Teacher Quotes

Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.

Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.

Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.

I am not a teacher, but an awakener.

Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.

A mind is like a parachute. It doesn't work if it is not open.

You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.

A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.

The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.

Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering its a feather bed.

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

Love is a better teacher than duty.

Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.

The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.

Words have a magical power. They can bring either the greatest happiness or deepest despair; they can transfer knowledge from teacher to student; words enable the orator to sway his audience and dictate its decisions. Words are capable of arousing the strongest emotions and prompting all men's actions.

The greatest sign of success for a teacher... is to be able to say, 'The children are now working as if I did not exist.'

To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil's soul.

It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it.

True teachers are those who use themselves as bridges over which they invite their students to cross; then, having facilitated their crossing, joyfully collapse, encouraging them to create theirown.

Anyone who does anything to help a child in his life is a hero to me.

I am indebted to my father for living, but to my teacher for living well.

There are no incurable diseases — only the lack of will. There are no worthless herbs — only the lack of knowledge.

Education is the key to unlock the golden door of freedom.

Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker. Failure is delay, not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead end. Failure is something we can avoid only by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.

The role of the teacher is to create the conditions for invention rather than provide ready-made knowledge.

Life is like a confused teacher...first she gives the test and then teaches the lesson

When I was in school the teachers told me practice makes perfect; then they told me nobody's perfect so I stopped practicing.

It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.

Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.

If you take responsibility for yourself you will develop a hunger to accomplish your dreams.

When asked "What do we need to learn this for?" any high-school teacher can confidently answer that, regardless of the subject, the knowledge will come in handy once the student hits middle age and starts working crossword puzzles in order to stave off the terrible loneliness.

If we teach today's students as we taught yesterday's, we rob them of tomorrow.

Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.

The years teach much which the days never know.

What the teacher is, is more important than what he teaches.

Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted... but to weigh and consider.

Jesus does not give recipes that show the way to God as other teachers of religion do. He is himself the way.

I like a teacher who gives you something to take home to think about besides homework.

While parents possess the original key to their offspring's experience, teachers have a spare key. They, too, can open or close the minds and hearts of children.

Let me be a free man, free to travel, free to stop, free to work, free to trade where I choose, free to choose my own teachers, free to follow the religion of my fathers, free to talk, think and act for myself — and I will obey every law or submit to the penalty.

Those who have no record of what their forebears have accomplished lose the inspiration which comes from the teaching of biography and history.

Only those who look with the eyes of children can lose themselves in the object of their wonder.

I'm a teacher. A teacher is someone who leads. There is no magic here. I do not walk on water. I do not part the sea. I just love children.

Don't try to fix the students, fix ourselves first. The good teacher makes the poor student good and the good student superior. When our students fail, we, as teachers, too, have failed.

I ended up dropping out of high school. I'm a high school dropout, which I'm not proud to say, ... I had some teachers that I still think of fondly and were amazing to me. But I had other teachers who said, 'You know what? This dream of yours is a hobby. When are you going to give it up?' I had teachers who I could tell didn't want to be there. And I just couldn't get inspired by someone who didn't want to be there

The high-school English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided opportunity, through the best writing of the past, to come, in time, to an understanding of the best writing of the present. He will teach literature, not social studies or little lessons in democracy or the customs of many lands. And if the student finds that this is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.

When I approach a child, he inspires in me two sentiments; tenderness for what he is, and respect for what he may become.

Teaching is more difficult than learning because what teaching calls for is this: to let learn. The real teacher, in fact, lets nothing else be learned than learning. His conduct, therefore, often produces the impression that we properly learn nothing from him, if by "learning" we now suddenly understand merely the procurement of useful information.

No printed word, nor spoken plea can teach young minds what they should be. Not all the books on all the shelves - but what the teachers are themselves.

Retirement is not in my vocabulary. They aren't going to get rid of me that way.

As for myself, I always willingly acknowledge my own self as the principal cause of every good and of every evil which may befall me; therefore I have always found myself capable of being my own pupil, and ready to love my teacher.

Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some of us more than we can ever learn from books.

Learning, while at school, that the charge for the education of girls was the same as that for boys, and that, when they became teachers, women received only half as much as men for their services, the injustice of this distinction was so apparent.

Do you know that moment when you paint a landscape as a child and, when you’re maybe under seven or something, the sky is just a blue stripe across the top of the paper? And then there’s that somewhat disappointing moment when the teacher tells you that the sky actually comes down in amongst all the branches. And it’s like life changes at that moment and becomes much more complicated and a little bit more boring, as it’s rather tedious to fill in the branches…

I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing than to teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.

Those qualities that separate us are often ridiculed by others or criticized by teachers. Because of these judgments, we might see our strengths as disabilities and try to work around them in order to fit in. But anything that is peculiar to our makeup is precisely what we must pay the deepest attention to and lean on in our rise to mastery.

You don't have to teach people how to be human. You have to teach them how to stop being inhuman.

Educators remind us that what counts in a classroom is not what the teacher teaches; it’s what the learner learns.

Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton was the one who asked why.

Gie me ae spark o' Nature's fire, That's a' the learning I desire.

In a completely rational society, the best of us would aspire to be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for something less, because passing civilization along from one generation to the next ought to be the highest honor and the highest responsibility anyone could have.

Mama was my greatest teacher, a teacher of compassion, love and fearlessness. If love is sweet as a flower, then my mother is that sweet flower of love.

There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.

Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.

A good teacher must be able to put himself in the place of those who find learning hard.

Although teachers do care and do work very, very hard, the institution is psychopathic-it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to a different cell where he must memorize that humans and monkeys derive from a common ancestor.

When you wish to instruct, be brief; that men's [children's] minds take in quickly what you say, learn its lesson, and retain it faithfully. Every word that is unnecessary only pours over the side of a brimming mind.

Wine can be a better teacher than ink, and banter is often better than books

Can teachers successfully educate children to think for themselves if teachers are not treated as professionals who think for themselves?

What is a teacher? I'll tell you: it isn't someone who teaches something, but someone who inspires the student to give of her best in order to discover what she already knows.

The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives.

We expect teachers to handle teenage pregnancy, substance abuse, and the failings of the family. Then we expect them to educate our children.

He who laughs most, learns best.

I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.

Housework is a breeze. Cooking is a pleasant diversion. Putting up a retaining wall is a lark. But teaching is like climbing a mountain.

It's okay to make mistakes. Mistakes are our teachers — they help us to learn.

Your best teacher is the person offering you your greatest challenge.

The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery.

There is no education like adversity.

The truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable.

As a student I learned from wonderful teachers and ever since then I've thought everyone is a teacher.

The most important role models should and could be parents and teachers. But that said, once you're a teenager you've probably gotten as much of an example from your parents as you're going to.

One good teacher in a lifetime may sometimes change a delinquent into a solid citizen.

the calling of the teacher. There is no craft more privileged. To awaken in another human being powers, dreams beyond one's own; to induce in others a love for that which one loves; to make of one's inward present their future; that is a threefold adventure like no other.

He suddenly understood the message of so many spiritual teachers that the only revolution that can work is the inner transformation of every human being.

My father was my teacher. But most importantly he was a great dad.

We learn by example and by direct experience because there are real limits to the adequacy of verbal instruction.

Retirement at sixty-five is ridiculous. When I was sixty-five I still had pimples.

In all the works on pedagogy that ever I read — and they have been many, big, and heavy — I don't remember that any one has advocated a system of teaching by practical jokes, mostly cruel. That, however, describes the method of our great teacher, Experience.

That is the difference between good teachers and great teachers: good teachers make the best of a pupil's means; great teachers foresee a pupil's ends.

No matter what accomplishments you make, somebody helped you.

A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering on cold iron.

The dream begins with a teacher who believes in you, who tugs and pushes and leads you to the next plateau, sometimes poking you with a sharp stick called 'truth'.

Everyone is my teacher. Some I seek. Some I subconsciously attract. Often I learn simply by observing others. Some may be completely unaware that I'm learning from them, yet I bow deeply in gratitude.

Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.

Who dares to teach must never cease to learn.

If you would thoroughly know anything, teach it to others.

Every time I asked a question, that magnificent teacher, instead of giving the answer, showed me how to find it. She taught me to organise my thoughts, to do research, to read and listen, to seek alternatives, to resolve old problems with new solutions, to argue logically. Above all, she taught me not to believe anything blindly, to doubt, and to question even what seemed irrefutably true, such as man's superiority over woman, or one race or social class over another.

You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid, monotonous work, chances are you'll end up boring, stupid, and monotonous.

Education is a shared commitment between dedicated teachers, motivated students and enthusiastic parents with high expectations.