Top 60 William Deresiewicz Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You won’t be able to recognize the things you really care about until you have released your grip on all the things that you’ve been taught to care about.”

— William Deresiewicz

2. “People’s stories are the most personal thing they have, and paying attention to those stories is just about the most important thing you can do for them.”

— William Deresiewicz

3. “It’s hard to build your soul when everyone around you is trying to sell theirs.”

— William Deresiewicz

4. “Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes be useful. Developing your own ideas. In short, thinking for yourself.”

— William Deresiewicz

5. “Depression means self-loathing, self-disgust, and the kind of emotional numbness that feels like psychic death.”

— William Deresiewicz

6. “If you want others to follow, learn to be alone with your thoughts.”

— William Deresiewicz

7. “We proceed by doubt, by trial and error, by resisting the impulse to lunge after certainty.”

— William Deresiewicz

8. “Not every ten-percenter is an excellent sheep, but a sufficient number are for you to think very carefully before deciding to surround yourself with them. Kids at less prestigious schools are apt to be more interesting, more curious, more open, more appreciative of what they’re getting, and far less entitled and competitive. They tend to act like peers instead of rivals.”

— William Deresiewicz

9. “When a student at Pomona told me that she’d love to have a chance to think about the things she’s studying, only she doesn’t have the time, I asked her if she had ever considered not trying to get an A in every class. She looked at me as if I had made an indecent suggestion.”

— William Deresiewicz

10. “The system manufactures students who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose: trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they’re doing but with no idea why they’re doing it. In.”

— William Deresiewicz

11. “College, after all, as those who like to denigrate it often say, is “not the real world.” But that is precisely its strength. College is an opportunity to stand outside the world for a few years, between the orthodoxy of your family and the exigencies of career, and contemplate things from a distance.”

— William Deresiewicz

12. “So it is with the drug of praise upon which these children are trained to depend: the praise that is the sign of parental love, for the achievement that is the condition of that love. Every A is a fix that temporarily quells the anxiety of failure, the terror of falling short.”

— William Deresiewicz

13. “The problem is that students have been taught that that is all that education is: doing your homework, getting the answers, acing the test. Nothing in their training has endowed them with the sense that something larger is at stake. They’ve learned to “be a student,” not to use their minds.”

— William Deresiewicz

14. “We are not teaching to the test; we are living to it.”

— William Deresiewicz

15. “The Bible doesn’t say that money is the root of all evil; it says that love of money is.”

— William Deresiewicz

16. “But it is not the job of truth to make us feel good. It is the job of truth to be true, and it is our job to deal with it.”

— William Deresiewicz

17. “No real excellence, personal or social, artistic, philosophical, scientific, or moral, can arise without solitude.”

— William Deresiewicz

18. “Here is the rule of thumb: if you aren’t giving anything up, it isn’t moral and it isn’t courage. Stumbles, sacrifices, inner struggle, false starts and wrong turns, conflict with parents and peers-these are some of the signs of the genuine article The way you know it’s real is if it hurts.”

— William Deresiewicz

19. “If you’re oblivious to other people, chances are pretty good that you’re going to hurt them.”

— William Deresiewicz

20. “Moral courage can be lonely indeed. People don’t mind being trapped, as long as no one else is free. But stage a break, and everybody else begins to panic.”

— William Deresiewicz

21. “A real reader creates her own canon, for it consists precisely of those books that she has used to create herself.”

— William Deresiewicz

22. “You want to make it to the top? There is no top. However high you climb, there is always somebody above you. Mailer wanted to be Hemingway, Hemingway wanted to be Joyce, and Joyce was painfully aware he’d never be another Shakespeare.”

— William Deresiewicz

23. “People don’t mind being in prison as long as no one else is free. But stage a jailbreak, and everybody else freaks out.”

— William Deresiewicz

24. “Growing up elite means learning to value yourself in terms of the measures of success that mark your progress into and through the elite:.”

— William Deresiewicz

25. “Don’t try to figure out what you want to do with the rest of your life. You are going to be a very different person in two or three years, and that person will have his own ideas. All you can really figure out is what you want to do right now.”

— William Deresiewicz

26. “But the compulsive overachievement of today’s elite college students – the sense that they need to keep running as fast as they can – is not the only thing that keeps them from forming the deeper relationships that might relieve their anguish. Something more insidious is operating, too: a resistance to vulnerability, a fear of looking like the only one who isn’t capable of handling the pressure.”

— William Deresiewicz

27. “A man never rises so high as when he knows not whither he is going.” The desire to eliminate uncertainty eliminates life.”

— William Deresiewicz

28. “Jane Austen’s life may have seemed uneventful compared to her aunt’s or cousin’s or brothers’, or indeed, compared to just about anyone’s. Her genius began with the recognition that such lives as hers were very eventful indeed – that every life is eventful, if only you know how to look at it. She did not think that her existence was quiet or trivial or boring; she thought it was delightful and enthralling, and she wanted us to see that our own are, too.”

— William Deresiewicz

29. “The purpose of life becomes the accumulation of gold stars. Hence the relentless extracurricular busyness, the neglect of learning as an end in itself, the inability to imagine doing something that you can’t put on your resume. Hence the constant sense of competition.”

— William Deresiewicz

30. “For that is one of the greatest curses of the high-achieving mentality: the envy that it forces on you – the desperation, not simply to be loved, but to be loved, as Auden says, alone.”

— William Deresiewicz

31. “Practical utility, however, is not the ultimate purpose of a liberal arts education. Its ultimate purpose is to help you learn to reflect in the widest and deepest sense, beyond the requirements of work and career: for the sake of citizenship, for the sake of living well with others, above all, for the sake of building a self that is strong and creative and free.”

— William Deresiewicz

32. “In The Pale King, David Foster Wallace has his narrator remark that “it was a little bit like a for-profit company, my family, in that you were pretty much only as good as your last sales quarter.”

— William Deresiewicz

33. “Autonomy, adventure, imagination: entrepreneurshi p comprehends all this and more for us. The characteristic art form of our age may be the business plan.”

— William Deresiewicz

34. “As the sociologist Mitchell L. Stevens has put it, “affluent families fashion an entire way of life organized around the production of measurable virtue in children.” Measurable, here, means capable of showing up on a college application. We are not teaching to the test; we’re living to it.”

— William Deresiewicz

35. “Austen, I realized, had not been writing about everyday things because she couldn’t think of anything else to talk about. She had been writing about them because she wanted to show how important they really are.”

— William Deresiewicz

36. “I can tell you right now where you’re going to end up: somewhere in the middle, with the rest of us. Does it really matter exactly where? People get to places like Yale and think that they’ve “arrived,” only to discover that there are still other places to arrive at, and other places after that, and so on and so forth in an infinite recession, like the vista in a double mirror.”

— William Deresiewicz

37. “Kids at less prestigious schools are apt to be more interesting, more curious, more open, more appreciative of what they are getting, and far less entitled and competitive. They tend to act like peers instead of rivals.”

— William Deresiewicz

38. “I have heard from many high-achieving students who have asked me whether it wasn’t possible to be invested both in learning for its own sake and in being at the top. No, I’ve said, it isn’t possible. Learning for its own sake means exactly what it says: learning is the only reason that you’re doing it, because learning is what matters.”

— William Deresiewicz

39. “I believe librarians, like English teachers, sit at the right hand of God.”

— William Deresiewicz

40. “Posting information is like pornography, a slick, impersonal exhibition.”

— William Deresiewicz

41. “There is by now a robust literature on the nature of happiness, and it converges on a pair of observations. Beyond a moderate level of material comfort, happiness consists of two things: feeling connected to others and engaging in meaningful work. These are hardly new ideas. Aristotle, who said that man is a social animal, also.”

— William Deresiewicz

42. “I sentimenti sono anche il modo primo di conoscere un romanzo; e i romanzi sono il terreno di prova per conoscere il mondo, santuari dell’immaginazione dove affinare e mettere alla prova i nostri valori, le nostre scelte. I sentimenti sono lo strumento di lavoro dei romanzieri, i colori della loro tavolozza.”

— William Deresiewicz

43. “When people say that students at elite schools have a sense of entitlement, that is what they are referring to: the belief that you deserve more than other people because your SAT scores are higher. Of course, your SAT scores are higher because you have already gotten more than other people.”

— William Deresiewicz

44. “Of course her daughter got into Harvard: that is exactly the kind of parenting the system rewards. That’s exactly what is wrong with it.”

— William Deresiewicz

45. “Online instruction isn’t just conducted on the Web; it embodies an idea of knowledge that’s been shaped by the Web – by Google, by Wikipedia – a confusion of information with understanding.”

— William Deresiewicz

46. “The very fact that we still have majors at all in this country represents a compromise between the ideals of depth and breadth –.”

— William Deresiewicz

47. “By the time they finish high school – after years of learning how to please their teachers and coaches, not to mention schmoozing with their parents’ friends – elite students have become accomplished adult-wranglers.”

— William Deresiewicz

48. “We inherited a strong and flourishing country, and instead of making the investments – that is, the sacrifices – to maintain it, we chose to suck it dry and stick our children with the bill. If you want to see who is to blame for student debt, just look in the mirror. And if parents find themselves supporting kids beyond their college years, that is only, in the aggregate, a form of compensatory justice: the intergenerational transfer of wealth that should have been effected through taxation.”

— William Deresiewicz

49. “Reflection, again, should complement action, not gaze at its navel.”

— William Deresiewicz

50. “With no larger educational ideals to shape the undergraduate experience,” Lewis says, “decisions affecting students are calculated to satisfy their immediate demands.” Instead of humanities, students are getting amenities.”

— William Deresiewicz