Keith Gessen Quotes

I learn lessons with every interview I give.

If in the last few years you haven't discarded a major opinion or acquired a new one, check your pulse. You may be dead.

For eleven months and maybe about twenty days each year, we concentrate upon the shortcomings of others, but for a few days at the turn of the New Year we look at our own. It is a good habit.

Begin challenging your assumptions. Your assumptions are the windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in awhile or the light won't come in.

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.

One of the great things about education is that it should stop you making mistakes - and I have made a lot of mistakes.

To me, I look at situations and try to look back and see if there was anything I could have done.

Even when it doesn't look good, it's always good. Even the worst thing, there's always something good that comes out of it. I've learned that.

I think it's important to always stay critical. But rather than dwelling on it and wishing I could change something, it's important to just take those lessons learned and those new notes and apply them to the next thing.

It was a lesson that I would learn in time though it wasn't Hegbert who taught me.

I'm grateful for every scar, some pages turned, some bridges burned, but there were lessons learned

Experience teaches nothing, but evaluated experience teaches everything.

To celebrate growing older, I once wrote the 45 lessons life taught me. It is the most-requested column I've ever written.

Good judgement is the result of experience and experience the result of bad judgement.

This [defeat] has taught me a lesson, but I'm not sure what it is.

Be brutal with the past, especially your own, and have no respect for the philosophies that are foisted on you from outside.

sloughing my skin / escaping it's grip / stripped of my wit / it hurts to be me .

The wise man is satisfied with nothing.

Embrace bad news to learn where you need the most improvement.

I think that every day we are taught lessons and sometimes we don't realize or see it.

And then her heart changed, or at least she understood it; and the winter passed, and the sun shone upon her.

Experience isn't the best teacher - evaluated experience is.

You've got to be able to look at your thoughts on paper and discover what a fool you were.

God give me the wisdom to see the truth however contrary to my established beliefs.

The washing of dishes does seem to me the most absurd and unsatisfactory business that I ever undertook. If, when once washed, they would remain clean for ever and ever (which they ought in all reason to do, considering how much trouble it is), there would be less occasion to grumble; but no sooner is it done, than it requires to be done again. On the whole, I have come to the resolution not to use more than one dish at each meal.