Top 50 Howard Gardner Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It’s not how smart you are that matters, what really counts is how you are smart.”

— Howard Gardner

Featured in: Smart Quotes, Intelligence Quotes

2. “If you think education is expensive, try estimating the cost of ignorance.”

— Howard Gardner

3. “Anything that is worth teaching can be presented in many different ways. These multiple ways can make use of our multiple intelligences.”

— Howard Gardner

Featured in: Education Quotes, Intelligence Quotes

4. “The biggest mistake of past centuries in teaching has been to treat all students as if they were variants of the same individual and thus to feel justified in teaching them all the same subjects the same way.”

— Howard Gardner

5. “The Goal of Education is to Help People Use Their Minds Better.”

— Howard Gardner

6. “You learn at your best when you have something you care about and can get pleasure in being engaged in.”

— Howard Gardner

7. “Intelligence is the ability to find and solve problems and create products of value in one’s own culture.”

— Howard Gardner

8. “We should spend less time ranking children and more time helping them to identify their natural competencies and gifts and cultivate these. There are hundreds and hundreds of ways to succeed and many, many different abilities that will help you get there.”

— Howard Gardner

9. “We’ve got to do fewer things in school. The greatest enemy of understanding is coverage... You’ve got to take enough time to get kids deeply involved in something so they can think about it in lots of different ways and apply it.”

— Howard Gardner

Featured in: School Quotes, Quotes About Kids

10. “Creativity begins with an affinity for something. It’s like falling in love.”

— Howard Gardner

11. “I want my children to understand the world, but not just because the world is fascinating and the human mind is curious. I want them to understand it so that they will be positioned to make it a better place.”

— Howard Gardner

12. “To ask “Where in your brain is intelligence?” is like asking “Where is the voice in the radio?””

— Howard Gardner

13. “Stories are the single most powerful tool in a leader’s toolkit.”

— Howard Gardner

14. “If you are not prepared to resign or be fired for what you believe in, then you are not a worker, let alone a professional. You are a slave.”

— Howard Gardner

15. “Well, if storytelling is important, then your narrative ability, or your ability to put into words or use what someone else has put into words effectively, is important too.”

— Howard Gardner

16. “Kids go to school and college and get through, but they don’t seem to really care about using their minds. School doesn’t have the kind of long term positive impact that it should.”

— Howard Gardner

17. “An individual understands a concept, skill, theory, or domain of knowledge to the extent that he or she can apply it appropriately in a new situation.”

— Howard Gardner

18. “If I know you’re very good in music, I can predict with just about zero accuracy whether you’re going to be good or bad in other things.”

— Howard Gardner

19. “I believe that the brain has evolved over millions of years to be responsive to different kinds of content in the world. Language content, musical content, spatial content, numerical content, etc.”

— Howard Gardner

20. “Teaching which ignores the realities of children will be rejected as surely as any graft which attempts to ignore the body’s immune system.”

— Howard Gardner

21. “The countries who do the best in international comparisons, whether it’s Finland or Japan, Denmark or Singapore, do well because they have professional teachers who are respected, and they also have family and community which support learning.”

— Howard Gardner

22. “Discover your difference – the asynchrony with which you have been blessed or cursed – and make the most of it.”

— Howard Gardner

23. “Hitler didn’t travel. Stalin didn’t travel. Saddam Hussein never traveled. They didn’t want to have their orthodoxy challenged.”

— Howard Gardner

24. “Education is at a turning point.”

— Howard Gardner

25. “The biggest communities in which young people now reside are online communities.”

— Howard Gardner

26. “Much of the material presented in schools strikes students as alien, if not pointless.”

— Howard Gardner

27. “The less a person understands his own feelings, the more he will fall prey to them. The less a person understands the feelings, the responses, and the behavior of others, the more likely he will interact inappropriately with them and therefore fail to secure his proper place in the world.”

— Howard Gardner

28. “Extraordinary individuals are distinguished less by their impressive “raw powers” than by their ability to identify their strengths and then to exploit them.”

— Howard Gardner

29. “We need to focus on the kind of human beings we want to have and the kind of society in which we want to live.”

— Howard Gardner

30. “I need to add that my work on multiple intelligences received a huge boost in 1995 when Daniel Goleman published his book on emotional intelligence. I am often confused with Dan. Initially, though Dan and I are longtime friends, this confusion irritated me.”

— Howard Gardner

31. “I align myself with almost all researchers in assuming that anything we do is a composite of whatever genetic limitations were given to us by our parents and whatever kinds of environmental opportunities are available.”

— Howard Gardner

32. “Jean Monnet: “I regard every defeat as an opportunity.”

— Howard Gardner

33. “He knows everything but he lacks inexperience.”

— Howard Gardner

34. “A lot of knowledge in any kind of an organization is what we call task knowledge. These are things that people who have been there a long time understand are important, but they may not know how to talk about them. It’s often called the culture of the organization.”

— Howard Gardner

35. “While I’ve worked on many topics and written many books, I have not abandoned my interest in multiple intelligences.”

— Howard Gardner

36. “Emile Zola was a poor student at his school at Aix. We are all so different largely because we all have different combinations of intelligences. If we recognize this, I think we will have at least a better chance of dealing appropriately with many problems that we face in the world.”

— Howard Gardner

37. “My belief in why America has been doing so well up to now is that we have been propelled by our immigrants and our encouragement of technical innovation and, indeed, creativity across the board.”

— Howard Gardner

38. “Part of the maturity of the sciences is an appreciation of which questions are best left to other disciplinary approaches.”

— Howard Gardner

39. “One must exploit the asynchronies that have befallen one, link them to a promising issue or domain, reframe frustrations as opportunities, and, above all, persevere.”

— Howard Gardner

40. “I am knowledgeable enough about the world of prizes to realize that there is a large degree of luck – both for the recognitions that you receive and those that you did not.”

— Howard Gardner

41. “No academic ever expects to be taken seriously by more than three other people, because really, we write for three people in our field.”

— Howard Gardner

42. “Extraordinary individuals fail often and sometimes dramatically. Rather than giving up, however, they are challenged to learn from their setbacks and to convert defeats into opportunities.”

— Howard Gardner

43. “Twenty-five years ago, the notion was you could create a general problem-solver software that could solve problems in many different domains. That just turned out to be totally wrong.”

— Howard Gardner

44. “It is important for leaders to know their stories; to get them straight; to communicate them effectively, particularly to those who are in the thrall of rival stories; and, above all, to embody in their lives the stories that they tell.”

— Howard Gardner

45. “Young children possess the ability to cut across the customary categories; to appreciate usually undiscerned links among realms, to respond effectively in a parallel manner to events which are usually categorized differently, and to capture these ori.”

— Howard Gardner

46. “By nature, I am not an optimist, though I try to act as if I am.”

— Howard Gardner

47. “Til 1983, I wrote primarily for other psychologists and expected that they would be the principal audience for my book.”

— Howard Gardner

48. “If we were to abandon concern for what is true, what is false, and what remains indeterminate, the world would be totally chaotic. Even those who deny the importance of truth, on the one hand, are quick to jump on anyone who is caught lying.”

— Howard Gardner

49. “I see Freud as energized by three motivations: pleasure in classifying, lust for problem solving, passion for system building.”

— Howard Gardner

50. “Extraordinary individuals stand out in the extent to which they reflect – often explicitly – on the events of their lives, large as well as small.”

— Howard Gardner