The only lesson to extract from any civil war is that it's pointless and futile and ugly, and that there is nothing glamorous or heroic about it. There are heroes, but the causes are never heroic.

I did things like get in a cupboard before the teacher came in at the beginning of a lesson, and then, two minutes before the end of the class, I come out of the cupboard and go, 'Sorry I'm late.'

I've got to give my neighbors a bottle of wine or something because I was just screaming into microphones and learning how to play instruments, and it was a lesson in patience for them, I believe.

People come up to me all the time and ask how I stay the way I am, and it's no secret. The first lesson a chef needs to learn is how to handle a knife; the second is how to be around all that food.

Books are standing counselors and preachers, always at hand, and always disinterested; having this advantage over oral instructors, that they are ready to repeat their lesson as often as we please.

Perhaps the most useful lesson which has come out of the work on penicillin has been the demonstration that success in this field depends on the development and coordinated use of technical methods.

I remember being in a history lesson and saying to my teacher, 'How come you never talk about black scientists and inventors and pioneers?' And she looked at me and said, 'Because there aren't any.'

The great lesson in theatre is that you live the story every night, and that is a wonderful vehicle for getting to the richest places in a performance or investing a character with the richest life.

I think the big lesson I've learned is that it's very hard to write satire in America because almost immediately, whatever you've thought of turns out to come true, or sometimes it already was true.

You have to let fear go. Another lesson is you just have to believe in yourself; you just have to. There's no way around it. No matter how things are stacked against you, you just have to every time.

An hour of violin lessons in Berlin is an hour where you get the child interested in music. An hour in a violin lesson in Palestine is an hour away from violence, is an hour away from fundamentalism.

The lesson that people can't give me what they don't have, and if there's anything I took from it, it was: okay, I don't really expect anyone to hand me anything. There's going to be me and the world.

As a parent, you want to protect your children, but the fact of racism in this country, of inequality, that is still a lesson my children are going to have to learn. I can't protect my kids from that.

I've always been fascinated with sound, since I was a little kid when my mother Dorothy Dean took me to my first piano lesson. Later on, my guitar, bass guitar, and synthesizer were my secret weapons.

I learned a priceless lesson and one that everyone can use today - it's never the amount of money we have or haven't; it's always the amount of fear we have to wrestle with to make it through the day.

I've never been interested in watching or reading anything because it's the hero's story. I don't feel the need to be inspired by the character or learn a lesson. I feel the need to be engaged by them.

I am somewhat grateful to the disintegration of my marriage for teaching me a lot about myself and about relationships, and though I wish it hadn't been such a taxing lesson, I wouldn't change a thing.

When I talk to young people, I always tell them the biggest lesson I learned was that you shouldn't care about the outcome. If it fails, it fails. Every failure will groom you for your next big reward.

Travel provided many interesting experiences, but perhaps the most useful lesson I learned was that I really had no proficiency for learning the thousands of characters of the written Chinese language.

I'm from a generation of women that shattered the glass ceiling. We didn't wait for doors to open. The lesson I learned is that you need to open some doors for yourself in pursuit of career advancement.

I spent too many years of my life stressing over and struggling with my sexuality. But it was a valuable lesson. I realised that by not sharing how you feel, you become inhibited in every facet of life.

I never actually had a guitar lesson. I taught myself the guitar from piano exercise books, which led me to have a pretty good technique on the guitar and allowed me to find different ways to do things.

My grandfather and my uncle took me to the gym. I was kinda wild; they thought that boxing would teach me a lesson, but I don't think in their wildest dreams they could imagine the success I would have.

The biggest lesson that I've learned is that fashion is this tightrope where you have to be consistent but inconsistent. You need the connective thread but at the same time you need a sense of surprise.

The mistake we have made in our lives is that over and over again we've run into the needful moment and then failed to learn its higher lesson. We don't like needful moments and therefore we resist them.

North Korea has taught a great lesson to all the countries in the world, especially the rogue countries of dictatorships or whatever: if you don't want to be invaded by America, get some nuclear weapons.

Studying the daily news can appear more interesting than the priesthood lesson manual. Sitting down to rest can be more attractive than making appointments to visit those who need our priesthood service.

Every film, regardless of being a success or a failure or anything in between, teaches you something. You might not sometimes realise what it taught you, but down the line, there would be a lesson in it.

People who make money often make mistakes, and even have major setbacks, but they believe they will eventually prosper, and they see every setback as a lesson to be applied in their move towards success.

The lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis is plain: Strength prevents war; weakness invites it. We need a commander-in-chief who understands that - and who won't leave us facing a foe who thinks he doesn't.

When you write for kids, people always ask you what lesson you mean to impart. I don't think adult writers get that question. I never mean to teach anybody a lesson, because I don't know anything myself.

The failure of academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.

History's lesson, of course, is that attempts to suppress free expression have merely confirmed the caricaturists' original critique of heavy-handed and objectionable actions of overreaching governments.

My mother took me to Venice one time and showed me all the houses where famous composers used to live. It gave me a fascination for music and the city, but also for architecture. It was a valuable lesson.

In high school, I tried very hard to make everybody like me, which resulted in me being extremely unhappy and in a lot of pain. Therefore, the lesson I got from that was that I can't make everybody happy.

Having children is not for everyone, but I think it's a beautiful lesson in it not being all about me anymore. It's a relief, in a way. It's like, this is her story now, and I'm her mom. It's a nice shift.

That's part of your life lesson to be afraid. The bigger question is how you deal with being afraid. Do you have to summon courage or something else to live with that fear without letting it take you over?

That was the big lesson for all of us. Everything was going great on paper, but we all became miserable because we were so caught up in the machinery of how you make that happen, it took away the sheer joy.

If you were to ask me what the No. 1 lesson I learned from being on 'The Real World', and I challenge you to go back to the episodes and you will see that I'm right: I learned the myth of liberal tolerance.

When I had my first voice lesson I was 15 years old. And I had a really good teacher. This is what made all the difference. A good teacher will teach you the technique, but also how to listen to your voice.

If there is one lesson for U.S. foreign policy from the past 10 years, it is surely that military intervention can seem simple but is in fact a complex affair with the potential for unintended consequences.

I took one guitar lesson, and they wanted me to play 'Mary Had a Little Lamb' or 'Michael Row the Boat Ashore,' and that was the last guitar lesson that I ever took, so I taught myself what I wanted to know.

I personally believe that if you love someone, and you get your heart broken, and you can learn to love someone else just as deeply as the first, then that is the greatest lesson we can learn on this planet.

If I write a book where all I've ever experienced is success, people won't take a positive lesson from it. In being candid, I have to own up to my own failures, both in my marriage and in my work environment.

One lesson of the vote for Brexit was that citizens were fed up being treated as bystanders. One of the gains of Leave was the flourishing of a sense of agency and self-determination that it afforded to many.

I've learned the lesson that when you're in the middle of something that seems overwhelming, or you're in a bad situation and it seems like it's the end of the world or whatever, then you learn that it's not.

What kind of people do they think we are? Is it possible they do not realize that we shall never cease to persevere against them until they have been taught a lesson which they and the world will never forget?

In the 20th century, the Soviet Union made the state's role absolute. In the long run, this made the Soviet economy totally uncompetitive. This lesson cost us dearly. I am sure nobody wants to see it repeated.

The biggest lesson learned from 'X-Men: The Last Stand' or 'X3' was that if you are going to tell a Phoenix story, tell the Phoenix story. Don't make it the subplot of the movie. Make it the plot of the movie.

My mother's no dummy. She taught the lesson about sacrificing for your kids, but also that if your kids hit it big, they better make it up to you for those years. She's gotten her sacrifices back with interest.

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