn in her face, surrounded by tall sequoias that, like centenary guards, had watched over her sleep, by gentle hills, and, far in the distance, purple mountaintops; at that moment she was filled with an atavistic happiness that was entirely new. She realized that she had lost the feeling of panic that had lain curled in the pit of her stomach like a rat, threatening to gnaw her entrails. Her fears had dissipated in the awesome grandeur of this landscape. To the measure that she confronted danger, she was becoming bolder: she had lost her fear of fear. "I am finding new strength in myself; I may always have had it and just didn't know because I'd never had to call on it. I don't know at what turn in the road I shed the person I used to be, Tao. Now I am only one of thousands of adventurers scattered along the banks of these crystal-clear rivers and among the foothills of these eternal mountains. Here men are proud, with no one above them but the sky overhead; they bow to no one because they are inventing equality. And I want to be one of them. Some are winners with sacks of gold slung over their backs; some, defeated, carry nothing but disillusion and debts, but they all believe they are masters of their destiny, of the ground they walk on, of the future, of their own u ~ Isabel Allende

But the last one: the baby who trails her scent like a flag of surrender through your life when there will be no more coming after - oh, that's love by a different name. She is the babe you hold in your arms for an hour after she's gone to sleep. If you put her down in the crib, she might wake up changed and fly away. So instead you rock my the window, drinking the light from her skin, breathing her exhaled dreams. Your heart bays to the double crescent moons of closed lashes on her cheeks. She's the one you can't put down. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

Weren't expecting this, were you, Mr. Detective? Probably thought, once a mountain fell on her, you'd seen the last of our sister, eh?"
"To be honest," Skulduggery said, "yes. ~ Derek Landy

Were it not for the mind change of Sai devotees the world would already have fallen into complete chaos. The deterioration of mind and man has been very rapid and abrupt, even precipitous during the last fifteen years. That the world is not in total destruction is due to the change of mind of Sai devotees and to Sai's grace. ~ Sathya Sai Baba

Anna has a quality." Matthew raised a thoughtful eyebrow. "The French would call it jolie laide." Cordelia knew French well enough to frown. "Pretty-ugly? She's not ugly!" "It doesn't mean that," Matthew said. "It means unusually pretty. Oddly beautiful. It denotes having a face with character. ~ Cassandra Clare

Look at me. Please." It was more than a whisper but less than a shout. She got quieter. "Blake, please."
His green eyes found hers. She spoke as if they were alone.
"I made a mistake," Livia began. "I know you overheard me talking to my dad. I needed him to understand who you are, but I had to talk on his level. As a father he needed to know I was being decisive. I don't think you heard the last part when I told him you were the path I wanted to take."
A flicker. Was it hope? Livia smiled.
Blake's lips moved, and she knew he'd counted her smile.
"I'll make mistakes. I know I will," she continued. "I want to be perfect for you. But I'm human. I can only be me. That probably isn't enough for a soul as beautiful as yours. But if I hurt you by accident, can't we stay and hold hands until we fix it? Can't we fix it?" Livia now spoke louder than she wanted to, but she had to be heard over the cacophony.
Blake bit his lip. "You're perfect."
"No, sweetheart. I can't even pretend to be perfect. Look where we are right now. That's my fault, Blake."
Here. I need to tell him now. "Blake, I love you," Livia confessed quietly.
The tears in her eyes had nothing to do with smoke this time.Livia leaned toward Blake and tried again, louder still.
"Blake, I love you."
Livia shouted in the silence because now her soul was free. "I love you, Blake!"
She smiled as he mouthed the words back to her. ~ Debra Anastasia

It's one of the things Cam and I discussed last evening- he said it's characteristic of Hathaway women, this need for demonstrations of affection."
Amused and fascinated, Poppy made a face. "What else did he say?"
Harry's mood altered with quicksilver speed. He threw her a dazzling grin. "He compared it to working with Arabian horses... they're responsive, quick, but they need their freedom. You never master an Arabian... you become its companion." He paused. "At least, I think that's what he said. I was half dead from exhaustion, and we were drinking brandy."
"That sounds like Cam." Poppy raised her gaze heavenward. "And after dispensing this advice, he sent you to me, the horse."
Harry stopped and pulled her against him, nudging her braid aside to kiss her neck. "Yes," he whispered. "And what a nice ride it was. ~ Lisa Kleypas