Top 60 William Glasser Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The ultimate use of power is to empower others.”

— William Glasser

2. “We almost always have choices, and the better the choice, the more we will be in control of our lives.”

— William Glasser

3. “We are driven by five genetic needs: survival, love and belonging, power, freedom, and fun.”

— William Glasser

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4. “It is almost impossible for anyone, even the most ineffective among us, to continue to choose misery after becoming aware that it is a choice.”

— William Glasser

5. “Education is the process in which we discover that learning adds quality to our lives. Learning must be experienced.”

— William Glasser

6. “The day we stop playing will be the day we stop learning.”

— William Glasser

7. “What we get, and all we ever get, from the outside is information; how we choose to act on this information is up to us.”

— William Glasser

8. “If you want to change attitudes, start with a change in behavior. In other words, begin to act the part, as well as you can, of the person you would rather be, the person you most want to become. Gradually, the old, fearful person will fade away.”

— William Glasser

9. “What happened in the past that was painful has a great deal to do with what we are today, but revisiting this painful past can contribute little or nothing to what we need to do now.”

— William Glasser

10. “Good or bad, everything we do is our best choice at that moment.”

— William Glasser

11. “It is no kindness to treat unhappy people as helpless, hopeless, or inadequate, no matter what has happened to them. Kindness is having faith in the truth and that people can handle it and use it for their benefit. True compassion is helping people help themselves.”

— William Glasser

12. “Caring for but never trying to own may be a further way to define friendship.”

— William Glasser

13. “If everyone could learn that what is right for me does not make it right for anyone else, the world would be a much happier place.”

— William Glasser

14. “We may be up against a stone wall, but we don’t have to bloody our heads against it unless we choose to.”

— William Glasser

15. “Using no control and using humor will build a relationship and make a dent to where the client puts the counselor in their quality world and then begins to relate and seek out the counselor. Effective therapy begins with the acceptance of the therapist into the client’s quality world.”

— William Glasser

16. “Choice Theory explains that, for all practical purposes, we choose everything we do.”

— William Glasser

17. “If you look around at your family and friends, you will see that the happiest people are the ones who don’t pretend to know what’s right for others and don’t try to control anyone but themselves.”

— William Glasser

18. “The faster you go, the more students you leave behind. It doesn’t matter how much or how fast you teach. The true measure is how much students have learned.”

— William Glasser

19. “Too many of us fail to fulfill our needs because we say no rather than yes, yes when we should say no.”

— William Glasser

20. “Effective teaching may be the hardest job there is.”

— William Glasser

21. “No human being will work hard at anything unless they believe that they are working for competence.”

— William Glasser

22. “Without pay, no human being will work up to their ability if he or she is not cared for and respected.”

— William Glasser

23. “We can teach a lot of things, but if the teacher can’t relate by talking to a group of friendly students, he’ll never be a competent teacher.”

— William Glasser

24. “Choice theory explains that, for all practical purposes, we choose everything we do, including the misery we feel. Other people can neither make us miserable nor make us happy. All we can get from them or give to them is information. But by itself, information cannot make us do or feel anything. It goes into our brains, where we process it and then decide what to do.”

— William Glasser

25. “No one is so inadequate that he can’t help himself to some degree. Not only can he, but he must; nothing else will work.”

— William Glasser

26. “What students lack in school is an intellectual relationship or conversation with the teacher.”

— William Glasser

27. “Perhaps the beginning of gaining strength is becoming aware of the bad choices you make. Just knowing that you choose much of your misery yourself will help you get the idea that it may be worth trying to make a better choice. If you believe your misery just happens to you and you have no control over it, then you will never get much more than what you are getting now from life.”

— William Glasser

28. “While it is possible that we do know what’s right for others, unless they agree with us, trying to force this knowledge on them is usually a disaster.”

— William Glasser

29. “In a Glasser Quality School there is no such thing as a closed book test. Students are told to get out their notes and open their books. There is no such thing as being forbidden to ask the teacher or another student for help.”

— William Glasser

30. “This is at the heart of all good education, where the teacher asks students to think and engages them in encouraging dialogues, constantly checking for understanding and growth.”

— William Glasser

31. “To counter the avoidance of intellectual challenge and responsibility, we must reduce the domination of certainty in education.”

— William Glasser

32. “Since the obvious purpose of pain, misery, and suffering is to tell you something is wrong, fix it, change it, reform, improve, get help; if you don’t have the strength to do it, you are stuck with the pain. This is not to say that people with strength don’t suffer – they do. They have no immunity to life, but when they feel pain, they get moving or at least they try to do something, and the more strength they have the more successful their efforts are.”

— William Glasser

33. “To be depressed or neurotic is passive. It happened to us; we are its victim, and we have no control over it.”

— William Glasser

34. “A friend of mine, a dedicated golfer, shot a hole in one playing by himself. Disaster.”

— William Glasser

35. “There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.”

— William Glasser

36. “Weak people carry a torch for life, they “enjoy” wallowing in their misery. They do so partly in the hope that someone will feel sorry for them and solve their problems.”

— William Glasser

37. “To achieve and maintain the relationships we need, we must stop choosing to coerce, force, compel, punish, reward, manipulate, boss, motivate, criticize, blame, complain, nag, badger, rank, rate, and withdraw. We must replace these destructive behaviors with choosing to care, listen, support, negotiate, encourage, love, befriend, trust, accept, welcome, and esteem. These.”

— William Glasser

38. “Told that the passing grade is a B or competence and that we will help you to get there, students do competent work. The lowest passing grade in the real world is competence. Why do schools accept so much less?”

— William Glasser

39. “Unlike the weak, the strong neither give up nor are driven by pain into rash or stupid behavior. They don’t like pain any more than anyone else, but they are not willing to settle for short-term relief if it means reducing their options later. They don’t rob Peter to pay Paul, they face reality now.”

— William Glasser

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40. “They have this big book called the ‘DSM-IV,’ you know, that is supposedly written about crazy people, but I think it is a book that is written by crazy people!”

— William Glasser

41. “If you improve education by teaching for competence, eliminating schooling, and connecting with students, the test scores will improve.”

— William Glasser

42. “Everybody needs one essential friend.”

— William Glasser

43. “Today much of what we call education is merely knowledge gathering and remembering. Problem solving and thinking, never strong parts of our educational system, have been downgraded in all but a few scientific subjects.”

— William Glasser

Featured in: Strong Quotes

44. “Kids aren’t stupid; we figure things out. We don’t want to wreck our lives any more than you do. As long as we’re loved, most of us come out okay.”

— William Glasser

45. “The Compassionate Classroom is a fabulous book! If teachers will read it, they can transform their classrooms.”

— William Glasser

46. “It takes strength, however, to be warm, firm, humorous, and caring and still do what we know we ought to do. Our lives would be much better if we never said, “The hell with it!”

— William Glasser

47. “We can pay teachers a hundred thousand dollars a year, and we’ll do nothing to improve our schools as long as we keep the A, B, C, D, F grading system.”

— William Glasser

48. “There is plenty of competition in a Glasser Quality School in that there is winning but no losing.”

— William Glasser

49. “All of us know happily married couples, solid families, and people who are well satisfied with their jobs. But when asked to explain their happiness, many hesitate. They aren’t sure. Some say, We work hard to get along with each other, but others shrug and say, Maybe luck has a lot to do with it. What they never say is, We have given up trying to control each other. They don’t realize that they may be following a different theory, that inadvertently they have discovered choice theory.”

— William Glasser

50. “Since there will be no one left to talk peace after the next war, it makes good sense to break with tradition and hold the peace conference first.”

— William Glasser