Student Quotes

If you know that I am genius Then know that you made me genius Everyone don't accept me as genius Because they aren't genius to belief me as genius

~ Hasil Paudyal

All subjects are the same. I memorize notes for a test, spew it, ace it, then forget it. What makes this scary for the future of our country is that I'm in the tip-top percentile on every standardized test. I'm a model student with a very crappy attitude about learning.

~ Megan Mccafferty

I've always been a student of this life, not a teacher. More of a sponge than a fountain.

~ Louis Chunovic

If you wanted to be the best then you had to swallow your pride and become a student of the game first.

~ Jon Osborne

No one can do the learning for you.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

To become a better you, keep doing what you have been doing right and learn to correct what you have been doing wrongly.

~ Israelmore Ayivor

There is no more valuable skill than studentship. The farther we go down one area of human understanding, the more we see the corollaries that all activities share. Everything I do for the rest of my life, all the skills I acquire, will be made possible because of my time spent on the mats. It has revealed a symbiosis between all things that I never knew existed.

~ Chris Matakas

It would do me well to realize that the path that has led me to where I am was mapped by those who taught me and paved by what they taught me. Therefore, if God is not my teacher and His truth is not my topic I will find myself where I don’t want to be, having trod a path I didn’t want to take.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

I’ll always be a student, because I think of music as never ending.

~ Lenny Breau

A good listener is one who always pays attention, not to gain, but to learn.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

Life is here to teach us, so be a good student. Mistakes are the only way we learn.

~ Dannika Dark

We should keep learning so long as we have grace and breathe.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Every mistake is a new learning adventure.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Jiu Jitsu gives each of us something that no other sport can. We have the opportunity to become truly great regardless of what circumstance fate has handed us. We have complete freedom and responsibility to achieve whatever level of mastery we wish.

~ Chris Matakas

We seek to understand Jiu Jitsu as a vehicle to understand ourselves. We have different explicit goals, from getting in shape, learning self-defense or competition, but tacitly we all seek mastery of ourselves.

~ Chris Matakas

Jiu Jitsu is meant to serve us, not the other way around. It is meant to make you more of whatever it is you already are. It is meant to separate the wheat from the chaff. It is meant to bring to conscious attention all that once went unseen. It is meant to make you more loving. It is meant to make you more wise, but less certain. It is meant to make us humble, yet supremely confident. It is meant to remind us of our frailty while simultaneously making us feel invincible.

~ Chris Matakas

If Jiu Jitsu does not make you a better father, son, mother, daughter, wife or husband, you are missing the point. If Jiu Jitsu does not leave you viewing strangers in a kinder light, you are missing the point. If you are not better equipped to deal with the vicissitudes of life due to your training, then you are not really training.

~ Chris Matakas

Jiu Jitsu has shown me that we are not confined to the lot which we inherit. We are not bound to these fetters eternally. They are temporal. We can transcend them should we sincerely choose to. Sincere effort is in fact the rarest virtue among man.

~ Chris Matakas

I wanted to get to the most essential aspect of my being, and look around for a while. I wanted to explore what I am in my most basic self. I wanted to chip away at all of the nonsense I have acquired through my twenty-nine years on this earth. I wanted to find truth. Thoreau went to the woods. I went to the mats. Jiu Jitsu has peeled the veil of daily life, and has shown me what lies beyond the curtain. We willingly accept the chains that circumstance forces upon us, and we grow to find comfort in them. We attach various fetters of day-to-day living to our being, and we do so with a smile. We accept these constraints for they come in the way of comfort. We accept conformity for it appears the path of least resistance. We strive toward the middle, and we run from ourselves.

~ Chris Matakas

Thoreau went to the woods. I went to the mats.

~ Chris Matakas

We call it training. Not because we are training for Jiu Jitsu. We are training for life.

~ Chris Matakas

I have seen far by seeing through the lens of Jiu Jitsu. I have exchanged a great deal of physical health for these insights, and these were trades worth making. My efforts were worth the return. I have sacrificed much in the name of this craft. Not for trophies or belts or prestige. For these fall away like dust. I pursued this art so fervently because it was not actually Jiu Jitsu I pursued. It was myself.

~ Chris Matakas

Do not seek victory, for victory in itself will not serve you. Seek to understand what made the victory possible.

~ Chris Matakas

An arm bar in a vacuum is worthless. It is the realization of the truths which constitute that arm bar that is the real treasure we seek.

~ Chris Matakas

The infinitude of Jiu Jitsu allows for the infinitude of the types of practitioners. There exists a game for each and every one of us which is specifically possible within the confines of our particular skill set.

~ Chris Matakas

We must keep on learning for self-development.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

For the sincere student, it mustn't be enough to simply understand Jiu Jitsu. We must seek to understand ourselves.

~ Chris Matakas

I believe that which you study is only matched in importance by the sincerity with which you approach it.

~ Chris Matakas

There is no concrete way to play Jiu Jitsu, and this is why so many different types of people find joy in it.

~ Chris Matakas

Always maintain the attitude of a student. When a person thinks they have finished learning, that is when bitterness and disappointment can set in, as that person will wake up everyday wondering when someone is going to throw a parade in their honour for being so smart.

~ Nick Offerman

Life is school.Be a student for life.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Learning and knowing something is cool, but superb knowledge comes when you leave your books and become the inner world's friend.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

I don't want to be like my mentor or inspiration, I can do better. Don't get me wrong, I need them to motivate and inspire me but my potential can never be like theirs.

~ Unarine Ramaru

I've come to learn, and to establish mine in that same place i come from. Staying in my school place makes me always a student.

~ Sol Michael

The problem with all students, he said, is that they inevitably stop somewhere. They hear an idea and they hold on to it until it becomes dead; they want to flatter themselves that they know the truth. But true Zen never stops, never congeals into such truths. That is why everyone must constantly be pushed to the abyss, starting over and feeling their utter worthlessness as a student. Without suffering and doubts, the mind will come to rest on clichés and stay there, until the spirit dies as well. Not even enlightenment is enough. You must continually start over and challenge yourself.

~ Robert Greene

No policeman had ever arrested anyone for over-reading; but ignorance prosecutes those who under-read. You begin to stop growing on the day you stop learning, so why not keep learning and keep growing!

~ Israelmore Ayivor

Do not trust a teacher that is unwilling to learn.

~ T.f. Hodge

I touched his hand, carefully. Not too intimate, but not some half-assed there-there pat, either. Would he understand? Usually the thought process for a seventeen-year-old boy went girl touching me>omg>boner.

~ Leah Raeder

Always work enthusiastically.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Education is acquisition of intellectual knowledge to be what we ought to be.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita