Below you will find several famous quotations related to teaching and learning. Click on the links below to go to the collection of quotations on the theme of your choice. Alternatively, you may choose to surf through the whole list. If you know of other good materials for our collection here, please e-mail Deborah Vess.
On the Influence of Teachers | On the Importance of Caring | On Teachers as Lifelong Learners | On Excellence in Teaching | On Learning | On Education
"The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn." ~Cicero
"Teaching is truth mediated by personality." ~Phyllis Brooks
"The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence. He inspires self-distrust. He guides their eyes from himself to the spirit that quickens him. He will have no disciple." ~Amos Bronson Alcott
"A teacher's purpose is not to create students in his own image, but to develop students who can create their own image." ~Author Unknown
"What the teacher is, is more important than what he teaches." ~Karl Menninger
"A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops." ~Henry Adams
"A good teacher is better than a spectacular teacher. Otherwise the teacher outshines the teachings." ~The Tao of Teaching
"Teaching is leaving a vestige of oneself in the development of another. And surely the student is a bank where you can deposit your most precious treasures." ~Eugene P. Bertin
"An understanding heart is everything in a teacher, and cannot be esteemed highly enough. One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feeling. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child." ~Carl Jung
"You can pay people to teach, But you can't pay them to care." ~Marva Collins
"No man can be a good teacher unless he has feelings of warm affection toward his pupils and a genuine desire to impart to them what he himself believes to be of value." ~Bertrand Russell
"I put the relation of a fine teacher to a student just below the relation of a mother to a son." ~Thomas Wolfe
"Only through education does one come to be dissatisfied with his own knowledge, and only through teaching others does one come to realize the uncomfortable inadequacy of his knowledge. Being dissatisfied with his own knowledge, one then realizes that the trouble lies with himself, and realizing the uncomfortable inadequacy of his knowledge one then feels stimulated to improve himself. Therefore, it is said, 'the processes of teaching and learning stimulate one another.'" ~Confucius
"He who dares to teach must never cease to learn." ~Richard Henry Dann
"To teach is to learn twice." ~Joseph Joubert
"I affirm that to grow as a teacher, I must remain an alert learner." Eric Maisel
"Men learn while they teach." Lucius A. Seneca
"The most important knowledge teachers need to do good work is a knowledge of how students are experiencing learning and perceiving their teacher's actions." ~Steven Brookfield
"Instruction begins when you, the teacher, learn from the learner; put yourself in his place so that you may understand . . . what he learns and the way he understands it." ~Soren Kierkegaard
"If you would thoroughly know anything, teach it to others." ~Tryon Edwards
"Ye great teachers: listen to what you say!" ~Goethe
"You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him find it within himself." ~Galileo Galilei
"A mind is a fire to be kindled, not a vessel to be filled." ~Plutarch
"Tell me and I forget. Show me and I remember. Involve me and I understand." ~Chinese proverb
"A man should first direct himself in the way he should go. Only then should he instruct others." ~Buddha
"Teaching is the highest form of understanding." ~Aristotle
"Let him who would move the world first move himself." ~Socrates
"I cannot teach anybody anything; I can only make them think." ~Socrates
"The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires." ~William Arthur Ward
"A master can tell you what he expects of you. A teacher, though, awakens your own expectation." ~Anonymous
"It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge." ~Albert Einstein
"Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition." ~Jacques Barzun
"Teaching people skills without giving them a vision for a better future a vision based on common values -- is only training." ~Nido Qubein
"The lasting measure of good teaching is what the individual student learns and carries away." ~Barbara Harrell Carson
"Good teaching is more a giving of right questions than a giving of right answers." ~Josef Albers
"The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires." ~William A. Ward
"Teach to the problems, not to the text." ~E. Kim Nebeuts
"The task of the excellent teacher is to stimulate "apparently ordinary" people to unusual effort. The tough problem is not in identifying winners: it is in making winners out of ordinary people." ~K. Patricia Cross
"It's not what is poured into a student that counts, but what is planted." ~Linda Conway
"Any genuine teaching will result, if successful, in someone's knowing how to bring about a better condition of things than existed earlier." ~John Dewey
"The teachers who get "burned out" are not the ones who are constantly learning, which can be exhilarating, but those who feel they must stay in control and ahead of the students at all times." ~Frank Smith
"Professors known as outstanding lecturers do two things; they use a simple plan and many examples." ~W. McKeachie
"Example isn't another way to teach, it is the only way to teach." ~Albert Einstein
"Teaching should be such that what is offered is perceived as a valuable gift and not as a hard duty." ~Albert Einstein
"Thought flows in terms of stories - stories about events, stories about people, and stories about intentions and achievements. The best teachers are the best story tellers. We learn in the form of stories." ~Frank Smith
"A teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary." ~Thomas Carruthers
"Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theatre." ~Gail Godwin
"The secret of teaching is to appear to have known all your life what you just learned this morning." ~Anonymous
"To know how to suggest is the great art of teaching." ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The role of the teacher remains the highest calling of a free people. To the teacher, America entrusts her most precious resource, her children; and asks that they be prepared ... to face the rigors of individual participation in a democratic society. ~ Shirley Mount Hufstedler
"A liberal education is at the heart of a civil society, and at the heart of a liberal education is the act of teaching. ~Angelo Bartlett Giamatti
"The teacher is one who makes two ideas grow where only one grew before." ~Elbert Hubbard
"A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering on a cold iron." ~Horace Mann
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." ~Aristotle
"A certain brother went to Abbot Moses in Scete and asked him for a good word. And the elder said to him, 'Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.'" ~From The Apothegmata, or Sayings of the Desert Hermits.
"The first key to wisdom is this – constant and frequent questioning, for by doubting we are led to question and by questioning we arrive at the truth." ~ Peter Abelard in Sic et Non
"In truth, to attain to interior peace, one must be willing to pass through the contrary to peace; such is the teaching of the sages." ~Swami Brahmananda
"Learn avidly. Question repeatedly what you have learned. Analyze it carefully. Then put what you have learned into practice intelligently." ~Confucius
"The essence of knowledge is, having it, to apply it; not having it, to confess your ignorance." ~Confucius
"Every truth has four corners: as a teacher I give you one corner, and it is for you to find the other three." ~Confucius
"He who learns but does not think, is lost! He who thinks but does not learn is in great danger." ~Confucius
"Believe nothing, O monks, merely because you have been told it . . . or because it is traditional, or because you yourselves have imagined it. Do not believe what your teacher tells you merely out of respect for the teacher. But whatsoever, after due examination and analysis, you find to be conductive to the good, the benefit, the welfare of all beings - that doctrine believe and cling to, and take it as your guide." ~Buddha
"The unexamined life is not worth living." ~Socrates
"Wisdom begins in wonder. I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing." ~Socrates
"The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance." ~Socrates
"Think not those faithful who praise all thy words and actions; but those who kindly reprove thy faults." ~Socrates
"A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring." ~Alexander Pope
"Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other." ~Edmund Burke
"Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever." ~ Mahatma Gandhi
"They can because they think they can." ~Virgil
"What we do not understand we do not possess." ~Goethe
"Teachers open the door. You enter by yourself." ~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." ~Kwan Tzu
"Education is the acquisition of the art of the utilization of knowledge. This an art very difficult to impart. We must beware of what I will call "inert ideas" that is to say, ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilized or tested or thrown into fresh combinations." ~Alfred North Whitehead
"I entered the classroom with the conviction that it was crucial for me and every other student to be an active participant, not a passive consumer...[a conception of] education as the practice of freedom.... education that connects the will to know with the will to become. Learning is a place where paradise can be created." ~Bell Hooks
"Learning is not so much an additive process, with new learning simply piling up on top of existing knowledge, as it is an active, dynamic process in which the connections are constantly changing and the structure reformatted." ~K. Patricia Cross
"Memorization is what we resort to when what we are learning makes no sense." ~Anonymous
"It is what we think we know already that often prevents us from learning." ~Claude Bernard
"Experience is the worst teacher, it gives the test before the lesson." ~Vernon Law
"Sometimes the last thing learners need is for their preferred learning style to be affirmed. Agreeing to let people learn only in a way that feels comfortable and familiar can restrict seriously their chance for development." ~Steven Brookfield
"Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young." ~Henry Ford
"When asked what learning was the most necessary, he said, 'Not to unlearn what you have learned!'" ~Diogenes Laertius
"We think too much about effective methods of teaching and not enough about effective methods of learning." ~John Carolus, S.J.
"They know enough who know how to learn." ~Henry Adams
"One must learn by doing the thing; for though you think you know it, you have no certainty, until you try." ~Sophocles
"An idea that is developed and put into action is more important than an idea that exists only as an idea."
~Buddha"What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday and our present thoughts build our life tomorrow. Our life is the creation of our mind."
~Buddha"It's what you learn after you know it all that counts." ~Harry S. Truman
"You will find something more in the woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you that which you can never learn from masters." ~St. Bernard of Clairvaux, Epistola 106.
"There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man's life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave." ~Ernest Hemingway
"The purpose of education is not to produce more scholars, technicians and job hunters, but integrated men and women who are free of fear; for only between such human beings can there be enduring peace." ~Krishnamurti
"The main hope of a nation lies in the proper education of its youth." ~Erasmus
"Our best chance for happiness is education." ~Mark van Dorn
"The test and the use of man's education is that he finds pleasure in the exercise of his mind." ~Jacques Barzun
"The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet."
~Aristotle"Information cannot replace education." ~Imparato and Itarari
"To me the sole hope of human salvation lies in teaching." ~George Bernard Shaw
"Whoever neglects learning in his youth, loses the past and is dead to the future." ~Euripides
"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance." ~Derek Bok
"Rewards and punishments are the lowest form of education."~ Chuang Tzu
"Education...beyond all other devices of human origin, is a great equalizer of conditions of men --the balance wheel of the social machinery...It does better than to disarm the poor of their hostility toward the rich; it prevents being poor." ~Horace Mann
"Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one." ~Malcolm S. Forbes
"The main failure of education is that it has not prepared people to comprehend matters concerning human destiny." ~Norman Cousins
"The great end of education is to discipline rather than to furnish the mind; To train it to the use of its own powers rather than to fill it with the accumulation of others." ~Tryon Edwards
"The highest result of education is tolerance." ~Helen Keller
"The real object of education is to have a man in the condition of continually asking questions." ~Bishop Creighton
"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
"Every uneducated person is a caricature of himself." ~Friedrich Schlegel
"Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing; education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance." ~Will Durant
"The great end of education is to discipline rather than to furnish the mind; to train it to the use of its own powers, rather than fill it with the accumulation of others." ~Tryon Edwards
"Education should turn out the pupil with something he knows well and something he can do well." ~Alfred North Whitehead
"At present the universities are as uncongenial to teaching as the Mojave Desert to a clutch of Druid priests. If you want to restore a Druid priesthood, you cannot do it by offering prizes for Druid-of-the Year. If you want Druids, you must grow forests." ~W. Arrowsmith
"If a doctor, lawyer, or dentist had 40 people in his office at one time, all of whom had different needs, and some of whom didn't want to be there and were causing trouble, and the doctor, lawyer, or dentist, without assistance, had to treat them all with professional excellence for nine months, then he might have some conception of the classroom teacher's job." ~Donald D. Quinn
"An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't." ~Anatole France
"When Alexander the Great visited Diogenes and asked whether he could do anything for the famed teacher, Diogenes replied, 'Only stand out of my light.' Perhaps some day we shall know how to heighten creativity. Until then, one of the best things we can do for creative men and women is to stand out of their light." ~John Gardner
"The ultimate goal of the educational system is to shift to the individual the burden of pursing his own education. This will not be a widely shared pursuit until we get over our odd conviction that education is what goes on in school buildings and nowhere else." ~John Gardner
"He who opens a school door, closes a prison." Victor Hugo
"If you are planning for a year, sow rice; if you are planning for a decade, plant trees; if you are planning for a lifetime, educate people." ~Chinese Proverb
"What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to the soul." ~Joseph Addison
If you enjoyed reading these quotations, you may want to read more on the lists
compiled by NTLF,
Richard
Zakia, and Stephen
Nordby.
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