What is it in you that brings you to a spiritual teacher in the first place? It's not the spirit in you, since that is already enlightened, and has no need to seek. No, it is the ego in you that brings you to a teacher.

I rise to taste the dawn, and find that love alone will shine today.

I went to Duke University in the medical track. And then I decided I wanted to do something more creative, so I switched to biochemistry at Nebraska.

Not to belittle what we do as actors, but my wife Helen is a teacher, and she makes a real difference to kids. So it's unusual to see people thinking of us as something special.

And I found out, the other part of it is that I found out and in my desire to life successfully, that baseball fit very well into my life. It's been a great teacher, trainer, mentor and you'll see what I mean in the next few minutes that I have to speak.

If you put down a list of jobs, doctor, lawyer, janitor, teacher or movie star, everybody would pick the movie star. And why? So you could lie around the pool, drink margaritas and send money to your parents. So that's what I did.

My teacher told me I'd never amount to anything. I left high school at 15, after one year. But my real teachers were all the people around me. And I was a good listener.

Often, when people ask me what I read as a young girl, I lie. Or, I should say, I lie by omission. I tell them about my brilliant fourth-grade teacher, Miss Artis, who assigned us 'Johnny Tremain' and 'Where the Red Fern Grows' and 'Tuck Everlasting,' all books that made an impression on me. And people nod in approval.

My mother worked in the white world, but I lived almost exclusively in a black world. I don't think I had ever seen a white teacher until I got to high school.

During my childhood, my father, a Southern Baptist minister, and my mother, a teacher, made sure I took educational trips to cities such as Washington, D.C., Williamsburg, Va., Philadelphia, and Boston to learn about America's history.

I was introduced to theater by a teacher that found me when I was in elementary school. She tested me for the Gifted and Talented program, started taking me to see the 'Nutcracker Ballet.' I got involved.

I had an acting teacher tell me once that if you're playing a car salesman, you don't want to be an OK car salesman, you want to play the best car salesman.

My mother had been a Latin teacher, and she was always very fascinated with words. She and I shared books and responded to them.

Every moral teacher or spiritual adviser gives injunctions about how to live wisely and well. But life is so complicated and full of uncertainty that rules seldom tell us quite what to do.

I never intended to be a teacher. I just like going to school and learning things.

Poetry and fiction have grieved for a century now over the loss of some vitality which they think they see in a past from which we are by now irrevocably alienated.

There's nothing like being a soldier for confidence or learning your limits or enduring utter humiliation.

The difference between the Parthenon and the World Trade Center, between a French wine glass and a German beer mug, between Bach and John Philip Sousa, between Sophocles and Shakespeare, between a bicycle and a horse, though explicable by historical moment, necessity, and destiny, is before all a difference of imagination.

Imagination is like the drunk man who lost his watch and must get drunk again to find it.

Of course, MIT was notable not just for its faculty but also for its students. And, facing such extremely bright kids as a rookie teacher was something like being thrown to the wolves.

What we mean by an outcome will naturally depend on the context. Thus, for a government charged with delivering public goods, an outcome will consist of the quantities provided of such goods as intercity highways, national defense and security, environmental protection, and public education together with the arrangements by which they are financed.

Leo Hurwicz is the father of mechanism design theory and has inspired much of my work, and Roger Myerson is an old friend and collaborator and a tremendous economist.

If budget planning requires gathering information from people who may not always have the incentive to disclose that information, then the principles of mechanism design can definitely be of use in such planning.

I went to the William Penn Charter School in Philadelphia, where I had a teacher really named Edward Shakespeare. He was a very influential figure in my childhood - I acted in high school a few times, but Mr. Shakespeare got me to lead in 'The Crucible.' I played John Proctor.

My father was my trainer, my teacher. He was closer to my sister in the sense that she adored him and he adored her. He was more like my pal. Because of the 13-year gap, I think by the time I came along, it wasn't a big deal. I wasn't spoilt or cherished, I was just put to work.

When I first came to Los Angeles, I was a teacher in Compton. I know how in need schools are around the country.

It's cool for me because I'm a director, but I'm also a teacher. I'm a lover of cinema, and I love working with people who are hungry and have the energy to really do better work.

My mother was an actress and my voice teacher, an incredible voice teacher. My biological father is an actor, and my stepfather, who raised me along with my mother, is a psychotherapist. I was always supported in creative ventures.

I think that I come off as, 'Nothing bothers me, I don't care! I'm funny and sassy.' But I'm deeply sensitive. Not only about myself but to others. Not to pat myself on the back, empathy is a quality I've cultivated over my life. It came naturally to me as a child.

I'm very grateful for social media. I think it has shown people my true nature, and through that has come a book deal, and I think it certainly contributes to people's view of me as a person with a sense of humor, which is only helpful in my industry.

If you lock me in the room with a piano teacher for a year I might be able to knock out a rendition of 'Roll Out The Barrel,' but will I ever be a concert pianist? No.

If I weren't an actor, I'd either be a teacher or a critic.

I remember I used to come up to my teacher crying because I couldn't read. She would say: 'You can do this. You just don't want to do this.'

Zombies are apocalyptic in nature. They belong to a class of monster that doesn't just hunt humans, but seeks to obliterate that entire human race.

When I started writing, there was nothing about zombies. It was all teen movies, which to me are scarier than zombies, but that's another story.

Zombies let us explore notions of the apocalypse - no water, food, medical care, the government imploding - while letting us sleep at night.

Some of my high school teachers did remind me that I had an excellent imagination when it came to making up excuses.

I remember my fourth grade teacher reading 'Charlotte's Web' and 'Stuart Little' to us - both, of course, by E. B. White. His stories were genuinely funny, thought provoking and full of irony and charm. He didn't condescend to his readers, which was why I liked his books, and why I wasn't a big reader of other children's' books.

Then I heard this genius teacher Stella Adler - I recommend you read anything you might find about her and if you have anyone interested in theatre, you get them one of her books.

As a teacher myself I've been in situations where parents come at you, and sometimes parents come across like the teacher doesn't want the best for their kid and it can be really, really hurtful.

So many women keep their anger inside and let it build until they explode and then people blow them off again.

Teacher unions are an interest group that acts in defense of their own interests, which means the union bosses' interests, not the members.

I was all-state in four sports in New Jersey, but sometimes I couldn't get served at a restaurant two blocks from my high school. There were no job opportunities then... the only thing a black youth could aspire to be was a bellboy or a pullman or an elevator operator, or, maybe, a teacher. There was a time when all we had was black baseball.

Oscar Charleston was the Willie Mays of his day. Nobody ever played center field better than Willie Mays. Suppose they had never given Willie a chance, and we said that, would anybody believe there was a kid in Alabama who was that good? Or there was a black guy in Atlanta who might break Babe Ruth's home run record? No.

Encouragement from my high school teacher Patty Hart said 'you need to focus and theater might be your route out of here.' I created the program, went to college and graduate school and now here I am.

I was fantastically well versed by the time I left school. I had a teacher who put 'A Clockwork Orange' my way, and 'Catcher in the Rye.'

Americanism demands loyalty to the teacher and respect for his lesson.

Personally, I had a great education. My mum was a trained teacher, a Montessori teacher, and I know that I could not have written 'Eragon' if I had gone into a public school system because I would have just been too busy attending classes and doing homework - I wouldn't have had the time to write.

As an undergraduate, I took two writing workshops taught by Elizabeth Hardwick. She was certainly a major influence, though more as a writer I greatly admired than as a teacher. As for other writers, I think it's safe to say that my work has been and continues to be influenced to one degree or another by every writer whose work I love and admire.

I can't explain something I saw on holiday on Holy Island when I was about nine years old, but do you know what, it could have been my PE teacher dressed in a monk's habit. I have no idea. I'm not a ghost person... it doesn't mean there aren't unexplained things; I just don't think they're ghosts.