33 Inspirational Teaching Quotes

In the ever-evolving landscape of education, teachers often seek inspiration to ignite passion and foster a nurturing environment for their students. Words of wisdom from educational pioneers, philosophers, and contemporary thinkers can serve as a beacon of motivation, encouraging educators to persevere and innovate. In this post, we’ve gathered a curated selection of 33 inspirational teaching quotes. Each quote holds the power to renew your enthusiasm, reflect on your teaching journey, and reaffirm the profound impact you have on shaping the minds of tomorrow. Whether you're a seasoned educator or just beginning your career, these powerful insights are sure to inspire and energize your classroom endeavors.

1. “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

2. “In learning you will teach, and in teaching you will learn.” - Phil Collins

3. “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

4. “If you look at your class as anything less than life or death, you do not deserve to be a teacher. If you walk into the classroom ten minutes late, week after week, you need to resign. You wouldn't come in late on your job all the time, but I venture to guess that some of you do it on Sunday.” - Bill Wilson

5. “So you'll teach me?" Val asked.Ravus nodded agin. "I will make you as terrible as you desire.""I don't want to be - ," she started, but he held up his hand."I know you're very brave," he said."Or stupid.""And stupid. Brave and Stupid." Ravus smiled, but then his smile sagged. "But nothing can stop you from being terrible once you've learned how.” - Holly Black

6. “Consider now the primal scene of education in the modern elementary school. Let us assume that a teacher wishes to inform a class of some 20 pupils about the structure of atoms, and that she plans to base the day's instruction on an analogy with the solar system. She knows that the instruction will be effective only to the extent that all the students in the class already know about the solar system. A good teacher would probably try to find out. 'Now, class, how many of you know about the solar system?' Fifteen hands go up. Five stay down. What is a teacher to do in this typical circumstance in the contemporary American school?"If he or she pauses to explain the solar system, a class period is lost, and 15 of the 20 students are bored and deprived of knowledge for that day. If the teacher plunges ahead with atomic structure, the hapless five—they are most likely to be poor or minority students—are bored, humiliated and deprived, because they cannot comprehend the teacher's explanation.” - E.D. Hirsch

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

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

9. “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

10. “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

11. “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

12. “Great teachers had great personalities and that the greatest teachers had outrageous personalities. I did not like decorum or rectitude in a classroom; I preferred a highly oxygenated atmosphere, a climate of intemperance, rhetoric, and feverish melodrama. And I wanted my teachers to make me smart. A great teacher is my adversary, my conqueror, commissioned to chastise me. He leaves me tame and grateful for the new language he has purloined from other kings whose granaries are filled and whose libraries are famous. He tells me that teaching is the art of theft: of knowing what to steal and from whom. Bad teachers do not touch me; the great ones never leave me. They ride with me during all my days, and I pass on to others what they have imparted to me. I exchange their handy gifts with strangers on trains, and I pretend the gifts are mine. I steal from the great teachers. And the truly wonderful thing about them is they would applaud my theft, laugh at the thought of it, realizing they had taught me their larcenous skills well.” - Pat Conroy

13. “There are many teachers who could ruin you. Before you know it you could be a pale copy of this teacher or that teacher. You have to evolve on your own.” - Berenice Abbott

14. “Do they listen?"He held up a finger. "Every year one does," he said, ginning, "But that one makes it worthwhile. Even Jesus only did twelve. I try to get one a year.” - Abraham Verghese

15. “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

16. “Teachers have three loves: love of learning, love of learners, and the love of bringing the first two loves together.” - Scott Hayden

17. “Students never appreciate their teachers while they are learning. It is only later, when they know more of the world, that they understand how indebted they are to those who instructed them. Good teachers expect no praise or love from the young. They wait for it, and in time, it comes.” - Darren Shan

18. “[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

19. “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

20. “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

21. “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

22. “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

23. “The teacher is of course an artist, but being an artist does not mean that he or she can make the profile, can shape the students. What the educator does in teaching is to make it possible for the students to become themselves.” - Paulo Freire

24. “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

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

26. “The passion to teach, to share deeplyexperienced “lessons from life,” is embedded in all literature.” - Vera B. Williams

27. “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

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

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

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

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

32. “I was still learning when I taught my last class.” - Claude M. Fuess

33. “Children learn best when they like their teacher and they think their teacher likes them.” - Gordon Neufeld