143 Inspiring Teaching Quotes

Teaching is an art that shapes the minds and hearts of future generations. It is a profession filled with passion, patience, and perseverance. Educators have the power to inspire, motivate, and influence their students in profound ways. To celebrate the significance of this noble profession, we've handpicked a collection of the top 143 inspiring teaching quotes. These quotes serve as a source of encouragement and reflection for teachers, reminding them of the incredible impact they have on their students' lives. Dive into these words of wisdom and let them reignite your passion for teaching.

1. “Quand tu veux construire un bateau, ne commence pas par rassembler du bois, couper des planches et distribuer du travail, mais reveille au sein des hommes le desir de la mer grande et large.If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

2. “Our great mistake in education is, as it seems to me, the worship of book-learning–the confusion of instruction and education. We strain the memory instead of cultivating the mind. The children in our elementary schools are wearied by the mechanical act of writing, and the interminable intricacies of spelling; they are oppressed by columns of dates, by lists of kings and places, which convey no definite idea to their minds, and have no near relation to their daily wants and occupations; while in our public schools the same unfortunate results are produced by the weary monotony of Latin and Greek grammar. We ought to follow exactly the opposite course with children–to give them a wholesome variety of mental food, and endeavor to cultivate their tastes, rather than to fill their minds with dry facts. The important thing is not so much that every child should be taught, as that every child should be given the wish to learn. What does it matter if the pupil know a little more or a little less? A boy who leaves school knowing much, but hating his lessons, will soon have forgotten almost all he ever learned; while another who had acquired a thirst for knowledge, even if he had learned little, would soon teach himself more than the first ever knew.” - John Lubbock

3. “It would seem that you have no useful skill or talent whatsoever," he said. "Have you thought of going into teaching?” - Terry Pratchett

4. “The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of the mind for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards.” - Anatole France

5. “Our musicians in residence carry this belief into the classroom. They don't think of children's self-esteem as so fragile that it will be shattered by the suggestion that the child guessed wrong or jumped to an invalid conclusion. They make corrections matter-of-factly, with no feeling that a chid is a failure because she has made an error, but with ocnfidence that the feedback will help the child learn and be accurate the next time.” - Peter Perret

6. “I am afraid that the schools will prove the very gates of hell, unless they diligently labor in explaining the Holy Scriptures and engraving them in the heart of the youth.” - Martin Luther

7. “Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else ... Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.” - Hermann Hesse

8. “Learning is finding out what you already know. Doing is demonstrating that you know it. Teaching is reminding others that they know just as well as you. You are all learners, doers, teachers.” - Richard Bach

9. “the fundamental purpose of school is learning, not teaching.” - Richard DuFour

10. “All teachings are mere references. The true experience is living your own life. Then, even the holiest of words are only words.” - DENG MING-DAO

11. “The object of teaching a child is to enable him to get along without a teacher.” - Elbert Hubbard

12. “The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence.” - Amos Bronson Alcott

13. “part of the art of teaching is the ability to rearrange the world for students - to force them to see things in a new way. i've known too many stupid intellectuals to believe that education and wisdom come as a package deal along with facts, it's your perspective that counts - your ability to see differently, not just to see a lot.” - Sunny Decker

14. “The biggest challenge facing the great teachers and communicators of history is not to teach history itself, nor even the lessons of history, but why history matters. How to ignite the first spark of the will o'the wisp, the Jack o'lantern, the ignis fatuus [foolish fire] beloved of poets, which lights up one source of history and then another, zigzagging across the marsh, connecting and linking and writing bright words across the dark face of the present. There's no phrase I can come up that will encapsulate in a winning sound-bite why history matters. We know that history matters, we know that it is thrilling, absorbing, fascinating, delightful and infuriating, that it is life. Yet I can't help wondering if it's a bit like being a Wagnerite; you just have to get used to the fact that some people are never going to listen.” - Stephen Fry

15. “Adults constantly raise the bar on smart children, precisely because they're able to handle it. The children get overwhelmed by the tasks in front of them and gradually lose the sort of openness and sense of accomplishment they innately have. When they're treated like that, children start to crawl inside a shell and keep everything inside. It takes a lot of time and effort to get them to open up again. Kids' hearts are malleable, but once they gel it's hard to get them back the way they were.” - Haruki Murakami

16. “No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.The teacher who walks in the shadow of the temple, among his followers, gives not of his wisdom but rather of his faith and his lovingness.If he is indeed wise he does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind.” - Khalil Gibran

17. “I’ve come to a frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element in the classroom. It’s my personal approach that creates the climate. It’s my daily mood that makes the weather. As a teacher, I possess a tremendous power to make a child’s life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated and a child humanized or dehumanized.” - Haim Ginott

18. “Experience teaches only the teachable.” - Aldous Huxley

19. “Only those who look with the eyes of children can lose themselves in the object of their wonder. ” - Eberhard Arnold

20. “To know how to suggest is the art of teaching.” - Henri Frédéric Amiel

21. “His older self had taught his younger self a language which the older self knew because the younger self, after being taught, grew up to be the older self and was, therefore, capable of teaching.” - Robert A. Heinlein

22. “Sometimes I think that wisdoms slip from my mind like drool from the lips of an idiot...Where's all this stuff coming from? Is it any good? Any good in, you know, the wisdom sense? Who am I to spout this stuff anyway?Well, here's the thing. You too can find yourself shedding wisdom like cat hair if you only allow yourself the liberty of introspection.Think about what you alone know that no one else does. That one neat wonderful profound insight. It is fully yours. No one else on this planet of about six billion people understands it like you do.Now, see if you can share it with someone. Bestow it, a gift of yourself.Wisdom is like gossip. Except it's the good kind.” - Vera Nazarian

23. “No one learns as much about a subject as one who is forced to teach it.” - Peter Drucker

24. “Evil prevails when good people do nothing.” - Erin Gruwell

25. “The job of an educator is to teach students to see vitality in themselves” - Joseph Campbell

26. “Don't fuck with an English major. They keep lots of useless crap trapped in their heads. Once in a while they let some of it out and it bites you square on the ass.” - P.C. Cast

27. “If thou wouldst seek justice, thyself must be just. ” - Stephen R. Lawhead

28. “I'm not a teacher: only a fellow traveler of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead - ahead of myself as well as you.” - George Bernard Shaw

29. “But the purpose of a story is to teach and to please at once, and what it teaches is how to recognize the snares of the world.” - Umberto Eco

30. “[T]eaching has been for me an education (Lord knows what it has been for my students).” - Howard Nemerov

31. “Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.” - Plato

32. “I never teach my pupils, I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn.” - Albert Einstein

33. “I'm more interested in arousing enthusiasm in kids than in teaching the facts. The facts may change, but that enthusiasm for exploring the world will remain with them the rest of their lives.” - Seymour Simon

34. “I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught.” - Winston S. Churchill

35. “Real learning comes about when the competitive spirit has ceased.” - J. Krishnamurti

36. “You can't really teach a kid anything: you can only show him the way and motivate him to learn it himself.” - Dave Cullen

37. “Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting. Most people learn best by being "with it," yet school makes them identify their personal, cognitive growth with elaborate planning and manipulation.” - Ivan Illich

38. “Not fault of teaching spider if little spider pay more attention to catching fly than doing lesson.” - Anne Bishop

39. “When you study great teachers... you will learn much more from their caring and hard work than from their style.” - William Glasser

40. “Every day the same things came up; the work was never done, and the tedium of it began to weigh on me. Part of what made English a difficult subject for Korean students was the lack of a more active principle in their learning. They were accustomed to receiving, recording, and memorizing. That's the Confucian mode. As a student, you're not supposed to question a teacher; you should avoid asking for explanations because that might reveal a lack of knowledge, which can be seen as an insult to the teacher's efforts. You don't have an open, free exchange with teachers as we often have here in the West. And further, under this design, a student doesn't do much in the way of improvisation or interpretation.This approach might work well for some pursuits, may even be preferred--indeed, I was often amazed by the way Koreans learned crafts and skills, everything from basketball to calligraphy, for example, by methodically studying and reproducing a defined set of steps (a BBC report explained how the North Korean leader Kim Jong Il had his minions rigorously study the pizza-making techniques used by Italian chefs so that he could get a good pie at home, even as thousands of his subjects starved)--but foreign-language learning, the actual speaking component most of all, has to be more spontaneous and less rigid.We all saw this played out before our eyes and quickly discerned the problem. A student cannot hope to sit in a class and have a language handed over to him on sheets of paper.” - Cullen Thomas

41. “Jack Woodson is currently living and working in Dallas, TX. He has forty children, and all of them have different mothers.” - John Pearson

42. “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.” - George Steiner

43. “Seek opportunities to show you care. The smallest gestures often make the biggest difference.” - John Wooden

44. “The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.” - William Arthur Ward

45. “To be agreeable in society, you must consent to be taught many things which you already know.” - Talleyrand

46. “Over the years, I have noticed that the child who learns quickly is adventurous. She's ready to run risks. She approaches life with arms outspread. She wants to take it all in. She still has the desire of the very young child to make sense out of things. She's not concerned with concealing her ignorance or protecting herself. She's ready to expose herself to disappointment and defeat. She has a certain confidence. She expects to make sense out of things sooner or later. She has a kind of trust.” - John Holt

47. “schools assume that children are not interested in learning and are not much good at it, that they will not learn unless made to, that they cannot learn unless shown how, and that the way to make them learn is to divide up the prescribed material into a sequence of tiny tasks to be mastered one at a time, each with it's approrpriate 'morsel' and 'shock.' And when this method doesn't work, the schools assume there is something wrong with the children -- something they must try to diagnose and treat.” - John Holt

48. “Rewards and punishment is the lowest form of education.” - Chuang Tzu

49. “It may take a decade or two before the extent of Shakespeare's collaboration passes from the graduate seminar to the undergraduate lecture, and finally to popular biography, by which time it will be one of those things about Shakespeare that we thought we knew all along. Right now, though, for those who teach the plays and write about his life, it hasn't been easy abandoning old habits of mind. I know that I am not alone in struggling to come to terms with how profoundly it alters one's sense of how Shakespeare wrote, especially toward the end of his career when he coauthored half of his last ten plays. For intermixed with five that he wrote alone, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, and The Tempest, are Timon of Athens (written with Thomas Middleton), Pericles (written with George Wilkins), and Henry the Eighth, the lost Cardenio, and The Two Noble Kinsmen (all written with John Fletcher).” - James Shapiro

50. “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.” - Cicero

51. “I will have to rely on that painful teacher, experience.” - Kirby Larson

52. “pencils racing across paper, a sound I like." Marisol” - Eileen Granfors

53. “Schoolmastering kept me busy by day and part of each night. I was an assistant housemaster, with a fine big room under the eaves of the main building, and a wretched kennel of a bedroom, and rights in a bathroom used by two or three other resident masters. I taught all day, but my wooden leg mercifully spared me from the nuisance of having to supervise sports after school. There were exercises to mark every night, but I soon gained a professional attitude towards these woeful explorations of the caves of ignorance and did not let them depress me. I liked the company of most of my colleagues, who were about equally divided among good men who were good teachers, awful men who were awful teachers, and the grotesques and misfits who drift into teaching and are so often the most educative influences a boy meets in school. If a boy can't have a good teacher, give him a psychological cripple or an exotic failure to cope with; don't just give him a bad, dull teacher. This is where the private schools score over state-run schools; they can accommodate a few cultured madmen on the staff without having to offer explanations.” - Robertson Davies

54. “What we instill in our children will be the foundation upon which they build their future.” - Steve Maraboli

55. “To instruct calls for energy, and to remain almost silent, but watchful and helpful, while students instruct themselves, calls for even greater energy. To see someone fall (which will teach him not to fall again) when a word from you would keep him on his feet but ignorant of an important danger, is one of the tasks of the teacher that calls for special energy, because holding in is more demanding than crying out. ” - Robertson Davies

56. “My words itch at your ears till you understand them” - Walt Whitman

57. “I want students to engage the way a clutch on a car gets engaged: an engine can be running, making appropriate noises, burning fuel and creating exhaust fumes, but unless the clutch is engaged, nothing moves. It's all sound and smoke, and nobody gets anywhere.” - Robert L. Fried

58. “Music and symbols, they're older than human race.Prehuman beings used them to teach early mankind.” - Toba Beta

59. “Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching.” - Oscar Wilde

60. “An alarming number of parents appear to have little confidence in their ability to "teach" their children. We should help parents understand the overriding importance of incidental teaching in the context of warm, consistent companionship. Such caring is usually the greatest teaching, especially if caring means sharing in the activites of the home.” - Raymond S. Moore

61. “Parents should also question much of the contemporary emphasis on special materials and equipment for learning in a child's environment. A clutter of toys can be more confusing than satisfying to a child. On the other hand, natural situations, with opportunieties to explore, seldom overstimulate or trouble a small child. Furthermore, most children will find greater satisfaction and demonsstrate greater learning from things they make and do with their parents or other people than from elaborate toys or learning materials. And there is no substitute for solitude - in the sandpile, mud puddle, or play area - for a yound child to work out his own fantasies. Yet this privilege is often denied in our anxiety to institutionalize children.” - Raymond S. Moore

62. “My first semester I had only nine students. Hoping they might view me as professional and well prepared, I arrived bearing name tags fashioned in the shape of maple leaves.” - David Sedaris

63. “We were supposed to be an English literature class, but Miss Nesbitt used literature to teach real life. She said she didn't have time to teach us like a regular English teacher--we were too far behind. Instead, she taught us the world through literature.” - Phillip Hoose

64. “As a Jew, I had no desire to challenge my childhood prejudice. But as a teacher, I could not do otherwise.” - Sondra Perl

65. “When you want to teach children to think, you begin by treating them seriously when they are little, giving them responsibilities, talking to them candidly, providing privacy and solitude for them, and making them readers and thinkers of significant thoughts from the beginning. That’s if you want to teach them to think.” - Bertrand Russell

66. “Ask yourself: 'Do I feel the need to laminate?' Then teaching is for you.” - Gordon Korman

67. “That's what education should be," I said, "the art of orientation. Educators should devise the simplest and most effective methods of turning minds around. It shouldn't be the art of implanting sight in the organ, but should proceed on the understanding that the organ already has the capacity, but is improperly aligned and isn't facing the right way.” - Plato

68. “What you do teaches faster, and has a lasting impression, far beyond what you say.” - T.F. Hodge

69. “I have always had the greatest respect for students. There is nothing I hate more than condescension—the attitude that they are inferior to you. I always assume they have good minds.” - Mark Van Doren

70. “One night I begged Robin, a scientist by training, to watch Arthur Miller's 'Death of a Salesman' with me on PBS. He lasted about one act, then turned to me in horror: 'This is how you spend your days? Thinking about things like this?' I was ashamed. I could have been learning about string theory or how flowers pollinate themselves. I think his remark was the beginning of my crisis of faith. Like so many of my generation in graduate school, I had turned to literature as a kind of substitute for formal religion, which no longer fed my soul, or for therapy, which I could not afford.... I became interested in exploring the theory of nonfiction and in writing memoir, a genre that gives us access to that lost Middlemarch of reflection and social commentary.” - Mary Rose O'Reilley

71. “Positive expectations are the mark of the superior personality.” - Brian Tracy

72. “The effects you will have on your students are infinite and currently unknown; you will possibly shape the way they proceed in their careers, the way they will vote, the way they will behave as partners and spouses, the way they will raise their kids.” - Donna Quesada

73. “The most important step in developing skillful speech is to think before speaking.” - Allan Lokos

74. “Then said a teacher, speak to us of teaching. And he said:The teacher who walks in the shadow of the temple among his followers gives not of his wisdom but rather of his faith and his lovingness.The astronomer may speak to you of his understanding of space, but he cannot give you his understanding.The musician may sing to you of the rhythm which is in all space, but he cannot give you the ear which arrests the rhythm nor the voice that echoes it.And he who is versed in the science of numbers can tell of the regions of weight and measure, but he cannot conduct you thither.For the vision of one man lends not its wings to another man.” - Khalil Gibran

75. “In God's eyes, a man who teaches one truth and nothing else is more righteous than a man who teaches a million truths and one lie.” - Criss Jami

76. “Teachers, you don't teach a subject, you teach a child.” - Deepa Bhushan

77. “I taught you everything you know. But I didn't teach you everything I know.” - Orson Scott Card

78. “My plan is to continue teaching many more years than the 32 years I've already enjoyed and continue writing, and promoting my books and websites if it's God will.” - Ana Monnar

79. “This irritated or puzzled such students of literature and their professors as were accustomed to ‘serious’ courses replete with ‘trends ’ and ‘schools ’ and ‘myths ’ and ‘symbols ’ and ‘social comment ’ and something unspeakably spooky called ‘climate of thought.’ Actually these ‘serious’ courses were quite easy ones with the students required to know not the books but about the books.” - Vladimir Nabokov

80. “You can learn English online” - Brian Daniel

81. “...anyone still attempting to argue that Ebonics is a problem for black students or that it is somehow connected to a lack of intelligence or lack of desire to achieve is about as useful as a Betamax video cassette player, and it's time for those folks to be retired, be they teachers, administrators, or community leaders, so the rest of us can try to do some real work in the service of equal access for black students and all students. (15)” - Adam J. Banks

82. “The difference between a beginning teacher and an experienced one is that the beginning teacher asks, "How am I doing?" and the experienced teacher asks, How are the children doing?” - Esme Raji Codell

83. “They're horrible little creatures. All snot and smelly feet and pestering questions.""Then why did you go into teaching?""It was either that or sit at home with Mother all day. I picked the lesser of two evils.” - Brian Francis

84. “We never know which lives we influence, or when, or why.” - Stephen King

85. “A teacher who loves learning earns the right and the ability to help others learn.” - Ruth Beechick

86. “...you seemed to be listening to me, not to find out useful information, but to try to catch me in a logical fallacy. This tells us all that you are used to being smarter than your teachers, and that you listen to them in order to catch them making mistakes and prove how smart you are to the other students. This is such a pointless, stupid way of listening to teachers that it is clear you are going to waste months of our time before you finally catch on that the only transaction that matters is a transfer of useful information from adults who possess it to children who do not, and that catching mistakes is a criminal misuse of time.” - Orson Scott Card

87. “The academic bias against subjectivity not only forces our students to write poorly ("It is believed...," instead of, "I believe..."), it deforms their thinking about themselves and their world. In a single stroke, we delude our students into believing that bad prose turns opinions into facts and we alienate them from their own inner lives.” - Parker J. Palmer

88. “[Women] complain about many clerks who attribute all sorts of faults to them and who compose works about them in rhyme, prose, and verse, criticizing their conduct in a variety of different ways. They then give these works as elementary textbooks to their young pupils at the beginning of their schooling, to provide them with exempla and received wisdom, so that they will remember this teaching when they come of age ... They accuse [women] of many ... serious vice[s] and are very critical of them, finding no excuse for them whatsoever.This is the way clerks behave day and night, composing their verse now in French, now in Latin. And they base their opinions on goodness only knows which books, which are more mendacious than a drunk. Ovid, in a book he wrote called Cures for Love, says many evil things about women, and I think he was wrong to do this. He accuses them of gross immorality, of filthy, vile, and wicked behaviour. (I disagree with him that they have such vices and promise to champion them in the fight against anyone who would like to throw down the gauntlet ...) Thus, clerks have studied this book since their early childhood as their grammar primer and then teach it to others so that no man will undertake to love a woman.” - Christine de Pizan

89. “The task of teaching has never been more complex and the expectations that burden teachers are carried out in antiquated systems that offer little support—and yet, teachers are finding success every day.” - Tucker Elliot

90. “There was a time we laughed at the old guys up on the hill. The ones who graduated a couple of years before us, and who would hang around the school and the ballpark still, and would sit on the hoods of their cars and tell us how when they were seniors they did it better, faster, and further. We laughed, because we were still doing it, and all they could do was talk. If our goals were not met, there was next year, but it never occurred to us that one day there would not be a next year, and that the guys sitting on the hoods of their cars at the top of the hill, wishing they could have one more year, willing to settle for one last game, could one day be us.” - Tucker Elliot

91. “It's why I went into teaching in the first place. I like the sound of my own voice. Well that, and I am addicted to the smell of chalk and white-board markers.” - Mercy Celeste

92. “Never talk back to a teacher. Teachers are like God. Actually, teachers are God's boss.” - Deborah Wiles

93. “Teachers knew every one of the students, their secrets, their grades, their home situations. And all the students knew the teachers. It was like teachers were people who finally were the most popular at school.” - Victoria Kahler

94. “A teacher who cannot explain any abstract subject to a child does not himself thoroughly understand his subject; if he does not attempt to break down his knowledge to fit the child's mind, he does not understand teaching.” - Fulton J. Sheen

95. “Leaders are more powerful role models when they learn than when they teach.” - Rosabeth Moss Kantor

96. “... be radical about grace and relentless about truth and resolute about holiness...” - Ann Voskamp

97. “Proper teaching is recognized with ease. You can know it without fail because it awakens within you that sensation which tells you this is something you have always known.” - Frank Herbert

98. “Being considerate of others will take your children further in life than any college degree.” - Marian Wright Edelman

99. “The barrier during self-improvement is not so much that we hate learning, rather we hate being taught. To learn entails that the knowledge was achieved on one's own accord - it feels great - but to be taught often leaves a feeling of inferiority. Thus it takes a bit of determination and a lot of humility in order for one to fully develop.” - Criss Jami

100. “Whoever teaches without emancipating stultifies.” - Jacques Ranciere

101. “At what age did I start to think that where I was going was more important than where I already was? When was it that I began to believe that the most important thing about what I was doing was getting it over with? Knowing how to live is not something we have to teach children. Knowing how to live is something we have to be careful not to take away from them.” - Colin Beavan

102. “Namun guru yang paling baik adalah yang mengajar tanpa bicara apa-apa” - Deepak Chopra

103. “I've managed to bring the backlog down to a mere sixty-eight years," she announced with some small sense of achievement. "I hope to be able to start marking the papers of pupils who are still alive by the end of the decade.” - Jasper Fforde

104. “People who teach you cram old ideas, old views, old ways, into you. Like covering plants with layer after layer of old earth; it's no wonder the poor things so rarely come up fresh and green.” - John Fowles

105. “If we are teaching children how to lie,to steal, and to be aggressive, why do schools punish those who lie and steal? and why does the society punish the offender criminal?” - Ali Altantawi

106. “Another Mexican American in another class, approaches Victor after class, carrying his copy of Fahrenheit 451, required reading for the course. The student doesn't understand the reference to a salon. Victor explains that this is just another word for the living room. No understanding in the student's eyes. He tries Spanish: la salon. Still nothing. The student has grown up as a migrant worker. And Victor remembers the white student who had been in his class a quarter ago, who had written about not understanding racism, that there was none where he had grown up, in Wennatchee, that he has played with the children of his father's migrant workers without there being any hostility. His father's workers. Property. Property that doesn't know of living rooms. And Victor thought of what the man from Wennatchee knew, what the ROTC Mexican American knew, what the migrant worker knew. And he thought of getting up the next morning to go with Serena to St. Mary's for cheese and butter. And he knew there was something he was not doing in his composition classrooms.” - Victor Villanueva

107. “Was I gleeful, settled, content, during the hours I passed in yonder bare, humble schoolroom this morning and afternoon? Not to decieve myself, I must reply -- No: I felt desolate to a degree. I felt -- yes, idiot that I am -- I felt degraded. I doubted I had taken a step which sank instead of raising me in the scale of social existence. I was weakly dismayed at the ignorance, the poverty, the coarseness of all I heard and saw around me. But let me not hate and despise myself too much for these feelings; I know them to be wrong -- that is a great step gained. I shall strive to overcome them.” - Charlotte Brontë

108. “When all the teachers are gone, who will be your teacher?The student replied: “Everything!Kobun, paused, then said: “No, you".” - Kobun Chino Otogawa Roshi

109. “Your most important task as a leader is to teach people how to think and ask the right questions so that the world doesn't go to hell if you take a day off.” - Jeffrey Pfeffer

110. “Teach honesty by all means - you do know what it is, don't you?” - Idries Shah

111. “worksheets - the archenemy of abundant, purposeful reading (and discussion and writing).” - Mike Schmoker

112. “You shouldn't call then anything. They're poor unfortunate people who cannot help the way they look,” - Jacqueline Wilson

113. “The years teach us much, which the days never knew.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

114. “Without books we should very likely be a still-primitive people living in the shadow of traditions that faded with years until only a blur remained, and different memories would remember the past in different ways. A parent or a teacher has only his lifetime; a good book can teach forever.” - Louis L'Amour

115. “Roses and thorns are parts of the same plant. Somehow though, some people are concerned mainly about the roses. The rose is not on the plant for more than a week, but the thorns are there forever.Roses are teaching that the beauty of life will bloom, once you have taught yourself the lessons given by living with the thorns.” - Grigoris Deoudis

116. “But for I am a woman should I therefore live that I should not tell you the goodness of God?” - Julian of Norwich

117. “My God can do it! My God will do it! My God wants to do it! My God has done it!” - Kathy Degraw

118. “We teach what we need to learn. And we teach it until we get it.” - Irene Tomkinson

119. “The most important attitude that can be formed is that of desire to go on learning.” - John Dewey

120. “So much of teaching is sharing. Learning results in sharing, sharing results in change, change is learning. The only other job with so much sharing is parenting. That's probably why the two are so often confused.” - Esme Raji Codell

121. “It is so delightful to teach those one loves!” - Andrew Lang

122. “The light teaches you to convert life into a festive promenade.” - Dejan Stojanovic

123. “Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results.” - John Dewey

124. “A person must earn enlightenment, Eragon. It is not handed down to you by others, regardless of how revered they be.” - Christopher Paolini

125. “You will search the world over and not find a nonsuperstitious community. As long as there is ignorance, there will be adherence to superstition. Dispelling ignorance is the only solution. That is why I teach.” - Irvin D. Yalom

126. “Teach don't preach!” - Habeeb Akande

127. “I meet them in this stadium, strangers at opposing desks until I wave my red flag.” - Marina Leigh Duff

128. “I would go to parties and say I was an editor, and people, especially women – and that was important to me back then – would say, “Oh, really?” and raise their eyebrows and look at me a little more carefully. I remember the first party I went to after I became a teacher, someone asked me what I did for a living, and I said, “Well, I teach high school.” He looked over my shoulder, nodded his head, said, “I went to high school,” and walked away.Once I repeated this anecdote around a big table full of Mexican food in the garden at a place called La Choza in Chicago, and Becky Mueller, another teacher at the school, said that I was a “storyteller.” I liked that. I was looking for something to be other than “just” a teacher, and “storyteller” felt about right. I am a teacher and a storyteller in that order. I have made my living and my real contribution to my community as a teacher, and I have been very lucky to have found that calling, but all through the years I have entertained myself and occasionally other people by telling stories.” - Peter Ferry

129. “Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fancies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after years relieved of them. In fact, men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth — often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you cannot get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable.” - Hypathia of Alexandria

130. “Any school for free citizens must begin by teaching distrust, not trust. It must teach questioning, not acceptance of stock answers.” - Brian Herbert

131. “A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals. He isn't telling, or teaching, or ordering. Rather, he seeks to establish a relationship with meaning, of feeling, of observing. We are lonesome animals. We spend all our live trying to be less lonesome. And one of our ancient methods is to tell a story, begging the listener to say, and to feel, "Yes, that's the way it is, or at least that's the way I feel it. You're not as alone as you thought." To finish is sadness to a writer, a little death. He puts the last word down and it is done. But it isn't really done. The story goes on and leaves the writer behind, for no story is ever done.” - John Steinbeck

132. “Real education happens only by failing, changing, challenging, and adjusting. All of those gerunds apply to teachers as well as students. No person is an “educator,” because education is not something one person does to another. Education is an imprecise process, a dance, and a collaborative experience.” - Siva Vaidhyanathan

133. “Good coaching is good teaching and nothing else.” - Pat Conroy

134. “A good teacher is one, that never stops listening; a good listener is one, that never stops teaching.” - Anthony Liccione

135. “Now, it is of course well known that Christ continually uses the expression 'imitators.' He never says that he asks for admirers, adoring admirers, adherents; and when he uses the expression 'follower' he always explains it in such a way that one perceives that 'imitators' is meant by it, that is not adherents of a teaching but imitators of a life....” - Søren Kierkegaard

136. “People respond when they are taught, and that primarily by example, rather than preached at. Jesus modeled just this approach in His life."~R. Alan Woods [2013]” - R. Alan Woods

137. “I can’t teach you how to write, and anybody who says they can is full of shit.” - Hank Moody

138. “That which we are, we shall teach, not voluntarily, but involuntarily. Thoughts come into our minds by avenues which we never left open, and thoughts go out of our minds through avenues which we never voluntarily opened.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

139. “The Grand Mistake in Education - To think that what's right for you is right for everyone. IT AIN'T. The Fly in this Ointment!http://youtu.be/6HpXUaQGY8I via @youtube” - Alan Share

140. “I would rather my descendants have greater abilities and a greater knowledge of the love of Christ than I do, much like standing on one's shoulders in order to get a clearer view of the valley.” - Criss Jami

141. “Those who don't know must learn from those who do.” - Plato

142. “..English teachers often take a right-wrong stance. I'd rather my students take a thinking stance.” - Jeff Anderson

143. “When I act tough they listen politely till the spasm passes. They know.” - Frank McCourt