A comprehensive collection of quotes about teachers - something for every occasion, we hope!
A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
Henry Adams
The beginning is the most important part of the work.
Plato
I like a teacher who gives you something to take home to think about besides homework.
Author Unknown
The best teachers teach from the heart, not from the book.
Author Unknown
It's easy to make a buck. It's a lot tougher to make a difference.
Tom Brokaw
Teacher appreciation makes the world of education go around.
Helen Peters
What the teacher is, is more important than what he teaches.
Karl Menninger
We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.
Cynthia Ozick
There are two good reasons to be a teacher - July, and August!
Author Unknown
The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind.
Khalil Gibran
Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths pure theatre.
Gail Godwin
Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.
Tennyson
I am not a teacher, but an awakener.
Robert Frost
The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.
William A. Ward
Great teachers empathize with kids, respect them, and believe that each one has something special that can be built upon.
Ann Lieberman
It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.
Albert Einstein
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
Albert Einstein
A man should never be ashamed to own he has been wrong, which is but saying in other words that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.
Alexander Pope
There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking.
Alfred Korzybski
Education should turn out the pupil with something he knows well and something he can do well.
Alfred North Whitehead
The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influences.
Amos Alcott
Awaken peoples curiosity. It is enough to open minds, do not overload them. Put there just a spark.
Anatole France
Sometimes one man with courage is a majority.
Andrew Jackson
You cant direct the wind but you can adjust the sails.
Anonymous
A good education is like a savings account; the more you put into it, the richer you are.
Anonymous
Even the clearest water appears opaque at great depth.
Anonymous
I know but one freedom and that is the freedom of the mind.
Antoine de Saint Exupery
Let the potential artist in our children come to life that they may surmount industrial monotonies and pressures.
Barbara Morgan
There is no education like adversity.
Benjamin Disraeli
A man should first direct himself in the way he should go. Only then should he instruct others.
Buddha
Where there is an open mind there will always be a frontier.
Charles F. Kettering
By viewing the old we learn the new.
Chinese Proverb
I hear, and I forget. I see, and I remember. I do, and I understand.
Chinese Proverb
Give me a fish and I eat for a day. Teach me to fish and I eat for a lifetime.
Chinese Proverb
To think is to differ.
Clarence Darrow
When asked what learning was the most necessary, he said, Not to unlearn what you have learned!
Diogenes Laertius
Whoever neglects learning in his youth, loses the past and is dead to the future.
Euripides
You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him find it within himself.
Galielo Galilei
To do just the opposite is a form of imitation.
Georg Lichtenberg
To me the sole hope of human salvation lies in teaching.
George Bernard Shaw
Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.
George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans)
A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
George Santayana
People learn more quickly by doing something or seeing something done.
Gilbert Highet
Creative activity is not a superimposed, extraneous task against which the body, or brain protests, but an orchestration of ... joyful doing.
Gyorgy Kepes
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
HG Wells
Its what you learn after you know it all that counts.
Harry S. Truman
They know enough who know how to learn.
Henry Adams
Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young.
Henry Ford
I have been maturing as a teacher. New experiences bring new sensitivities and flexibility.
Howard Lester
A talent is formed in stillness, a character in the worlds torrent.
Johann W. Goethe
We think too much about effective methods of teaching and not enough about effective methods of learning.
John Carolus S.J.
No matter how good teaching may be, each student must take the responsibility for his own education.
John Carolus S.J.
The origin of thinking is some perplexity, confusion or doubt.
John Dewey
One can think effectively only when one is willing to endure suspense and to undergo the trouble of searching.
John Dewey
Education...is a painful, continual and difficult work to be done in kindness, by watching, by warning: by praise, but above all, by example.
John Ruskin
An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher.
John W. Gardner
Good teaching is more a giving of right questions than a giving of right answers.
Josef Albers
The job of an educator is to teach students to see the vitality in themselves.
Joseph Campbell
To teach is to learn twice.
Joseph Joubert
Men learn while they teach.
Lucius A. Seneca
The great pilot can sail even when his canvass is rent.
Lucius A. Seneca
The limits of your language are the limits of your world.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
What greater or better gift can we offer the republic than to teach and instruct our youth?
Marcus T. Cicero
I am not ashamed to confess that I am ignorant of what I do not know.
Marcus T. Cicero
If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.
Marcus T. Cicero
I have gathered a posy of other mens flowers and only the thread that bonds them is my own.
Michel Montaigne
Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle.
Michelangelo
There is more to life than increasing its speed.
Mohandes Gandhi
Opposites are not contradictory but complementary.
Niels Bohr
An artist is always out of step with the time. He has to be.
Orson Welles
Only the mind cannot be sent into exile.
Ovid
The important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle.
Pierre de Coubertin
An object in possession seldom contains the same charm that it had in pursuit.
Pliny the Younger
The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be ignited.
Plutarch
Every artist was at first an amateur.
Ralph W. Emerson
To arrive at the simple is difficult.
Rashid Elisha
Reinventing the wheel is a process.
Rashid Elisha
The chief cause of human errors is to be found in the prejudices picked up in childhood.
Rene Descartes
Education can be dangerous. It is very difficult to make it not dangerous. In fact, it is almost impossible.
Robert M. Hutchins
Praise, like gold and diamonds, owes its values only to its scarcity.
Samuel Johnson
The young dont know what age is, and the old forget what youth was.
Seumas MacManus
Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.
Sigmund Freud
When inspiration does not come to me, I go half way to meet it.
Sigmund Freud
One must learn by doing the thing; for though you think you know it, you have no certainty, until you try.
Sophocles
It is not often that we use language correctly; usually we use it incorrectly, though we understand each others meaning.
St. Augustine
Wonder is the desire for knowledge.
St. Thomas Aquinas
To define is to destroy, to suggest is to create.
Stephane Mallarme
No one can become really educated without having pursued some study in which he took no interest.
T.S. Eliot
Peoples behaviour makes sense if you think about it in terms of their goals, needs, and motives.
Thomas Mann
I put the relation of a fine teacher to a student just below the relation of a mother to a son.
Thomas Wolfe
The best way to know life is to love many things.
Vincent Van Gogh
Learning is never done without errors and defeat.
Vladimir Lenin
Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.
Vladimir Lenin
In the practical use of our intellect, forgetting is as important as remembering.
William James
Come forth into the light of things, let nature be your teacher.
William Wordsworth
God understood our thirst for knowledge, and our need to be led by someone wiser;
He needed a heart of compassion, of encouragement, and patience;
Someone who would accept the challenge regardless of the opposition;
Someone who could see potential and believe in the best in others . . .
So He made Teachers.
Author Unkown
The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.
Winston Churchill
You can observe a lot by just looking around.
Yogi Berra