School Of Hard Knocks Quotes

Comin' from the school of hard knocks,
Some perpetrate ... they drink Clorox.
Attack the black, cause I know they lack exact
The cold facts, and still they try to Xerox. ~ Chuck D

The colleges and other institutions of learning are going too far, in my opinion. I think 50% of those attending educational institutions, having the professions in view, would be better off with a common school education that would enable them to earn a living, rather than sit around in offices and wait for clients.
W.A. Clark (MT Senator, 1901-1907) ~ Bill Dedman

I never expected my graduate degrees to give me all the practical how-to's that can perhaps only be learned through the school of hard knocks. ~ David Livermore

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

Hard-bitten had a double meaning: bitten hard by life, like her, or clamping meanly down on other people. But, as though belying his thoughts, she said, "I hope your days are good."
"If only. My eyes, you know, are like Swiss cheese, the doctor says. I see through the holes. ~ Edward Hoagland

The Street Epistemologist is a philosopher and a fighter. She has savvy and street smarts that come from the school of hard knocks. She relentlessly helps others by tearing down falsehoods about whatever enshrined "truths" enslave us. ~ Peter Boghossian

He said, 'You have to understand, I'm an academic. I'm not trained in dealing with masses of people. I found out through the school of hard knocks that it is better not to deal with masses of people. It's not that they don't deserve the information but they really react in very strange ways. They get panicky and excited, or over-excited, and it is so easy for academics to forget that. We're trained in math. We're trained in science. We're not trained in the masses.'
He paused.
'The public is extremely wild,' he said, 'uncontrollably wild.'
Then he shrugged his shoulders.
'You have to understand,' he said, 'I'm an academic. ~ Jon Ronson

I've had the school of hard knocks, and I've worked my way up to be the governor of this great state of Connecticut. ~ William O'Neill

A lot is gained through experience, but experience teaches some and not others. Effectiveness and excellence, whether or not they were attained by simply having the knack or through the school of hard knocks, is really what you want to reward. ~ Caterina Fake

When you break up with someone, and I'm not talking casual breakups here, it's hard to take the sudden absence of such an important person in your life. It reminded me of when I'd stopped going to school and the weird uneasy feeling I'd gotten afterward, like I was forgetting to do something. My life until that point had pivoted around some form of education, and all of a sudden, it was gone. Homework, classes, running around, and then – bam – nothing but a life of work stretching out before you. No one prepares you for that feeling or even mentions it. You just suddenly have a gap and have to decide how to fill it.

A break up is like that gap, only much, much more painful. One day the person you talked to constantly or did stuff with is just absent. Gone. Poof. And even though I'm not one of those people who has to be in a relationship all the time, I was feeling at a loss. ~ Lish McBride

Entrepreneurial knowledge has little to do with certified expertise, advanced degrees, or the learning of establishment schools. The fashionably educated and cultivated spurn the kind of fanatically focused learning commanded by the innovators. Wealth all too often comes from doing what other people consider insufferably boring or unendurably hard. ~ George Gilder

The walls were lined with books from floor to ceiling. Stacks of books stood neatly arranged on every horizontal surface - tables, windowsills, even the top of an unplugged television. Since Sophie had been forbidden to explore the library at home, her only real experience with books had come at school and from the few children's books that lay on the bottom shelf of a cabinet in the nursery. She sensed immediately that this was something altogether different. It was a library, yes, but she knew these books had been read. They weren't arranged in long lines of matching bindings like the ones in Bayfield House, and almost every volume had slips of paper protruding from the top. she wondered if Uncle Bertram had marked all the best bits.

"Shall we have a story?" said her uncle, when he had hung up their coats.

"Yes, please," said Sophie.

"What would you like?" he asked.

"You pick."

And so he did. They settled onto the couch, Bertram with a cup of tea and Sophie with a mug of cocoa. He began to read and Sophie's world was transformed - this was not like the insubstantial children's stories her mother read to her at bedtime. This was ever so much more.

"The Wind in the Willows," read Uncle Bertram. "Chapter One, The River Bank. The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home." Sophie closed her eyes and fell into the story. ~ Charlie Lovett

I grew up in a household that was a labor household. My dad was a Teamster and a milk truck driver. My mother was a secretary. Neither of them got through high school. But they worked hard and they gave me very, very important opportunities to go to school, get a good education. ~ Dick Gephardt

Thomas Stanley has not only found no correlation between success in school and an ability to accumulate wealth, he's actually found a negative correlation. 'It seems that school-related evaluations are poor predictors of economic success,' Stanley concluded. What did predict success was a willingness to take risks. Yet the success-failure standards of most schools penalized risk takers. Most educational systems reward those who play it safe. As a result, those who do well in school find it hard to take risks later on. ~ Richard Farson

According to Free Trait Theory, we are born and culturally endowed with certain personality traits - introversion, for example - but we can and do act out of character in the service of "core personal projects."
In other words, introverts are capable of acting like extroverts for the sake of work they consider important, people they love, or anything they value highly. Free Trait Theory explains why an introvert might throw his extroverted wife a surprise party or join the PTA at his daughter's school. It explains how it's possible for an extroverted scientist to behave with reserve in her laboratory, for an agreeable person to act hard-nosed during a business negotiation, and for a cantankerous uncle to treat his niece tenderly when he takes her out for ice cream. ~ Susan Cain

Kevin", his father began, "I've been thinking about it – I guess I was kind of carried away. It's just that I've waited so long for my old school to make it to the Regionals... I suppose I was living it vicariously through you. Keith says you're not going to fail, after all. Is that right?"

"Looks like I'll make it. I know it's hard to believe..."

"Yes, it is. I was hoping you could get a football scholarship, you know. Something to waive the entrance requirements, because I don't know what college would take you-"

"Yeah. Thanks a lot Dad," Kevin said sarcastically. He already knew what his father thought of him and didn't need to be reminded yet again.

"Oh, come on. You know perfectly well that you're too stupid to-"

"That's not what my boyfriend says. Oh, by the way, Dad – I'm a faggot. Did I mention that?"

"... Kevin – get your stuff, and get out."

"Gladly. ~ Failte

For in today's generation of teenagers finding acceptance is hard, especially for those who dare to be different-then it's impossible. ~ Rebecah McManus

The hard part is that I lost myself. In the midst of life happening all around me, I lost the ability to be okay, I lost the ability to trust. I lost the ability to love myself, and when that happens, you lose everything. And when the one person in the entire world who loves you unconditionally is gone, then you start wondering who will love you? And then when you start wondering, you get scared that you have to even ask that question. But since you have already asked yourself that, you can't ignore it. Who will love you now? Who could possibly love everything about you, now that the only person in the world who could, is gone? Hell, you don't even love yourself. Why would someone else? And then when you realize that, the relationship you're in seems pointless. Because you start believing that they won't ever be able to withstand your problems and craziness. And then that snowballs to even more insecurities and fear, and you feel trapped in this broken body that can't ever be healed. And then you feel lost, torn, broken, unfixable, damaged, and like nothing in the entire world could ever possibly be okay again. Because you know from the past, that even when everything seems okay, another devastating blow comes around again and knocks you back down. So you feel even smaller, even weaker. By that point you're at the bottom, you're looking up in tears, ready to scream for help. But you're not sure who's going to be there, and if the person who does show up, is going to be the pe ~ Sabrina K

I am looking at opening a school of social engineering. The McAfee School of Social Engineering has a nice ring to it. Beyond that, it is hard to say what life will bring my way. ~ John McAfee

Blues
Elizabeth Alexander, 1962

I am lazy, the laziest
girl in the world. I sleep during
the day when I want to, 'til
my face is creased and swollen,
'til my lips are dry and hot. I
eat as I please: cookies and milk
after lunch, butter and sour cream
on my baked potato, foods that
slothful people eat, that turn
yellow and opaque beneath the skin.
Sometimes come dinnertime Sunday
I am still in my nightgown, the one
with the lace trim listing because
I have not mended it. Many days
I do not exercise, only
consider it, then rub my curdy
belly and lie down. Even
my poems are lazy. I use
syllabics instead of iambs,
prefer slant to the gong of full rhyme,
write briefly while others go
for pages. And yesterday,
for example, I did not work at all!
I got in my car and I drove
to factory outlet stores, purchased
stockings and panties and socks
with my father's money.

To think, in childhood I missed only
one day of school per year. I went
to ballet class four days a week
at four-forty-five and on
Saturdays, beginning always
with plie, ending with curtsy.
To think, I knew only industry,
the industry of my race
and of immigrants, the radio
tuned always to the station
that said, Line up your summer
job months in advance. Work hard
and do not shame your family,
who worke ~ Elizabeth Alexander

I was never on a mission to be an NFL quarterback. I wanted to be a good high school player, and I worked hard at that. That made me good enough to play in college and then I wanted to be a good college quarterback. During college I played well enough to make it into the NFL. I never took it for granted and really wanted to play hard at each level and I have always had a lot of fun doing what I wanted to do. ~ Peyton Manning

I spent the last Friday of summer vacation spreading hot, sticky tar across the roof of George Washington High. My companions were Dopey, Toothless, and Joe, the brain surgeons in charge of building maintenance. At least they were getting paid. I was working forty feet above the ground, breathing in sulfur fumes from Satan's vomitorium, for free.
Character building, my father said.
Mandatory community service, the judge said. Court-ordered restitution for the Foul Deed. He nailed me with the bill for the damage I had done, which meant I had to sell my car and bust my hump at a landscaping company all summer. Oh, and he gave me six months of meetings with a probation officer who thought I was a waste of human flesh.
Still, it was better than jail.
I pushed the mop back and forth, trying to coat the seams evenly. We didn't want any rain getting into the building and destroying the classrooms. Didn't want to hurt the school. No, sir, we sure didn't. ~ Laurie Halse Anderson

She felt the snake between her breasts, felt him there, and loved him there, coiled, the deep tumescent S held rigid, ready to strike. She loved the way the snake looked sewn onto her V-neck letter sweater, his hard diamondback pattern shining in the sun. It was unseasonably hot, almost sixty degrees, for early November in Mystic, Georgia, and she could smell the light musk of her own sweat. She liked the sweat, liked the way it felt, slick as oil, in all the joints of her body, her bones, in the firm sliding muscles, tensed and locked now, ready to spring
to strike
when the band behind her fired up the school song: "Fight On Deadly Rattlers of Old Mystic High."
Harry Crews- A Feast of Snakes ~ Harry Crews

When men were tough and raw, when they lived amid hard knocks and hard laws, when they knew what fighting really was, they had only two kinds of songs. The first was a rejoicing that the weak had conquered the strong, the second a lamentation that the strong had, for once in a way, conquered the weak. ~ G.K. Chesterton

My granddad was a hard worker, and my dad is, too. It was instilled in me as a kid. I never got pocket money; I had to earn it. I had two paper rounds before school, not just one. Wherever I worked, whether it was at football, in the pub, I'd do whatever was asked of me - and more. ~ Olly Murs

The best way to stop the problem of agents would be for the NCAA to come down hard and suspend a school for two years if it finds players with agents on campus. ~ Dean Smith

Of course, if one does not fully trust the promise of God's Kingdom, he will have a hard time taking risks and making sacrifices in this life. A gospel centered around the temporal self - fleeting happiness, earthly success, vain prosperity, things such as these - is the primary ambition of the half-hearted Christian; the one who somewhat believes he is subject to an eternal death; the one who just might believe in men before God, who morbidly fears seeming less than anyone else. The man of this school feels deeply that he has but one life to live, that this must be his only chance, and therefore must have it all in his favor - from glory to comfort to riches - and have it right this instant. He is but hinting that he is overcome because he insists always that he must overcome, that his judgment comes now and by the persons around him. The point is, however, in this sense, that by grace the Christian is indeed free, but only for as long as he wants to be free - the practicality of true freedom: that of God which offers not so much freedom to be like the world as it does freedom from the pressures of having to be like the world. For Divine Law is based solely on love and freedom; whereas secular law, pressure and imitation. ~ Criss Jami

Ruthlessly, in despite of itself, the Enlightenment has extinguished any trace of its own self-consciousness. The only kind of thinking that is sufficiently hard to shatter myths is ultimately self-destructive. ~ Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer

The defining characteristic of pessimists is that they tend to believe that bad events will last a long time, will undermine everything they do, and are their own fault. The optimists, who are confronted with the same hard knocks of this world, think about misfortune in the opposite way. They tend to believe that defeat is just a temporary setback or a challenge, that its causes are just confined to this one case. ~ Martin Seligman

We have so little in common, but we were both avid readers growing up. I read almost nonstop when I was little, and it saved me in school. I hated classes, hated teachers. They always wanted me to do things I didn't want to do. But because I was a reader, they knew I wasn't stupid, just different. They cut me slack. It got me through.
Reading couldn't help me make friends, though. I never got the hang of it. I would talk to kids, and over the years a handful of them even seemed to like me enough to ask to come over, but after that first visit to the house they never lasted. Ma told me what I did wrong but I could never manage to do it right. 'Act interested in what they say,' she said, but they never said anything interesting. 'Don't talk too much,' she said, but it never seemed like too much to me. So it wasn't like people threw tomatoes at me, or dipped my pigtails in inkwells, or stood up to move their desks away from mine, but I never really managed to make friends that I could keep.
And I got used to it. I got used to a lot of things. Writing extra papers to make up for falling short in class participation. Volunteering to do the planning and the typing up whenever we had group work assigned, because I knew I could never really work right with a group. And the coping always worked. Up until three years into college, where despite Ma's repeated demands to try harder, I stalled. Every semester since, I was always still trying to finish that last Oral Communicatio ~ Jael McHenry

And there he stood looking like... RON WEASLEY to be precise….and that's where it all started.
People found him "boring" , "dumb" but did I really see what others couldn't ? Or was I blinded with that deep Infatuation.
Well he din't have the perfect body , his hair was always messy like a frizzy bear, stammered when he spoke but his flaws had swept me off by my feet like a Supernova. From the time we knew about each others existence on planet earth we din't really like each other reason being we had fought on a whole new level in a page on Facebook [ lame, but we were young].
Then as we reached high school… things became different, there was a drastic change.
"WE BECAME FRIENDS"
First it was really scary but as time passed we became inseparable. But I din't realize that amidst all that small inside jokes , teasing , recalling our embarassing past …I fell for him. And that too for the first time and believe me I fell hard. In a blink of an eye he who was a complete "moron" turned out to be the person who mattered the most to me. . . ~ Biipso

Merrill Meewee knew his stones. As a boy in Kenya, skipping stones was his favorite free-time activity. There had been an abundance of saucer-shaped missiles on the banks of his father's own fishpond. Fat, river-smoothed disks, they skipped ten, twelve, sixteen times before slipping beneath the surface with a watery plop. His father, a man of little wealth but great forbearance, was not pleased with his boy's solitary pastime, but he never ordered him to stop. Instead, he asked the boy how many stones he thought the pond could hold. I don't know, Meewee remembered answering. A hundred thousand?

Oh, such a big number! And how many stones do you suppose you've thrown already?

Merrill, who was an excellent student, calculated the number of stones he might have tossed in an hour and how many free hours were left each day after school and chores, how many afternoons in how many years since he first discovered the sport. I would estimate 14,850, he informed his father with a certain amount of swagger.

His father was impressed. So many? And all of them have gone to the bottom?

Of course they've gone to the bottom, he had said, embarrassed by his father's apparent ignorance. They're stones. They're heavier than water.

And heavier than fishes?

Of course heavier than fishes.

Good, good, his father concluded, patting him on the head. Keep at it, son, and soon I won't have to work so hard.

Fat ~ David Marusek

I was ready when Quentin approached me after school the following day.

"Genie," he said. "Please. Let me expl - moomph!"

"Stay away," I said, mashing the bulb of garlic into his face as hard as I could. I didn't have any crosses or holy water at home. I had to work with what was available.

Quentin slowly picked the cloves out of my hand before popping them into his mouth.

"That's white vampires," he said, chewing and swallowing the raw garlic like a bite of fruit. "If I was a jiangshi you should have brought a mirror."

I wrinkled my nose. "You're going to stink now."

"What, like a Chinese?" He pursed his lips and blew a kiss at me.

Instead of being pungent, his breath was sweet with plum blossoms and coconut. Like his body magically refused to be anything but intensely appealing to me, even on a molecular level.

I tried to swat away his scent before it made me drunk. ~ F.C. Yee

One of my biggest influences of all time would probably be one of my soccer coaches, Coach Darlington, from high school. He was always trying to get me to push myself really hard. No excuses. I always hated him, but it paid off. I think that's what life is all about ... when you push through the hard stuff and it pays off. ~ Jonny Weston

Statesmanship is developed in the hard knocks of general experience, private and public. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

I worked so hard for so long - I did a lot of movies. I also worked a lot when my kids were smaller, before they were in school. ~ Michelle Pfeiffer

I made up my mind I was going to find someone who would love me unconditionally three hundred and sixty five days a year, I was still in elementary school at the time - fifth or sixth grade - but I made up my mind once and for all."

"Wow," I said. "Did the search pay off?"

"That's the hard part," said Midori. She watched the rising smoke for a while, thinking. "I guess I've been waiting so long I'm looking for perfection. That makes it tough."

"Waiting for the perfect love?"

"No, even I know better than that. I'm looking for selfishness. Perfect selfishness. Like, say I tell you I want to eat strawberry shortcake. And you stop everything you're doing and run out and buy it for me. And you come back out of breath and get down on your knees and hold this strawberry shortcake out to me. And I say I don't want it anymore and throw it out the window. That's what I'm looking for."

"I'm not sure that has anything to do with love," I said with some amazement.

"It does," she said. "You just don't know it. There are time in a girl's life when things like that are incredibly important."

"Things like throwing strawberry shortcake out the window?"

"Exactly. And when I do it, I want the man to apologize to me. "Now I see, Midori. What a fool I have been! I should have known that you would lose your desire for strawberry shortcake. I have all the intelligence and sensitivity of a piece of donkey shit. To ~ Haruki Murakami

Hemorrhoids Go big or go home! That was my mental response to childbirth. You want me to push? Okay, awesome. I'm going to push so hard that I not only eject this baby from me, but I'm also going to turn my butthole inside out. When I explained the issue to my OB, she insisted hemorrhoids were totally normal, and if they didn't go away, I could get a quick surgery to correct them, a suggestion that I met with a resounding "Nope!" I had already spent a month in elementary school sitting on a blowup pillow, and I'm not pulling my pants down as an adult to have surgery in my butt. So, here I am, five years out from my last birth and sitting in my chair a quarter of an inch taller. ~ Brittany Gibbons

If I was sure, I'd say. For your Momma, maybe. For all of us, maybe, but I don't think so. I think, maybe, it's reaching out for that school. Somehow. I'm not saying that's what you thought you were doing or what you even wanted to do. But it's how it turned out. And I'm sorry, the way it turned out. Because somebody's slapped your hand back good and hard. But I don't want you to stop reaching, just because it didn't come out the way it should have. ~ Cynthia Voigt

It's hard to know how people select a course in life," Amos said. "The big choices we make are practically random. The small choices probably tell us more about who we are. Which field we go into may depend on which high school teacher we happen to meet. Who we marry may depend on who happens to be around at the right time of life. On the other hand, the small decisions are very systematic. That I became a psychologist is probably not very revealing. What kind of psychologist I am may reflect deep traits. ~ Michael Lewis

When I was young, I read everything I could lay my hands on, but the Scots in my storybooks spent their time fighting glorious battles, rowing across lochs, or escaping over moors of purple heather. Even those Scots were hard to find. For at school, we recited poetry according to the set texts the teachers taught us. ~ Theresa Breslin

Musicals are hard for me because I got thrown out of the glee club in high school, because I couldn't sing in tune at the time. I can sing in tune now, but I have to work really hard on it to make sure that I don't exercise one of my great talents, which is the ability to sing in three keys at the same time. ~ Alan Alda

Creativity is paradoxical. To create, a person must have knowledge but forget the knowledge, must see unexpected connections in things but not have a mental disorder, must work hard but spend time doing nothing as information incubates, must create many ideas yet most of them are useless, must look at the same thing as everyone else, yet see something different, must desire success but embrace failure, must be persistent but not stubborn, and must listen to experts but know how to disregard them.
[Twelve Things You Were Not Taught in School About Creative Thinking (The Creativity Post, December 6, 2011)] ~ Michael Michalko

It is true you can be successful without [college], but this is a hard world, a real world, and you want every advantage you can have. I would suggest to people to do all that you can. When I dropped out of school, I had worked in the music industry and had checks cut in my name from record labels and had a record deal on the table, and when I wasn't successful and Columbia said, 'We'll call you,' I had to go back and work a telemarketing job, go back to the real world, and that's how life is. Life is hard. Take advantage of your opportunities. ~ Kanye West

It's hard for people to realize now, but my gosh, when I was in school, you could not name a group that was less cool than Kiss. Going in to school with a Kiss T-shirt, you were asking for ridicule. In '77, they were one of the biggest bands in the world, but by '80, there was a severe backlash. ~ Eddie Trunk