Howard Gardner Quotes

The experience of the human, male or female, cannot be completely defined by one startling, surprising, or gigantic life experience.

I realised that people respond to banal things. They don't accept their own history, not participating in acceptance within their own being.

I had nothing to talk about until I, like, lived.

By making us stop for a moment, poetry gives us an opportunity to think about ourselves as human beings on this planet and what we mean to each other.

I don't want to get so lost in thinking about me and talking about me all the time in interviews. It's so nice to unwind and just look at other things and get out of yourself. It's hard to detach myself from myself without neglecting myself. You know what I mean? I don't want to get in to the habit of thinking about my career because when it comes down to it, it's not really that important. I could die tomorrow and the world would go on.

I've always been aware of both how extraordinarily normal and how extraordinarily extraordinary my life has been. It's always been important, first to my parents when I was younger, and now very much to me, to live in the world. I would never want to live in a cloister.

When I was doing 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind' I was asked, 'If there was one part of your life that you could erase, what would it be?' And I was so stunned by that. I thought: 'Nothing.' I would keep all the good bits and the bad bits, because those things made me who I am.

We talk of communing with Nature but 'tis with ourselves we commune .... Nature furnishes the conditions.

… one must never forget that in the drama of existence we are ourselves both actors and spectators.

Mortal experiences give us the opportunity to assess what we are doing with our lives.

Turning 30 changed me in ways I didn't expect. For the very first time, I felt like my life is valuable. Not my life because I'm putting something good into the world or I'm well-respected in my field, but my life as a human being on this planet for a limited amount of time.

Our lives teach us who we are.

I used to worry that if I wasn't having a dynamic life, then I wouldn't have anything to talk about.

I found that traveling on my own created a different state of mind because when you travel with your partner or a friend there is an endless tendency to exchange information, feelings and associations.

We're all trying to figure out on a daily basis what kind of person to be, aren't we? I am, at least.

The people who watch you on the court often don't know you as an actual person - a human being.

I love talking to strangers and absorb their life experiences.

Binaries aside, we are the products of our relationships with our identities - cities we have built, bodies we have embraced, kindred souls we've cherished, our memories, our dreams, the fears we hide, the pain we hold - identities that cannot be reduced to a collection of labels.

I'm getting less and less interested in the problems of youth. I'm much more interested in the idea of emotional paralysis, and I find myself less interested in work that doesn't have anything to do with a conversation about the world.

My identity will always inform my experience and shape my perception. But I am an unremarkable person.

I'm interested in how we understand ourselves in our relatioships and how we define ourselves.

The real meaning of travel, like that of a conversation by the fireside, is the discovery of oneself through contact with other people, and its condition is self-commitment in the dialogue.

I mean I certainly like when I'm like talking to people I'm like what did you think, what did you think, what did you think? You know that's always in the back of my head.

Self-awareness is a supreme gift, a treasure as precious as life. This is what makes us human. But it comes with a costly price: the wound of mortality. Our existence is forever shadowed by the knowledge that we will grow, blossom, and, inevitably, diminish and die.

The first question in any interactive process with another is: now Who Am I, and Who Do I Want to Be, in relationship to that?