Education is a journey, a continual path of discovery that unlocks potential and shapes future generations. Throughout history, educators, thinkers, and leaders have shared profound insights into the transformative power of learning. In this post, we have curated a collection of 59 inspiring education quotes that capture the essence and importance of education. These quotes serve not only as a source of motivation for students and teachers alike but also as a reminder of the lifelong impact education can have on our lives. Join us as we explore these timeless words of wisdom that continue to inspire a love for learning across the globe.
1. “Instruction does much, but encouragement everything."(Letter to A.F. Oeser, Nov. 9, 1768)” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
2. “The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.” - T.H. White
3. “Man's right to know, to learn, to inquire, to make bona fide errors, to investigate human emotions must, by all means, be safe, if the word "freedom" should ever be more than an empty political slogan.” - Wilhelm Reich
4. “Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.” - C.S. Lewis
5. “nothing that is worth knowing can be taught” - Oscar Wilde
6. “There is, I believe, in every disposition a tendency to some particular evil, a natural defect, which not even the best education can overcome.""And your defect is a propensity to hate everybody.""And yours," he replied with a smile, "is wilfully to misunderstand them.” - Jane Austen
7. “A child's education should begin at least 100 years before he was born.” - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
8. “A lecture has been well described as the process whereby the notes of the teacher become the notes of the student without passing through the mind of either.” - Mortimer J. Adler
9. “Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not. It is the first lesson that ought to be learned and however early a man's training begins, it is probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.” - Thomas Henry Huxley
10. “Orang yang baca banyak buku kayak kamu dan menguasai sejarah nggak mungkin bodoh. Kamu cuma sial karena hidup di tempat dan waktu yang salah. Tempat dan waktu ketika kamu dianggap bodoh kalau kamu nggak pintar dalam hal yang namanya sains.” - Windhy Puspitadewi
11. “A homeless man visited my store today. The few quarters that he had in his pocket he invested on books. I offered him free books, but he insisted on giving me his quarters. He walked away filled with joy as if he possessed the world's riches in his hands. In a way, he did. He left me smiling and knowing that he was wealthier than many others... (01-21-10)” - Besa Kosova
12. “Education isn't for getting a job. It's about developing yourself as a human being.” - Liz Berry
13. “Osama, baah!" Bashir roared."Osama is not a product of Pakistan or Afghanistan. He is a creation of America. Thanks to America, Osama is in every home. As a military man, I know you can never fight and win against someone who can shoot at you once and then run off and hide while you have to remain eternally on guard. You have to attack the source of your enemy's strength. In America's case, that's not Osama or Saddam or anyone else. The enemy is ignorance. That only way to defeat it is to build relationships with these people, to draw them into the modern world with education and business. Otherwise the fight will go on forever.” - Greg Mortenson
14. “These days, many well-meaning school districts bring together teachers, coaches, curriculum supervisors, and a cast of thousands to determine what skills your child needs to be successful. Once these "standards" have been established, pacing plans are then drawn up to make sure that each particular skill is taught at the same rate and in the same way to all children. This is, of course, absurd. It gets even worse when one considers the very real fact that nothing of value is learned permanently by a child in a day or two.” - Rafe Esquith
15. “Combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought.” - Albert Einstein
16. “One cannot expect positive results from an educational or political action program which fails to respect the particular view of the world held by the people. Such a program constitutes cultural invasion, good intentions notwithstanding.” - Paulo Freire
17. “We are training not isolated men but a living group of men, - nay, a group within a group. And the final product of our training must be neither a psychologist nor a brickmason, but a man. And to make men, we must have ideals, broad, pure, and inspiring ends of living, - not sordid money-getting, not apples of gold. The worker must work for the lory of his handiwork, not simply for pay; the thinker must think for truth, not for fame. And all this is gained only by human strife and longing; by ceaseless training and education; by founding Right on righteousness and Truth on the unhampered search for Truth...and weaving thus a system, not a distortion, and bringing a birth, not an abortion.” - W. E. B. DuBois
18. “Words are, like wines.” - Santosh Kalwar
19. “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
20. “The older I grow, the more I am convinced that there is no education which one can get from books and costly apparatus that is equal to that which can be gotten from contact with great men and women.” - Booker T. Washington
21. “Don't try to make children grow up to be like you, or they may do it.” - Russell Baker
22. “Os homens têm experiência de séculos a mais que as mulheres em: malsentir, antever e precaver. Quando levadas ao mundo do trabalho "masculino", as mulheres aceleram seu desenvolvimento nessa mesma direção e, dessa forma, as crianças estão deixando de aprender a amar, ou, ao menos, se afeiçoar.” - Carlos Messa
23. “It is the mark of a truly educated man to know what not to read.” - Ezra Taft Benson
24. “Education is the preparation of a child intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, and physically for life and for eternity.” - Kevin Swanson
25. “I had always insisted that a good education was a synthesis of book learning and involvement in social action, that each enriched the other. I wanted my students to know that the accumulation of knowledge, while fascinating in itself, is not sufficient as long as so many people in the world have no opportunity to experience that fascination.” - Howard Zinn
26. “There are so many charlatans in the world of education. They teach for a couple of years, come up with a few clever slogans, build their websites, and hit the lecture circuit. In this fast-food-society, simple solutions to complex problems are embraced far too often. We can do better. I hope that people who read this book realize that true excellence takes sacrifice, mistakes, and enormous amounts of effort. After all, there are no shortcuts.” - Rafe Esquith
27. “The task of all Christian scholarship—not just biblical studies—is to study reality as a manifestation of God’s glory, to speak and write about it with accuracy, and to savor the beauty of God in it, and to make it serve the good of man. It is an abdication of scholarship when Christians do academic work with little reference to God. If all the universe and everything in it exist by the design of an infinite, personal God, to make his manifold glory known and loved, then to treat any subject without reference to God’s glory is not scholarship but insurrection.” - John Piper
28. “I want my children to understand the world, but not just because the world is fascinating and the human mind is curious. I want them to understand it so that they will be positioned to make it a better place” - Howard Gardner
29. “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
30. “His education had been neither scientific nor classical—merely “Modern.” The severities both of abstraction and of high human tradition had passed him by: and he had neither peasant shrewdness nor aristocratic honour to help him. He was a man of straw, a glib examinee in subjects that require no exact knowledge (he had always done well on Essays and General Papers) and the first hint of a real threat to his bodily life knocked him sprawling.” - C.S. Lewis
31. “If we take the position that an assessment that veganism is morally preferable to vegetarianism is not possible because we are all “on our own journey,” then moral assessment becomes completely impossible or is speciesist. It is impossible because if we are all “on our own journey,” then there is nothing to say to the racist, sexist, anti-semite, homophobe, etc. If we say that those forms of discrimination are morally bad, but, with respect to animals, we are all “on our own journey” and we cannot make moral assessments about, for instance, dairy consumption, then we are simply being speciesist and not applying the same moral analysis to nonhumans that we apply to the human context.” - GaryLFrancione
32. “In order to fix it, you need a passionate anger about something that doesn't work well.” - James Dyson
33. “I would say, then, that you are faced with a future in which education is going to be number one amongst the great world industries.” - Richard Buckminster Fuller
34. “It is the present living generation that gives character and spirit to the next. Hence the paramount importance of accomplished and energetic teachers in forming the taste the manners and the character of the coming age.” - Alexander Campbell
35. “...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
36. “No mathematician in the world would bother making these senseless distinctions: 2 1/2 is a "mixed number " while 5/2 is an "improper fraction." They're EQUAL for crying out loud. They are the exact same numbers and have the exact same properties. Who uses such words outside of fourth grade?” - Paul Lockhart
37. “I suppose I was lucky enough to be educated at a time when teachers still thought children could handle knowledge. They trusted us. Then there came a time when they decided that because not every kid in the class could understand or remember those things they wouldn't teach them anymore because it wasn't fair on the less good ones. So they withheld knowledge. Then I suppose the next lot of teachers didn't have the knowledge to withhold.” - Sebastian Faulks
38. “... what you learn today, for no reason at all, will help you discover all the wonderful secrets of tomorrow.” - Norton Juster
39. “Decide that you like college life. In your dorm you meet many nice people. Some are smarter than you. And some, you notice, are dumber than you. You will continue, unfortunately, to view the world in exactly these terms for the rest of your life.” - Lorrie Moore
40. “Give a man a hoe and he is something to exploit. Give him a book and he is something to fear.” - Eric Burns
41. “You go to school everyday. Folks who think they've learned everything they need to know are usually dumber than chickens.” - Jodi Thomas
42. “A wise teacher learns in the midst of teaching; a wise student teaches in the midst of learning.” - Mollie Marti
43. “Everything I do is kind of a lesson, even if I am the only person who learns it.” - Taylor Mali
44. “In trying to justify the humanities, as in trying to live a life, what may turn out to matter most is holding one's nerve.” - Stefan Collini
45. “When it comes to the education of our young, this privilege should only be given to those whose visions are solely in the uplifting benefit of the child. There is no room for the ego in the education of children! Children should not be looked after, nor educated, by those who have not made a sacrifice within their hearts, laying down their own personal agenda and dreams, for the total ascension of the child. Even if you are to educate the children simply sitting under a tree; if you have the vision and the heart of a sage, those children will grow to be mighty men and women under your watch! And even if you wine and dine the children, putting them up in a palace; if you do not have the vision and the selfless heart of a sage, all you do is in utter vanity!” - C. JoyBell C.
46. “Wrote my way out of the hood...thought my way out of poverty! Don't tell me that knowledge isn't power. Education changes everything.” - Brandi L. Bates
47. “Childhood’s work is learning, and it is in his play...that the child works at his job.” - Caroline Pratt
48. “Children do not grow up all of a piece; look for the child of seven, especially to take many backward glances at the way he has come, while bounds and leaps unevenly ahead in his growth.” - Caroline Pratt
49. “From the earliest days, we knew that it was not possible to do good work with the little children without the help of their parents.” - Caroline Pratt
50. “Quando os graduados [das] famosas escolas inglesas saíam com 18 ou 19 anos para Oxford ou Cambridge, possuíam uma segunda personalidade: normalizada, não sem atrativos, mas artificial - semelhante às árvores podadas dos jardins barrocos franceses.(...)O sistema educativo está mais do que testado e raramente falha. Exerce forças poderosas e terríveis, e o seu poder de sugestão é quase irresistível. Um ou outro poderá quebrar perante a sua força, mas a maioria sobrevive à sua dureza e torna-se mais ou menos solícito, mais ou menos completo, formado e marcado pelo sistema. Anos mais tarde olham em retrospectiva para os anos de escola como se tivessem sido os mais felizes da sua vida.” - Sebastian Haffner
51. “A child who passes through many hands in turn, can never be well brought up. At every change he makes a secret comparison, which continually tends to lessen his respect for those who control him, and with it their authority over him. If once he thinks there are grown-up people with no more sense than children the authority of age is destroyed and his education is ruined.” - Jean Jacques Rousseau
52. “Some know the value of education by having it. I know it's value by not having it.” - Frederick Douglass
53. “If all you had was academic ability, you wouldn't have been able to get out of bed this morning. In fact, there wouldn't have been a bad to get out of. No one could have made one. You could have written about possibility of one, but not have constructed it.” - Ken Robinson
54. “There is no shame in not knowing your history, the shame lies in not finding out.” - Habeeb Akande
55. “They (teenage boys)don’t really listen to speeches or talks. They absorb incrementally, through hours and hours of observation.” - Rob Lowe
56. “When Scythrop grew up, he was sent, as usual, to a public school, where a little learning was painfully beaten into him, and from thence to the university, where it was carefully taken out of him; and he was sent home like a well-threshed ear of corn, with nothing in his head.” - Thomas Love Peacock
57. “Dwelling much on the contemplation of little things, [we] are in danger of losing the intellectual appetite.” - L.H. Sigourney
58. “This is my worst fear. It’s not keeping my students safe from terrorists, it’s knowing what to do when the Chaplain comes to take Johnny out of class because not letting the terrorists win means sometimes the good guys are going to die. And those good guys have kids, and they’re sitting in my classroom.” - Tucker Elliot
59. “You cannot change another person's mind or educate them; this they must do themselves.” - Bryant McGill
