John W. Gardner Quotes

You know, in college, your second year they expect you to have a sophomore slump.

I always say getting my bachelor's was the single hardest thing I've done in my life. Once I got to university, I was working harder than I ever had before and, for the first time in my life, I was getting bad grades. It was demoralising.

I'm the type of person, I have to study to get an A on the test.

When you're in college, everything seems much more important than it really is.

One thing that used to worry me is the fact that it seemed like Harvard was this big scary thing where I would have to spend all my time studying just to get in. But getting to go to both campuses of Harvard and Oxford and getting to meet some of the professors was absolutely amazing.

My first semester, I got a D in creative writing.

I never learned to study in studio school, so I had to teach myself to study.

I started college Pre-Med. That lasted about half a semester.

As you know from school, it's when you have not prepared for the test that you have the fear of failing. And if you have prepared, even if you fail, you've done your best.

I never studied much at Howard, but at Boston University, I didn't do much else but study.

When I enrolled in college at age 19, I had a total of eight years of formal classroom education. As a result, I was not comfortable with formal lectures and receiving regular homework assignments.

I was in high school, trying to get out of high school. The only thing slowing me up was grades.

When I went to college, I was doing well in school, but I didn't have any drive to study.

The Purdue education was fine, but I wasn't ready to learn when I was at Purdue.

I crammed my exams in London and did fine.

You cannot get an A if you're afraid of getting an F.

In fall 2007, I stood at the midway point of completing my undergraduate studies at Columbia. I studied every moment that I wasn't sitting in class. I was very focused on maintaining a solid GPA, so I could go on to law school.

It's not easy for a freshman, especially not at Duke.

I was studying for the SAT's and learning lines.

It is a lot of work when you have to go to school and then try to improve your game at the same time.

You still remember your SAT scores. And everybody else does too. Everybody's forgotten everything about themselves, everything else about high school. They remember their SAT scores.

We should not have 8th grade graduations. Instead we should tell the students, “You have a long way to go. Get your butt down and study.”

I didn't have any idea of what I was getting into by going away to college. And I was scared. I was scared of failing. I was scared of it not being for me because I was going to be one of the first people in my family to go off to college.

It's been a while since I've studied: since high school. It's a lot of work, a lot of work.

I was planning that whole athletic slide into Stanford rather than actually getting a 1450 on my SATs.