Angela Duckworth Quotes

If my dad was alive, I wouldn't have gone to boarding school, and I wouldn't have had the success I've had.

In the end it doesn't matter what you do.

Even with all the advantages of retrospect, and a lot of witnesses dead and gone, you can't make your life look as if you intended it or you were consistent. All you can show is how you dealt with various hands.

You never know what's going to happen in your life, and you never know what's going to happen in someone else's life either.

I had the sense when I looked back over my life I would actually see a mess of decisions, a few of which I had thought about, some of which I had sort of stumbled on and many that I had no control over whatsoever.

By definition, an actor's life is a recipe for regret. There are always roads you could have taken. But I've lived long enough to realise that each road has its own rewards.

Whether you want to go into music, whether you want to be a lawyer, whether you want to be President of the United States, the bottom line for all of you is that you have got to get your education.

What we have, what we wish we had - ambitions fulfilled, ambitions disappointed, investments won, investments lost, elections won, elections lost - these things may occupy our attention, but they do not define us.

I do know how life can go one way or another and that it's not all just black and white, and there are many different situations and twists and turns in life.

You can never predict what the specific shape of your life is going to be, and you won't really know its general shape until, God willing, you're advanced in years and you have the time and opportunity to look back in a coherent way and see what your life was about.

You never know what happens a few years down the line.

Pictures of entire lives, of the choices that people make and how those choices work out for them, those pictures are almost impossible to get.

No one sets their life out and says, 'Boy, this is what I think I'm going to go through.'

When I got to 40 or so... I had the sense when I looked back over my life I would actually see a mess of decisions, a few of which I had thought about, some of which I had sort of stumbled on, and many that I had no control over whatsoever.

But you know the thing that I thing oftentimes gets ignored and neglected is there was 10 or 12 years of life before I met Amy and before she met me, where you know, whatever happened was probably going to happen some day.

Things happen to us in unpredictable ways, but the effect that that has on the kind of people who we become actually is not only open to chance - we can influence it in pretty profound ways.

I look at the kids coming out of Yale. They are so intelligent with their careers. I wish I had that.

People who graduate are more resilient financially, and they weather economic downturns better than people who don't graduate. And, throughout their lives, people who graduate are more likely to be economically secure, more likely to be healthy, and more likely to live longer. Face it: A college degree puts a lot in your corner.

I'm not an example for how people should live their lives. Never in my life would I ever set out to be an example for people on how to live their lives. If you need an example for how to live, then you just shouldn't have been born. Straight up.

How you do in school determines how you do in life.

Most of the things that have happened in my life have been pretty arbitrary. I walk into a room, and someone hits me with a two-by-four, and that changes my life. I'm not sure what I've learned from anything.

At my age, I dare say I've kind of established myself, and I don't have to chase a paycheck.

Imagine you're 24 years old, earning what I earn and having all that I have. Wouldn't you be the same as me?

I'm very aware and very conscious of the path I chose in life, and very aware of the path I didn't choose.

IQ is a very important predictor, not just of academic success, but of economic success.