70 Inspiring Teacher Quotes

Teachers hold a unique and pivotal role in shaping the future, guiding young minds with wisdom, patience, and inspiration. Their impact is profound, weaving through the lives of their students, leaving a legacy of knowledge and encouragement. To celebrate the incredible influence teachers have, we have gathered a collection of 70 inspiring quotes that encapsulate their dedication and passion. These words, from some of the greatest thinkers and educators, serve as a testament to the inspiring and transformative power of teaching. Whether you’re an educator seeking motivation, a student wanting to express gratitude, or simply someone who appreciates the art of teaching, these quotes are sure to resonate deeply.

1. “Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.” - Charles W. Eliot

2. “There are two kinds of teachers: the kind that fill you with so much quail shot that you can't move, and the kind that just gives you a little prod behind and you jump to the skies.” - Robert Frost

3. “Those who educate children well are more to be honored than they who produce them; for these only gave them life, those the art of living well.” - Aristotle

4. “My English teacher has no face. She has uncombed stringy hair that droops on her shoulders. The hair is black from her part to her ears and then neon orange to the frizzy ends. I can't decide if she had pissed off her hairdresser or is morphing into a monarch butterfly. I call her Hairwoman.” - Laurie Halse Anderson

5. “The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave anything out. I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language. Because of them I rode with Don Quixote and danced with Anna Karenina at a ball in St. Petersburg and lassoed a steer in "Lonesome Dove" and had nightmares about slavery in "Beloved" and walked the streets of Dublin in "Ulysses" and made up a hundred stories in the Arabian nights and saw my mother killed by a baseball in "A Prayer for Owen Meany." I've been in ten thousand cities and have introduced myself to a hundred thousand strangers in my exuberant reading career, all because I listened to my fabulous English teachers and soaked up every single thing those magnificent men and women had to give. I cherish and praise them and thank them for finding me when I was a boy and presenting me with the precious gift of the English language. ” - Pat Conroy

6. “The women I know with strong personalities, the ones who might have become generals or the heads of companies if they were men, become teachers. Teaching is a calling, too. And I've always thought that teachers in their way are holy--angles leading their flocks out of the darkness.” - Jeannette Walls

7. “Fifty?” Harry gasped.“Fifty points each,” said Professor McGonagall, breathing heavily.“Professor — please —”“You can’t —”“Don’t tell me what I can and can’t do, Potter. I’ve never been more ashamed of Gryffindor students.” - J.K. Rowling

8. “They inspire you, they entertain you, and you end up learning a ton even when you don't know it” - Nicholas Sparks

9. “The world gives us PLENTY of opportunities to strengthen our patience. While this truth can definitely be challenging, this is a good thing. Patience is a key that unlocks the door to a more fulfilling life. It is through a cultivation of patience that we become better parents, powerful teachers, great businessmen, good friends, and a live a happier life.” - Steve Maraboli

10. “The VoiceThere is a voice inside of youThat whispers all day long,"I feel this is right for me,I know that this is wrong."No teacher, preacher, parent, friendOr wise man can decideWhat's right for you--just listen toThe voice that speaks inside.” - Shel Silverstein

11. “The great teachers fill you up with hope and shower you with a thousand reasons to embrace all aspects of life. I wanted to follow Mr. Monte around for the rest of my life, learning everything he wished to share of impart, but I didn't know how to ask.” - Pat Conroy

12. “We, Equality 7-2521, were not happy in those year in the Home of the Students. It was not that the learning was too hard for us. It was that the learning was too easy. This is a great sin, to be born with a head which is too quick. It is not good to be different from our brothers, but it is evil to be superior to them. The Teachers told us so, and they frowned when they looked at us.” - Ayn Rand

13. “The real heroes are the librarians and teachers who at no small risk to themselves refuse to lie down and play dead for censors.” - Bruce Coville

14. “Once in a while our school has half days, and the teachers spend the afternoon 'in service,' which I think must be a group therapy for having to deal with us.” - Neal Shusterman

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

16. “I recall once seeing a commentary advertised as having been written in prison without recourse to other commentaries and by reliance on the Holy Spirit alone. I doubt whether those last two phrases are complementary. If God has set teachers in the church (1 Cor. 12:28; Eph. 4:11) and many have written books, can good come out of ignoring them, let along parading that ignorance as glorifying God? God's work is never a one-man show. The one who represents the visible part of the iceberg must ever ackowledge his or her debt to others. I like to remember that the First Epistle to the Corinthians was from Paul and Sosthenes (1 Cor. 1:1) and that the Epistle to the Colossians was from Paul and Timothy.” - Leslie Allen

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

18. “What the teacher is, is more important than what he teaches.” - Karl Menninger

19. “You'll have a good, secure life when being alive means more to you than security, love more than money, your freedom more than public or partisan opinion, when the mood of Beethoven's or Bach's music becomes the mood of your whole life … when your thinking is in harmony, and no longer in conflict, with your feelings … when you let yourself be guided by the thoughts of great sages and no longer by the crimes of great warriors … when you pay the men and women who teach your children better than the politicians; when truths inspire you and empty formulas repel you; when you communicate with your fellow workers in foreign countries directly, and no longer through diplomats...” - Wilhelm Reich

20. “The teachers complain that the students today are all lazy, ignorant, and stupid. But the truth is that you're smarter than they are. You're not even old enough to drive and you already know that none of this matters.” - Charles Benoit

21. “Because teachers, no matter how kind, no matter how friendly, are sadistic and evil to the core.” - Heather Brewer

22. “Professors go batty too, perhaps more often than other people, although owing to their profession, their madness is less often remarked. ” - Michael Gruber

23. “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” - Hilary Swank

24. “The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught.” - Henry Adams

25. “She'll soon forget.""Caddy," said Saffron impatiently, "she is headmistress of the private school! She's probably never forgotten anything in her whole life!” - Hilary McKay

26. “In my ten years of teaching I’ve noticed that teachers tend to have a bad habit of talking to themselves. I hypothesize that this is because we talk for a living, and we feel safe speaking our feelings aloud. Or it could be that most of us, especially the high school teacher variety, are just weird as shit.” - P.C. Cast

27. “I am indebted to my father for living, but to my teacher for living well.{His teacher was the legendary philosopher Aristotle}” - Alexander the Great

28. “You can't stop a teacher when they want to do something. They just do it.” - J.D. Salinger

29. “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

30. “True patience is grounded in wisdom & compassion.” - Allan Lokos

31. “You don't have to think too hard when you talk to teachers.” - J.D. Salinger

32. “People cited violation of the First Amendment when a New Jersey schoolteacher asserted that evolution and the Big Bang are not scientific and that Noah's ark carried dinosaurs. This case is not about the need to separate church and state; it's about the need to separate ignorant, scientifically illiterate people from the ranks of teachers.” - Neil deGrasse Tyson

33. “New teachers were just a part of life, for a few days after one arrived, squawks of interest were emitted from various corners, but then they died away as the teacher was absorbed like everyone else...before you knew it, the fresh ones seemed to have been teaching there forever too, or else they didn't last very long, and were gone before you'd gotten to know them.” - Meg Wolitzer

34. “But it had no doubt sprung from true emotion, for all that parents ever wanted, really, was for you to love their child the way they did.” - Meg Wolitzer

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

36. “Teachers dread nothing so much as unusual characteristics in precocious boys during the initial stages of their adolescence. A certain streak of genius makes an ominous impression on them, for there exists a deep gulf between genius and the teaching profession. Anyone with a touch of genius seems to his teachers a freak from the very first. As far as teachers are concerned, they define young geniuses as those who are bad, disrespectful, smoke at fourteen, fall in love at fifteen, can be found at sixteen hanging out in bars, read forbidden books, write scandalous essays, occasionally stare down a teacher in class, are marked in the attendance book as rebels, and are budding candidates for room-arrest. A schoolmaster will prefer to have a couple of dumbheads in his class than a single genius, and if you regard it objectively, he is of course right. His task is not to produce extravagant intellects but good Latinists, arithmeticians and sober decent folk. The question of who suffers more acutely at the other's hands - the teacher at the boy's, or vice versa - who is more of a tyrant, more of a tormentor, and who profanes parts of the other's soul, student or teacher, is something you cannot examine without remembering your own youth in anger and shame. yet that's not what concerns us here. We have the consolation that among true geniuses the wounds almost always heal. As their personalities develop, they create their art in spite of school. Once dead, and enveloped by the comfortable nimbus of remoteness, they are paraded by the schoolmasters before other generations of students as showpieces and noble examples. Thus the struggle between rule and spirit repeats itself year after year from school to school. The authorities go to infinite pains to nip the few profound or more valuable intellects in the bud. And time and again the ones who are detested by their teachers are frequently punished, the runaways and those expelled, are the ones who afterwards add to society's treasure. But some - and who knows how many? - waste away quiet obstinacy and finally go under.” - Hermann Hesse

37. “Teaching is a calling too. And I've always thought that teachers in their way are holy - angels leading their flocks out of the darkness.” - Jeannette Walls

38. “In large part, we are teachers precisely because we remember what it was like to be a student. Someone inspired us. Someone influenced us. Or someone hurt us. And we’ve channeled that joy (or pain) into our own unique philosophies on life and learning and we’re always looking for an opportunity to share them—with each other, our students, parents, or in our communities.” - Tucker Elliot

39. “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

40. “The older I got, the smarter my teachers became.” - Ally Carter

41. “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

42. “If you don't read, I don't know how to communicate with you...I can never express who I am in my own words as powerfully as my books can.” - Donalyn Miller

43. “Here, let me break it down for you,so you know what I say is true:Teachers? Teachers make a difference! Now what about you?” - Taylor Mali

44. “Simply put, the best teachers are the ones you work your tail off for because in the end you just don't want them to think any less of you. You want and need their approval.” - Taylor Mali

45. “By the time these students enter the workforce, many of the jobs they will apply for ill be in industries that don't even exist yet. That's a hard future to prepare someone for. Teachers have their sights set on the real goal: not to produce Ivy League graduates, but to encourage the development of naturally curious, confident, flexible, and happy learners who are ready for whatever the future has in store.” - Taylor Mali

46. “That's what teaching is, the art of explanation: presenting the right information in the right order in a memorable way.” - Taylor Mali

47. “Teachers shouldn't make the mistake of always thinking they're the smartest person in the room” - Taylor Mali

48. “The only thing that surprises me is the characterization of teachers as lazy and greedy. Only someone with very little understanding of what teaching requires would say such a thing.” - Taylor Mali

49. “Certainly teachers themselves can do a better job of letting the world know how hard their profession is, but frankly, they have real work to do and a lot of it, so they don't have a whole lot of free time on their hands.” - Taylor Mali

50. “I know what you are known as . . . but to me, you will always be Tom Riddle. It is one of the irritating things about old teachers. I am afraid that they never quite forget their charges’ youthful beginnings.” - J.K. Rowling

51. “The educator has the duty of not being neutral.” - Paulo Freire

52. “We are more than role models for our students; we are leaders and teachers of both an academic curriculum and a social curriculum.” - Patricia Sequeira Belvel

53. “It is said, in a fire, everyone runs away from it save for the fireman who run towards it. When dealing with students, be the fireman.” - Patricia Sequeira Belvel

54. “I don't care who the student is, teachers should never be condescending. That should be the first rule in the teacher handbook.” - Colleen Hoover

55. “Roger Collins wasn’t the most popular teacher at school only because he was interesting in class. In fact, most of the girls would have loved a little after-class attention from this teacher.” - Francine Pascal

56. “There is nothing more valuable then God's widsom. HIS teachers are sometimes the most unlikely people.” - Shannon Alder

57. “Can teachers successfully educate children to think for themselves if teachers are not treated as professionals who think for themselves?” - Diane Ravitch

58. “But by the end of two years, most have either changed careers or moved to suburban schools - a consequence of low pay, a lack of support from the educational bureaucracy, and a pervasive feeling of isolation.” - Barack Obama

59. “Regard mistakes as teachers, not judges!” - Tae Yun Kim

60. “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

61. “We need teachers. We need to be teachers. Knowing when for each, is wisdom” - Rick Beneteau

62. “Before I started (college), that's the advice my dad gave me. He said to pick classes based on the teacher whenever you can, not the subject...his point was that good teachers are priceless. They inspire you, they entertain you, and you end up learning a ton even when you don't know it.” - Nicholas Sparks

63. “They say faith is taking the first step when you can’t see the whole staircase. Actually, wisdom is seeing the elevator behind it that would have taken you to the top floor.” - Shannon L. Alder

64. “I have noticed that teachers get exciting confused with boring a lot.” - Sara Pennypacker

65. “Some teachers, the less effective ones, thought that fair meant distributing instruction equally to all students regardless of their needs. The exemplary teachers we studied, however thought fair meant working in ways that evened out differences between students” - Richard Allington

66. “We don’t know anything about silent sages, buried knowledge, the eye of the mute poet, serene seers, yet how many talkative destroyers, prophets and ideologues, teachers and beautifiers there are on the other side.” - Dejan Stojanovic

67. “Go ye, who rest so placidly upon the sacred Bard who had been young, and when he strung his harp was old, and had never seen the righteous forsaken, or his seed begging their bread; go, Teachers of content and honest pride, into the mine, the mill, the forge, the squalid depths of deepest ignorance, and uttermost abyss of man's neglect, and say can any hopeful plant spring up in air so foul that it extinguishes the soul's bright torch as fast as it is kindled!” - Charles Dickens

68. “The most intriguing people you will encounter in this life are the people who had insights about you, that you didn't know about yourself.” - Shannon L. Alder

69. “Those who can do, those who can't teach.” - George Bernard Shaw

70. “Today, girls,' said Miss Renshaw, 'we shall go out into the beautiful Gardens and think about death.” - Ursula Dubosarsky