Self Directed Quotes

The beginning [of a journey] is a terrible time to plan. It's the moment of greatest ignorance. In self-directed education, a lot of the value comes from exploiting opportunities that arise well out to sea, once I've seen some things and begun the learning process. ~ James Marcus Bach

Anger is remembered pain, fear is anticipated pain, guilt is self directed pain, depression is depletion of energy. Cure-return to love& joy ~ Deepak Chopra

Companies that were paying attention understood they were witnessing the birth of the "self-directed consumer", because the internet and all the other tools for the flat world had created a means for every consumer to customize exactly the price, experience, and service he or she wanted. ~ Thomas L. Friedman

If you don't have common sense, ask someone who does ~ Sonya Withrow

The fact that the human act is self-directed or built up means in no sense that the actor necessarily exercises excellence in its construction. Indeed, he may do a very poor job in constructing his act. ~ Herbert Blumer

I got an accountability partner to call me everyday just to make sure I publish something. Accountability works because it adds social pressure to otherwise self-directed work. ~ Mike Fishbein

It was my assumption that skilled teachers spent their days imparting important and meaningful knowledge to eager students. I also believed, as many of you do, that I didn't remember or wasn't good at the things we learned in high school because I didn't pay close enough attention or didn't work hard enough. ~ Brian Huskie

Going to school is rarely a choice at all, but rather just the thing you do because everyone else does it. ~ Brian Huskie

Easter is a marvelous affirmation of the genius of our design, but it is likewise the blunt acknowledgement that left to its own devices, the genius of our design will result in the destruction of our lives. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

I'm sure if Socrates were alive today, and had to sit through even a single meeting discussing how to use data to inform instruction, he'd kill himself all over again. ~ Brian Huskie

I don't think anyone would disagree with this: You are self-directed in daytime, and that's it. So come with it, and bring it on the first take. ~ Lorraine Toussaint

I tried to point out that it's not a gimmick to teach patients suffering with OCD that their intrusive thoughts and urges are caused by brain imbalances, and that we now know they can physically alter those imbalances through mindfulness and self-directed behavioral therapy techniques. ~ Jeffrey M. Schwartz

What rewards and punishments do is induce compliance, and this they do very well indeed. If your objective is to get people to obey an order, to show up on time and do what they're told, then bribing or threatening them may be sensible strategies. But if your objective is to get long-term quality in the workplace, to help students become careful thinkers and self-directed learners, or to support children in developing good values, then rewards, like punishments, are absolutely useless. In fact, as we are beginning to see, they are worse than useless - they are actually counterproductive. ~ Alfie Kohn

If we live a self-directed, self-motivated, self-centered life, always needing to get our own way, then we're going to be miserable. In fact, many times we believe it's our problems that are making us unhappy when, in reality, it's because we're focused on ourselves! ~ Joyce Meyer

Healthy parenting is nothing if not a process of empowerment. As we help to raise our children's self-esteem, we also increase their personal power. When we encourage them to be confident, self-reliant, self-directed, and responsible individuals, we are giving them power. ~ Louise Hart

Free human dialogue, wandering wherever the agility of the mind allows, lies at the heart of education. If teachers do not have the time, the incentive, or the wit to produce that; if students are too demoralized, bored, or distracted to muster the attention their teachers need of them, then THAT is the educational problem which has to be solved ... That problem ... is metaphysical in nature, not technical ~ Neil Postman

Going forward, you must adjust to the new reality, be more self directed, and learn to be productive under the reign of uncertainty, unpredictability, and unstable times. ~ Jennifer Touma

In these times of self-directed teams, empowered employees, and "boundaryless" organizations, your worth as an individual employee will also get measured by your work group's collective results. ~ Price Pritchett

How defeated and restless the child that is not doing something in which it sees a purpose, a meaning! It is by its self-directed activity that the child, as years pass, finds its work, the thing it wants to do and for which it finally is willing to deny itself pleasure, ease, even sleep and comfort. ~ Ida Tarbell

The rewards are profound. Shadow-work enables us to alter our self-sabotaging behavior so that we can achieve a more self-directed life. ~ Connie Zweig

To recap, Motivation 2.0 suffers from three compatibility problems. It doesn't mesh with the way many new business models are organizing what we do - because we're intrinsically motivated purpose maximizers, not only extrinsically motivated profit maximizers. It doesn't comport with the way that twenty-first-century economics thinks about what we do - because economists are finally realizing tht we're full-fledged human beings, not single-minded economic robots. And perhaps most important, it's hard to reconcile with much of what we actually do at work - because for growing numbers of people, work is often creative, interesting, and self-directed rather than routine, boring and other-directed. Taken together, these compatibility problems warn us that something's gone awry in our motivational operating system. ~ Daniel H. Pink

How many of us have read history, and shook our heads and puffed our chest, and said, "If I were alive during that period, I would never have done those things to those people!" Yet here we are, doing those things to those people. ~ Brian Huskie

Homeschoolers are the ultimate do-it-yourselfers. They are self-motivated and self-directed, independent-minded and creative. They are not content to turn their education of their children over to the government. ~ Nancy Pearcey

Another significant factor that increased pressure on the Jews was the rise of the mendicant orders of preaching friars, the Dominicans and the Franciscans. The Dominicans in particular were to become leaders in the campaign against the Jews. Saint Dominic probably never imagined that his order would initiate the Spanish Inquisition and oversee the public immolation of heretics. The only torment he advocated was self-directed. ~ Jeffrey Gorsky

A person's zealous act of rebellion leading to their expulsion from a pampered private sanctuary is the first step in self-articulation. Passion requires a struggle. Only by risking committing grievous error can men and women claim authorship for their own destiny. Only the vigorous pursuit of our destiny allows us to discover our authenticity. When we learn to stop resisting our innermost calling, when we accept a lifestyle that makes us experience joy by pursuing our passions and the commonplace acts of being, we discover our pathway to bliss. We must listen to the demands of our spirit; we must break free from self-imposed barriers and cultural impediments that obstruct us from achieving the final manifestation of our spiritual being. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Pain, brought anger, anger brought rage, aimless rage, self-directed rage. An avalanche of 'if onlys' and a torrent of 'what ifs' assaulted his mind. Images and thoughts to torture and torment him, should he ever attempt to sleep again, seared and burnt into his brain by the heat of the ruined house. Scars to last a lifetime, however long that was. ~ G.R. Matthews

One bad thing can often be rectified or overlooked, but several of them can sometimes coalesce into a compound disaster that sprouts tentacles and develops a self-directed will of its own, the kind of thing my dear old dad used to call a cluster fudge bar. ~ Eleanor Druse

Understanding of oneself is the first act in establishing a transformative philosophy for living a vivid and a reflective existence. Knowing thy self is essential to designing and instigating a meaningful life that is self-directed instead of exclusively controlled by innate traits and external determinates. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

If the people in our congregation become other-directed instead of self-directed in the adoption of unwanted children, they are going to be other-directed instead of self-directed in their verbal witness to people in their community. On the other hand, the same self-interest that sears over the joy of birth will sear over the joy of the new birth. The numbness to earthly adoption is easily translated to numbness to spiritual adoption. But if people in our churches learn not to grumble at the blessing of minivans filled with children - some of whom don't look anything alike - they're going to learn not to grumble at the blessing of a congregation filling with new people, some of whom don't look anything alike. If our churches learn to rejoice in newness of life in the church nursery, they'll more easily rejoice at newness of life in the church baptistery, and vice versa. ~ Russell D. Moore

A teenager's nature is not laziness, their preferred state is not ignorance, and it is not necessary for extrinsic motivation to be delivered by trained professionals in order to prevent them from bareknuckle boxing under a bridge in exchange for drugs and money. ~ Brian Huskie

That 99 of compulsive thinkers' thinking is about themselves that 99 of this self-directed thinking consists of imagining and then getting ready for things that are going to happen to them and then weirdly that if they stop to think about it that 100 of the things they spend 99 of their time and energy imagining and trying to prepare for all the contingencies and consequences are never good. Then that this connects interestingly with the early-sobriety urge to pray for the literal loss of one's mind. In short that 99 of the head's thinking activity consists of trying to scare the everliving shit out of itself. ~ David Foster Wallace

And there you sit, atop the smoking mountain of rubble that was once your home, covered in gray dust, cradling the mangled corpse of your little girl in your arms, looking south to a Mexican people who, in solidarity with you, have stopped riding Uber. ~ Brian Huskie

Know what you're working toward and eliminate debt, so that if you change your mind later it doesn't kill you to know you have a hundred thousand dollar biology degree hanging in the kitchen of the tapas restaurant you just opened. ~ Brian Huskie

Maybe you've noticed what I've noticed, and thought it strange, or dismissed it as youthful foolishness or that you were missing some critical piece of information that would reveal itself with age and wisdom – that is: every single teacher believes feverishly in the importance of the content of their class, and furthermore, believes that their assessment of you in their class is a direct measure of your capacity for future success, while simultaneously not having a clue as to the content of virtually any other discipline in the school. They will boldly state things like, That's math, I'm an English teacher or That's literature, I'm a biology teacher, practically admitting out loud that nothing learned in school is important (except, of course, the course they are teaching). ~ Brian Huskie

Acid is not for every brain ... Only the healthy, happy, wholesome, handsome, hopeful, humorous, high-velocity should seek these experiences. This elitism is totally self-determined. Unless you are self-confident, self-directed, self-selected, please abstain. ~ Timothy Leary

Today's world needs a workforce of creative, curious, and self-directed lifelong learners who are capable of conceiving and implementing novel ideas. Unfortunately, this is the type of student that the Prussian model actively suppresses. ~ Salman Khan

Parental behavioral factors - including fathers who are responsive and positive, mothers who favor "self-directed child behavior," and parents with emotional intimacy in their marriages - influence a child's development two to three times more than any form of child care. ~ Sheryl Sandberg

Probing Wolf's construction of rape crisis feminism as victim feminism also shows that Wolf ignores an important aspect of victim identity that rape crisis feminists acknowledge centrally. Namely, the much-examined tendency of victims of rape to engage in self-blame and 'experience only self-directed anger' (Alcoff and Gray, 1993, p. 284). Wolf espouses a version of survivorship called power feminism, without carrying through rape crisis feminism's cautions about forms of agency that centrally involve self-blame. A core argument of Wolf is that victims are peculiarly at risk of failing to assume personal responsibility – this is what is so disabling about victim identity. Rape crisis feminists put the problem very differently: victims often assume excessive responsibility, for their own actions and for the actions of others. In fact, for rape crisis feminists, 'victim identity' primarily consists of this self-blaming consciousness. ... Rather than seek the 'rewards' of victim recognition, the self-blaming victim situates themselves as the agent of their own victimization. ~ Rebecca Stringer

Nothing could be more misdirected than a self-directed life. ~ Lewis Sperry Chafer

When writing functions in this fashion as self-directed psychotherapy, we err if we demand that people be entertained and enlightened by the process. ~ Lawrence Block

I knew that I wanted to follow their example and become a teacher who would help students become self-directed learners. ~ Bell Hooks

I tend to agree with Robert Frost when he says, 'Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.' By this definition, I don't think anyone can claim that we are successfully educating this next generation. ~ Brian Huskie

Voluntary self-directed religion was more dangerous to the Church than any number of infidels. ~ Barbara Tuchman

We must live life in the present as shaped by the past. The option to begin afresh does not exist. The past days and nights were the sacrificial coals that fired an internal furnace. The dying embers fueled my present being. I need to locate new nutrients to revitalize an unfulfilled soul. I seek to unearth fresh energy sources and forge a renewed resoluteness to slog through the remainder of this gaseous and hard-pressed sojourn. Any prior personal inspiration for living righteously was lost on a remote outpost somewhere along the fractured trail. I go on because I must. I trust that if I industrially seek, I shall ascertain a purpose in life that currently eludes me. If I tread long enough, if I assiduously track sufficient true miles, I shall discover a purpose that fits me. I continue to push forward with an unbowed determination, navigate into the deep unknown with the confidence of an experienced admiral who knows that if he endures the gale forces of self-doubt and persist despite all setbacks that he will discover what he seeks. A person must rely upon personal consciousness as a guiding compass into penetrating the unalleviated obscurity that shrouds the way. I shall always resist the easy path, because it leads to an apocalyptic demise. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

I know there's a lot of nasty humor directed at celebrities, but my feeling is, in most cases, they deserve it. ~ Doug Benson

Legend has it that Walter was taking a walk with his father one day and passed by a church where Oswald directed his young son's attention to a memorial. "There's a name you will never remember," Oswald commented as he kept walking. Walter paused to read: ~ Patricia Cornwell

Energy rightly applied and directed will accomplish anything. ~ Nellie Bly

Keep your thoughts directed at your goal, do everything that you DO know how to do to make it happen, decide with unwavering determination that it will happen, and be on the lookout for the opportunity. ~ Jen Sincero

The movie I've seen a million times is 'Steel Magnolias,' directed by Herbert Ross, starring Sally Field and Julia Roberts. ~ Queen Latifah

If I am looking at my work as an actor after having directed, I'm able to look at things in a much more technical way. There's no question about that. ~ Derek Magyar

Walt, at about eleven, had a routine of looking at Seymour's wrists and telling him to take off his sweater. "Take off your sweater, hey, Seymour. Go ahead, hey. It's warm in here." S. would beam back at him, shine back at him. He loved that kind of horseplay from any of the kids. I did, too, but only off and on. He did invariably. He thrived, too, waxed strong, on all tactless or underconsidered remarks directed at him by family minors. In 1959, in fact, when on occasion I hear rather nettling news of the doings of my youngest brother and sister, I think on the quantities of joy they brought S. I remember Franny, at about four, sitting on his lap, facing him, and saying, with immense admiration, "Seymour, your teeth are so nice and yellow!" He literally staggered over to me to ask if I'd heard what she said. ~ J.D. Salinger

I would like to have directed Hollywood musicals in the '40s and '50s. ~ Matthew Bourne

I just wish this social institution [religion] wasn't based on what appears to me to be a monumental hoax built on an accumulation of customs and myths directed toward proving something that isn't true. ~ Andy Rooney

Storms may come and they will, for no ship ever sailed the seas but had to face the storm. If it is strong from keel to top, from bow to stern, well maintained and intelligently directed, it rides the storm and goes on its way. If you are strong in faith, clear headed, honest, trusting for divine guidance and with a character built on the solid rock, you will meet all troubles victoriously. ~ Charles Chapman

A person can hurry through or sleep walk through life, but whenever they stop to catch their breath or awaken from a long nap, they will find apprehension, disquiet, and fretfulness waiting their directed attention. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Hypnosis is a fascinating subject, and more common than we realize. How does it work?
Essentially, when we relax our inner powers of discrimination, associated with our personal wills, and passively allow ideas and input into our subconscious mind, we are open to suggestions, which over time can be directed in specific ways that we call conditioning. The discriminating part of the mind is sometimes called the Gateway to the Unconscious. This gateway opens naturally and is most apparent, and useful, in the way children can quickly learn and adapt to their surroundings. This is an automatic occurrence and part of the learning process. This dynamic of "taking in" our surroundings is natural. It is fast and fluid and probably vital for the survival of our species to "learn" things rapidly. Our cultures, languages and civilizations are, to a great extent, passed on this way. Children are like sponges, we are told. We are delighted by this open and vital acceptance and curiosity of the world displayed by children. Interestingly enough, adults who maintain this open sense of wonder are labeled naive and gullible. I take delight in children, and encourage my clients to nurture their inner children. ~ Stephen Poplin

When church leaders make decisions driven by fear of man, the true church disappears. The truth is frequently unpopular, and standing up for God's word and against sin will sometimes make people angry. We need church leaders who aren't directed by popularity polls, but whose decision-making is dominated by what is right. ~ Mike McKinley

I remember my brother Nash had just directed me in 'The Square,' and I was sitting in Australia going: 'No one's called me about working for ages. I don't know if I'm ever going to get another job.' ~ Joel Edgerton

It's all that's left,' Leon said in a suddenly weak voice. 'It's what is left of civilization. You take raw material and you transform it. That is civilization. Physical love is all raw meat. That's why everyone's so preoccupied with it now. I have been told by a colleague ten years older than myself--as if it were possible for anybody to be ten years older than I am--that salvation comes from staring at the pubic region of strangers, and freedom, from inducing in myself, by the use of a chemical, the kind of ecstatic lunacy in which I spent most of my adolescence, a condition I attribute solely to the strength of my body at that time and the conviction I had then that I would see socialism in the United States during my lifetime. Now that my bones are weak, my brain is stronger. I don't expect . . . anything. But I cannot bear the grotesque, lying piety of my own unhinged contemporaries. One man, a literary star'--and here he broke off, laughed once, choked and shook his head--'oh, yes, a star, told me he only regretted the pill had not yet been developed in his own youth. All those girls who might have been his! In this age of generalized cock, is this the whole revelation toward which my life has been directed? I would, in any case, prefer to contemplate the organ of a horse. It is handsomer, larger and more comic than anything my fellow man has to show. It is the age of baby shit, darling. Don't kid yourself. My privacy has been violated--what I've admired and thought abo ~ Paula Fox

Plato's objection to the older art
that it is the imitation of a phantom and hence belongs to a sphere even lower than the empirical world
could certainly not be directed against the new art; and so we find Plato endeavoring to transcend reality and to represent the idea which underlies this pseudo-reality. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Kazan was an old friend, I met him in 1938. He picked up radio jobs for eating money, so I met him on a couple of radio shows. Later on I was in a play he directed. ~ Richard Widmark

Do you like manga?" she asked after a minute. "Anime?"
"Anime's cool. I'm not really into it, but 1 like Japanese movies,
animated or not."
"Well, I'm into it. I watch the shows, read the books, chat on the boards, and all that. But this girl I know, she's
completely into it. She spends most of her allowance on the books and DVDs. She can recite dialogue from
them." She caught my gaze. "So would you say she belongs here?"
"No. Most kids are that way about something, right? With me, it's
movies. Like knowing who directed a sci-fi movie made before I was born. ~ Kelley Armstrong

What separates experts from the rest of us is that they tend to engage in a very directed, highly focused routine, which Ericsson has labeled deliberate practice. ~ Joshua Foer

If the path you walk is the right one, then the big question comes: How many people have you directed to that path? ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writing of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States ... ~ George Orwell

Propose to an Englishman any principle, or any instrument, however admirable, and you will observe that the whole effort of the English mind is directed to find a difficulty, a defect, or an impossibility in it. If you speak to him of a machine for peeling a potato, he will pronounce it impossible: if you peel a potato with it before his eyes, he will declare it useless, because it will not slice a pineapple. ~ Charles Babbage

Those who today always look for disciplinarian solutions, those who long for an exaggerated doctrinal 'security,' those who stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer exists - they have a static and inward-directed view of things. In this way, faith becomes an ideology among other ideologies. ~ Pope Francis

I think a lot of times we're so told in our world that marriage is everything, and having a partner is everything. If you look at our movies and things, it's all directed around that love, and if you don't have that love, how sad you are. ~ Brooke Elliott

Our country is too large to have all its affairs directed by a single government. Public servants at such a distance, and from under the eye of their constituents, must, from the circumstance of distance, be unable to administer and overlook all the details necessary for the good government of the citizens; and the same circumstance, by rendering detection impossible to their constituents, will invite public agents to corruption, plunder and waste. ~ Thomas Jefferson

As soon as something like Monty Python's 'The Life of Brian' appears with a Muhammad figure as the main lead, directed by an Arabic Theo van Gogh, the controversial late Dutch filmmaker, we will have taken an enormous step forward. ~ Ayaan Hirsi Ali

I believe that photographs should be simple technically, and easy to look at. They shouldn't be directed at other photographers; their point is to make ordinary people react - to laugh, or to see something they hadn't taken in before, or to be touched. But not to wince, I think. ~ Antony Armstrong-Jones, 1st Earl Of Snowdon

There have been huge Muslim demonstrations against cartoons depicting Muhammad and any other perceived insult against Islam. But I am unaware of a single demonstration of Muslims against Muslim terror directed at non-Muslims. ~ Dennis Prager

I never think I'm capable of any of [action movies]! I'm always terrified, but luckily on this one it was directed by my husband [Len Wiseman]. 'I can't possibly do it. I'm too scared, I can't do it.' He says: 'Go on. DO it!' So it is shocking as I'm not one of those people who finds that stuff easy. ~ Colin Farrell

An exploration of the challenges Korea faces in transforming its economy from a government-directed, low-cost producer to an innovative world economic power based on its own scientific and technological development. ~ Lewis M. Branscomb

When a lack of white blood cells exposes the horizon of being, one has to make a choice. To cloister yourself away in a germ-free environment, alive but alone, or to embrace the woman you love and catch your death of cold at the marriage ceremony? What a great show. It's inner-directed script was unmatched by any other soap opera. ~ Benson Bruno

Now, we have the Holy Ghost. Each one of us who is a member of the Church has had hands laid upon his head and has been given, as far as an ordinance can give it, the gift of the Holy Ghost. But, as I remember, when I was confirmed, the Holy Ghost was not directed to come to me; I was directed to "receive the Holy Ghost." If I receive the Holy Ghost and follow his guidance, I will be among those who are protected and carried through these troubled times. And so will you, and so will every other soul who lives under his direction. If ye are prepared, ye need not fear. ~ Marion G. Romney