Finding motivation and encouragement in the midst of school challenges can make all the difference. Whether you're a student, teacher, or parent, inspirational quotes have the power to uplift and inspire positive attitudes toward learning and growth. We've gathered a curated collection of the top 73 inspirational school quotes to help spark determination, resilience, and a love for education in everyone’s journey.
1. “Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: 'You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.” - Doris Lessing
2. “Public education was not founded to give society what it wants. Quite the opposite.” - May Sarton
3. “Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes. I personally resent it bitterly.” - Isaac Asimov
4. “It's easier to floss with barbed wire than admit you like someone in middle school.” - Laurie Halse Anderson
5. “THE FIRST TEN LIES THEY TELL YOU IN HIGH SCHOOL 1. We are here to help you. 2. You will have time to get to your class before the bell rings. 3. The dress code will be enforced. 4. No smoking is allowed on school grounds. 5. Our football team will win the championship this year. 6. We expect more of you here. 7. Guidance counselors are always available to listen. 8. Your schedule was created with you in mind. 9. Your locker combination is private. 10. These will be the years you look back on fondly. TEN MORE LIES THEY TELL YOU IN HIGH SCHOOL 1. You will use algebra in your adult lives. 2. Driving to school is a privilege that can be taken away. 3. Students must stay on campus during lunch. 4. The new text books will arrive any day now. 5. Colleges care more about you than your SAT scores. 6. We are enforcing the dress code. 7. We will figure out how to turn off the heat soon. 8. Our bus drivers are highly trained professionals. 9. There is nothing wrong with summer school. 10. We want to hear what you have to say.” - Laurie Halse Anderson
6. “School prepares you for the real world... which also bites.” - Jim Benton
7. “Fifth grade was fourth grade with something wrong. Nothing changed outright. Instead it teetered. You'd pushed futility at Public School 38 so long by then you expected the building itself would be embarrassed and quit. The ones who couldn't read still couldn't, the teachers were teaching the same thing for the fifth time now and refusing to meet your eyes, some kids had been left back twice and were the size of janitors. The place was a cage for growing, nothing else. School lunch turned out to be the five-year-plan, the going concern. You couldn't be left back from fish sticks and sloppy joes. You'd retain at the least two thousand half-pint containers of vitamin D-enriched chocolate milk.Two black guys from the projects, twins, were actually named Ronald and Donald MacDonald. The twins themselves only shrugged, couldn't be made to agree it was incredible.” - Jonathan Lethem
8. “To be changed by ideas was pure pleasure. But to learn ideas that ran counter to values and beliefs learned at home was to place oneself at risk, to enter the danger zone. Home was the place where I was forced to conform to someone else’s image of who and what I should be. School was the place where I could forget that self and, through ideas, reinvent myself.” - bell hooks
9. “Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.” - Edmund Burke
10. “You can't eat straight A's.” - Maxine Hong Kingston
11. “I'd had nearly four years of experience looking at these clocks, but their sluggishness never ceased to surprise. If I am ever told that I have one day to live, I will head straight to the hallowed halls of Winter Park High School, where a day has been known to last a thousand years.” - John Green
12. “I was also sick of my neighbors, as most Parisians are. I now knew every second of the morning routine of the family upstairs. At 7:00 am alarm goes off, boom, Madame gets out of bed, puts on her deep-sea divers’ boots, and stomps across my ceiling to megaphone the kids awake. The kids drop bags of cannonballs onto the floor, then, apparently dragging several sledgehammers each, stampede into the kitchen. They grab their chunks of baguette and go and sit in front of the TV, which is always showing a cartoon about people who do nothing but scream at each other and explode. Every minute, one of the kids cartwheels (while bouncing cannonballs) back into the kitchen for seconds, then returns (bringing with it a family of excitable kangaroos) to the TV. Meanwhile the toilet is flushed, on average, fifty times per drop of urine expelled. Finally, there is a ten-minute period of intensive yelling, and at 8:15 on the dot they all howl and crash their way out of the apartment to school.” (p.137)” - Stephen Clarke
13. “School should be the best party in town” - Peter Kline
14. “What is the most important thing one learns in school? Self-esteem, support, and friendship.” - Terry Tempest Williams
15. “I expect that you must receive top marks at school, young lady."Madeleine smiled as she stirred her tea. "There are always rewards for those who state the obvious frequently and with conviction.” - Scott Westerfeld
16. “What I Found in My DeskA ripe peach with an ugly bruise,a pair of stinky tennis shoes,a day-old ham-and-cheese on rye,a swimsuit that I left to dry,a pencil that glows in the dark,some bubble gum found in the park,a paper bag with cookie crumbs,an old kazoo that barely hums,a spelling test I almost failed,a letter that I should have mailed,and one more thing, I must confess,a note from teacher: Clean This Mess!!!!” - Bruce Lansky
17. “InsomniaI cannot get to sleep tonight.I toss and turn and flop.I try to count some fluffy sheepwhile o'er a fence they hop.I try to think of pleasant dreamsof places really cool.I don't know why I cannot sleep -I slept just fine at school.” - Kathy Kenney-Marshall
18. “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
19. “Mom, is the world coming to an end?" Jonny asked, picking up the plate of cookies and ramming one into his mouth."No, it isn'T," Mom said, folding her lawn chair and carrying it to the front of the house. "And yes, you do have to go to school tomorrow.” - Susan Beth Pfeffer
20. “But after all we are not children, not illiterate juvenile delinquents, not English public school boys who after a night of homosexual romps have to endure the paradox of reading the Ancients in expurgated versions.” - Vladimir Nabokov
21. “I found my mind wandering at games; loved boxing and was good at it; and in summer, having chosen rowing instead of cricket, lay peacefully by the Stour, well upstream of the rhythmic creaking and the exhortation, reading Lily Christine and Gibbon and gossiping with kindred lotus-eaters under the willow-branches.” - Patrick Leigh Fermor
22. “High School: Oh, man. This is where boys and girls go from tweens to teens and become complicated and cruel. Girls play sick mind games; boys try to pull each other's penises off and throw them in the bushes. If you can, buy the most expensive jeans in a two-hundred-mile radius of your town and wear them on your first day. If anyone asks how you could afford them say that your father is the president of Ashton Kutcher. When they are like, 'Ashton Kutcher has a president?' answer, 'Yes.' Everyone will be in awe of you and you won't have to go through a lot of pain and cat fights.” - Eugene Mirman
23. “Robert said, "This is great, huh? Sorry to butt in and everything, but I really need the extra points. For my grade."Ben nodded and tried to smile. Right, for his grade. He probably wanted to get an A++ in social studies instead of just an A+” - Andrew Clements
24. “You should be nicer to him,' a schoolmate had once said to me of some awfully ill-favored boy. 'He has no friends.' This, I realized with a pang of pity that I can still remember, was only true as long as everybody agreed to it.” - Christopher Hitchens
25. “In a school community, someone who reads a book for some secretive purpose, other than discussing it, is strange. What was she reading for?” - John Irving
26. “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
27. “If I were to draw on a paper what gym does for me, I would make one dot and then I would erase it.” - Elizabeth Berg
28. “I stuff my mouth with old fabric and scream until there are no sounds left under my skin.” - Laurie Halse Anderson
29. “Schools and schoolmasters, as we have them today, are not popular as places of education and teachers, but rather prisons and turnkeys in which children are kept to prevent them disturbing and chaperoning their parent.” - George Bernard Shaw
30. “What teachers and the administration in that era never seemed to see was that the mental work of what they called daydreaming often required more effort and concentration than it would have taken simply to listen in class. Laziness is not the issue. It is just not the work dictated by the administration.” - David Foster Wallace
31. “Змейк умел приближать свой предмет через непосредственное сравнение с учениками и проведение прямых параллелей. «А вы плавитесь при гораздо меньших температурах», — говорил он спокойно, и Афарви с Двинвен, болтавшие на задней парте, вздрагивали, перехватывали пронзительный взгляд черных глаз Змейка и начинали слушать очень внимательно.” - Анна Коростелева
32. “I should have liked to be asked to say what I knew. They always tried to ask what I did not know. When I would have willingly displayed my knowledge, they sought to expose my ignorance. This sort of treatment had only one result: I did not do well in examinations” - Winston S. Churchill
33. “Sorry I'm late," Ms. Egami said to the class. She dropped her papers, which scattered in that special way papers do when one is running late.” - Adam Rex
34. “Education is the preparation of a child intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, and physically for life and for eternity.” - Kevin Swanson
35. “I furrowed my brows at him. What was so amazing about a stick? I could pick one up outside on the way to the car. “Let me guess, you’re Harry Potter and this is the school of Hogwarts. If I say Lumos will it light up?” - Brandi Salazar
36. “In a universe where all life is in movement, where ever fact seen in perspective is totally engaging, we impose stillness on lively young bodies, distort reality to dullness, make action drudgery. Those who submit - as the majority does - are conditioned to a life lived without their human birthright: work done with the joy and creativity of love.But what are schools for if not to make children fall so deeply in love with the world that they really want to learn about it? That is the true business of schools. And if they succeed in it, all other desirable developments follow of themselves.In a proper school, no fact would ever be presented as a soulless one, for the simple reason that there is no such thing. Every facet of reality, discovered where it lives, startles with its wonder, beauty, meaning.” - Marjorie Spock
37. “Shortly before school started, I moved into a studio apartment on a quiet street near the bustle of the downtown in one of the most self-conscious bends of the world. The “Gold Coast” was a neighborhood that stretched five blocks along the lake in a sliver of land just south of Lincoln Park and north of River North. The streets were like fine necklaces and strung together were the brownstone houses and tall condominiums and tiny mansions like pearls, and when the day broke and the sun faded away, their lights burned like jewels shining gaudily in the night. The world’s most elegant bazaar, Michigan Avenue, jutted out from its eastern tip near The Drake Hotel and the timeless blue-green waters of Lake Michigan pressed its shores. The fractious make-up of the people that inhabited it, the flat squareness of its parks and the hint of the lake at the ends of its tree-lined streets squeezed together a domesticated cesspool of age and wealth and standing. It was a place one could readily dress up for an expensive dinner at one of the fashionable restaurants or have a drink miles high in the lounge of the looming John Hancock Building and five minutes later be out walking on the beach with pants cuffed and feet in the cool water at the lake’s edge.” - Daniel Amory
38. “Should I have a doughnut or my disgusting cardboard?” asked Gwynn, as she drew up languidly before me at a study table in a bookstore on State Street, raising a puffed rice cake in the air. My eyes narrowed attentively at her face, but as I hesitated, she announced eagerly, “Disgusting cardboard it is!” - Daniel Amory
39. “I shuffle along, letting the current pull me, and i have the sense that I am like a rat caught in a maze of tunnels, moving endlessly toward some promise of...of what? Light? Life? Cheese?” - Lisa Ann Sandell
40. “Look, girls know when they’re cute,” he said. “You don’t have to tell them. All they need to do is look in the mirror. I have one friend out in New York, an attorney. She moved out there after the school year to take the bar. She doesn’t have a job. I was like, ‘How are you going to get a job there in this market?’ And she’s like, ‘I’ll wink and I’ll smile.’ She’s a pretty girl. Whether that works despite her poor grades is yet to be seen.” - Daniel Amory
41. “I don’t think I’ve ever referred to any girl I dated as my girlfriend. I think that would freak me out. Even the girl that I dated for two years in college I don’t think I ever referred to her as my girlfriend.”“How would you introduce her?” I asked.“I’m just going to say her name,” he said.” - Daniel Amory
42. “I remember when I was twenty-five,” he said. “No client comes to you when you’re twenty-five. It’s like when you are looking for a doctor. You don’t want the new one that just graduated. You don’t want the very old one, the one shaking, the one twenty years past his prime. You want the seasoned one who has done it so many times he can do it in his sleep though. Same thing with attorneys.” - Daniel Amory
43. “Knightley Academy stood out against the moonlight in silhouette, a ramshackle collection of chimneys, turrets and gables. Both boys stopped to take in the sight of the manicured lawns and tangled woods, the soaring chapel and the ivy-covered brick of the headmaster's house. They were home. For this, Henry felt, was home. Not some foreign castle encircled by guard towers, but this cozy, bizarre assortment of buildings with its gossiping kitchen maids and eccentric professors and clever students.” - Violet Haberdasher
44. “Teachers're always using that "in your own words." I hate that. Authors knit their sentences tight. It's their job. Why make us unpick them, just to put it back together more shonkily? How're you s'posed to say Kapellmeister if you can't say Kapellmeister?” - David Mitchell
45. “Most of the students there, he said, don't know what they think. You tell 'em, they'll think it. I plan to tell 'em.” - John Knowles
46. “A teacher who loves learning earns the right and the ability to help others learn.” - Ruth Beechick
47. “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
48. “Mr. Vey, you cannot be stuffed into a locker without your consent." Dallstrom said, which may be the dumbest thing ever said in a school. "You should have resisted. That's like blaming someone who was struck by lightning for getting in the way.” - Richard Paul Evans
49. “If you use a philosophy education well, you can get your foot in the door of any industry you please. Industries are like the blossoms on a tree while philosophy is the trunk - it holds the tree together, but it often goes unnoticed.” - Criss Jami
50. “He never reckoned much to schooling and that. He said you could learn most what was worth knowing from keeping your eyes and ears peeled. Best way of learning, he always said, was doing.” - Michael Morpurgo
51. “The more expensive a school is, the more crooks it has — I'm not kidding.” - J.D. Salinger
52. “Sometimes, in my world where parents hated one another and school was a battleground, it sucked to be me.” - Jennifer Brown
53. “I think that once you have a fair idea where you want to go, your first move will be to apply yourself in school.” - J.D. Salinger
54. “He saw her right after the seventh-period bell rang. She seemed dressed for the sole purpose of blending in with the lockers, but she stood out, anyway. It didn’t matter that her wide blue eyes were narrowed or that her pretty mouth was twisted into a near snarl — she was blatantly beautiful. It was kind of sick the way Ed was preoccupied with beautiful girls these days.He felt a little sorry for her. (He was also preoccupied with finding ways of feeling sorry for people.) She was new and trying hard not to look it. She was confused and trying to look tough. It was endearing is what it was.” - Francine Pascal
55. “Testing is not a substitute for curriculum and instruction. Good education cannot be achieved by a strategy of testing children, shaming educators, and closing schools.” - Diane Ravitch
56. “The child, unhampered, does not waste time.” - Caroline Pratt
57. “The societies kids naturally form are tribal. Gangs, clubs, packs. But we're herded into schools and terrified into behaving. Taught how we're supposed to pretend to be, taught to parrot all kinds of nonsense at the flick of a switch, taught to keep our heads down and our elbows in and shut off our minds and shut off our sex. We learn we can't even piss when we have to. That's how we learn to be plastic and dumb.” - Marge Piercy
58. “A classroom . People trying to stick me in classrooms was becoming as predictable and annoying as people trying to kill me, but with less-fun results.” - James Patterson
59. “The school is a mother” - Edmundo de Amicis
60. “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
61. “I can read. A little. I kind of protested it in School(TM). On the grounds that the silent 'E' is stupid.” - M.T. Anderson
62. “As you can see, I have memorized this utterly useless piece of information long enough to pass a test question. I now intend to forget it forever. You’ve taught me nothing except how to cynically manipulate the system. Congratulations.” - Bill Watterson
63. “Homework, I have discovered, involves a sharp pencil and thick books and long sighs.” - Katherine Applegate
64. “[On school uniforms] Don't these schools do enough damage making all these kids think alike, now they have to make them look alike too? It's not a new idea, either. I first saw it in old newsreels from the 1930s, but it was hard to understand because the narration was in German.” - George Carlin
65. “The central challenge for educational systems around the world is the substitution of effectiveness for popularity.” - Douglas B. Reeves
66. “It facilitates labor and thought so much that there is always the temptation in large schools to omit the endless task of meeting the wants of each single mind, and to govern by steam. But it is at frightful cost. Our modes of Education aim to expedite, to save labor; to do for masses what cannot be done for masses, what must be done reverently, one by one: say rather, the whole world is needed for the tuition of each pupil.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
67. “Gonzaga was the kind of place you’d not even think about loving until you’d left it for a couple of years.” - Pat Conroy
68. “There was no room for dust devils in the laws of physics, as least in the rigid form in which they were usually taught. There is a kind of unspoken collusion going on in mainstream science education: you get your competent but bored, insecure and hence stodgy teacher talking to an audience divided between engineering students, who are going to be responsible for making bridges that won’t fall down or airplanes that won’t suddenly plunge vertically into the ground at six hundred miles an hour, and who by definition get sweaty palms and vindictive attitudes when their teacher suddenly veers off track and begins raving about wild and completely nonintuitive phenomena; and physics students, who derive much of their self-esteem from knowing that they are smarter and morally purer than the engineering students, and who by definition don’t want to hear about anything that makes no fucking sense. This collusion results in the professor saying: (something along the lines of) dust is heavier than air, therefore it falls until it hits the ground. That’s all there is to know about dust. The engineers love it because they like their issues dead and crucified like butterflies under glass. The physicists love it because they want to think they understand everything. No one asks difficult questions. And outside the windows, the dust devils continue to gambol across the campus.” - Neal Stephenson
69. “Reading relaxes me.” - Elizabeth Newton
70. “If the old saying is true, that what one generation learns in school is the philosophy of the next, then the philosophy of the next generation will be totalitarianism.” - John Whitehead
71. “Each period had required me to be a slightly different person, and that was exhausting. I wondered if school had always felt this way and whether it was like this for everone.” - Gabrielle Zevin
72. “Many of our elected officials have virtually handed the keys to our schools over to corporate interests. Presidential commissions on education are commonly chaired by the executives of large companies.” - Alfie Kohn
73. “For a lack of education, a child's future may hold no fortune.” - Dennis E. Adonis
