78 Inspiring School Quotes

Inspiration is the cornerstone of a vibrant educational journey, fueling the minds of students and educators alike. Whether you're seeking to ignite a spark of curiosity, motivate perseverance, or simply brighten someone's day with a thoughtful expression, our curated collection of the top 78 inspiring school quotes offers the perfect blend of wisdom and encouragement. Dive into these timeless sayings that celebrate the transformative power of education and the relentless pursuit of knowledge, sure to leave a lasting impression on anyone who reads them.

1. “Instruction does much, but encouragement everything."(Letter to A.F. Oeser, Nov. 9, 1768)” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

2. “It's easier to floss with barbed wire than admit you like someone in middle school.” - Laurie Halse Anderson

3. “You know, sometimes kids get bad grades in school because the class moves too slow for them. Einstein got D's in school. Well guess what, I get F's!!!” - Bill Watterson

4. “Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.” - Jacques Barzun

5. “The human heart is my school.” - Anne Rice

6. “The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done; men and women who are creative, inventive and discoverers, who can be critical and verify, and not accept, everything they are offered.” - Jean Piaget

7. “If. If Mingus Rude could be kept in this place, kept somehow in Dylan's pocket, in his stinging, smudgy hands, then summer wouldn't give way to whatever came after. If. If. Fat chance. Summer on Dean Street had lasted one day and that day was over, it was dark out, had been for hours. The Williamsburg Savings Bank tower clock read nine-thirty in red-and-blue neon. Final score, a million to nothing. The million-dollar kid.Your school wasn't on fire, you were.” - Jonathan Lethem

8. “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

9. “The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn.” - Marcus Tullius Cicero

10. “We tilt our heads back and open wide. The snow drifts into our zombie mouths crawling with grease and curses and tobacco flakes and cavities and boyfriend/girlfriend juice, the stain of lies. For one moment we are not failed tests and broken condoms and cheating on essays; we are crayons and lunch boxes and swinging so high our sneakers punch holes in the clouds. For one breath everything feels better.Then it melts.The bus drivers rev their engines and the ice cloud shatters. Everyone shuffles forward. They don't know what just happened. They can't remember.” - Laurie Halse Anderson

11. “Prison for the crime of puberty -- that was how secondary school had seemed.” - David Brin

12. “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

13. “Colleges hate geniuses, just as convents hate saints.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

14. “School life is like being on a monkey mountain...monkeys in the same gang constantly fight and get back together again...and a hierarchy gets established.” - Shouko Akira

15. “With large industries throwing out the factory model as counterproductive, it is long past time for schools to do the same. I wonder how many adults would do well at dealing with different job requirements and a different boss every 47 minutes.” - Susan Ohanian

16. “They spent the first three years of school getting you to pretend stuff and then the rest of it marking you down if you did the same thing.” - Margaret Atwood

17. “The difference between school and life? In school, you're taught a lesson and then given a test. In life, you're given a test that teaches you a lesson.” - Tom Bodett

18. “As you can see, there are quite a number of things taught in school that one has to unlearn or at least correct.” - Ambeth Ocampo

19. “School made us 'literate' but did not teach us to read for pleasure.” - Ambeth Ocampo

20. “The idea for Maximum Ride come from the earlier books of mine called When the Wind Blows and The Lake House, which also feature a character named Max who escapes from a quiet despicable school. Most of the similarities end there. Max and the other kids in Maximum Ride are not the same Max and kids featured in those two books. nor do Frannie and Kit play any part in Maximum Ride. I hope you enjoy the ride anyways. ” - James Patterson

21. “However my mother had once said, ‘When you go to art school, you’ll find everybody sitting around practicing how to do their signature'; and sure enough, there they were, some of them doing just that.” - Richard Williams

22. “It is clearly absurd to limit the term 'education' to a person's formal schooling.” - Murray N. Rothbard

23. “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

24. “Because you live to love and love to live/ And because of what your heardrum will give/ Now we might love to live and live to love.” - Janet Goodfriend

25. “Forget the garden rake. Remember that time you dived over the desk at that guy in moot court? Had him by the throat in two seconds flat, that's what I heard.""You heard wrong.""And they suspended you for how long?" Antonia innocently asked."A day. And I apologized. Actually I crawled like a slug and ate dirt," Bree said ruefully. "But that was years ago, and have I pulled a stunt like that again? No, I have not.” - Mary Stanton

26. “My name is Percy Jackson. I'm twelve years old. Until a few months ago, I was a boarding student at Yancy Academy, a private school for troubled kids in upstate New York.Am I a troubled kid?Yeah. You could say that.” - Rick Riordan

27. “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

28. “Once you leave out all the bullshit they teach you in school, life gets really simple.” - George Carlin

29. “I am not your dear; I cannot lie down: send me to school soon, Mrs. Reed, for I hate to live here.” - Charlotte Brontë

30. “Do you know how to pick a lock?''Not in the least, I'm afraid.''I often wonder what we go to school for,' said Wimsey.” - Dorothy L. Sayers

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

32. “It was 1976.It was one of the darkest days of my life when that nurse, Mrs. Shimmer, pulled out a maxi pad that measured the width and depth of a mattress and showed us how to use it. It had a belt with it that looked like a slingshot that possessed the jaw-dropping potential to pop a man's head like a gourd. As she stretched the belt between the fingers of her two hands, Mrs. Shimmer told us becoming a woman was a magical and beautiful experience.I remember thinking to myself, You're damn right it had better be magic, because that's what it's going to take to get me to wear something like that, Tinkerbell! It looked like a saddle. Weighed as much as one, too. Some girls even cried.I didn't.I raised my hand."Mrs. Shimmer," I asked the cautiously, "so what kind of security napkins do boys wear when their flower pollinates? Does it have a belt, too?"The room got quiet except for a bubbling round of giggles."You haven't been paying attention, have you?" Mrs. Shimmer accused sharply. "Boys have stamens, and stamens do not require sanitary napkins. They require self control, but you'll learn that soon enough."I was certainly hoping my naughty bits (what Mrs. Shimmer explained to us was like the pistil of a flower) didn't get out of control, because I had no idea what to do if they did.” - Laurie Notaro

33. “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

34. “She turns to us, acts surprised to see us, then does the bit with the back of the hand to the forehead. "You're lost!" "You're angry!" "You're in the wrong school!" "You're in the wrong country!" "You're on the wrong planet!” - Laurie Halse Anderson

35. “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

36. “The quality of the relationships that students have in class with their peers and teachers is important to their success in school.” - Bob Pletka

37. “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

38. “School has become the world religion of a modernized proletariat, and makes futile promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age.” - Ivan Illich

39. “I must endure, fighting the temptation simply to become slack-jawed like most of my school 'peers' (they wish!), who will themselves into a collective, vacant, trancelike state for the duration of each class. (Although I sometimes secretly envy their ability to empty their minds completely for a full fifty minutes, reanimating only at the sound of a bell, like Pavlov's dogs...)” - Beth Fantaskey

40. “Don't forget to give Neville our love!' Ginny told James as she hugged him.'Mum! I can't give a professor love!''But you know Neville-'James rolled his eyes.'Outside, yeah, but at school he's Professor Longbottom, isn't he? I can't walk into Herbology and give him love....” - J.K. Rowling

41. “For Oscar, high school was the equivalent of a medieval spectacle, like being put in the stocks and forced to endure the peltings and outrages of a mob of deranged half-wits, an experience from which he supposed he should have emerged a better person, but that’s not really what happened—and if there were any lessons to be gleaned from the ordeal of those years he never quite figured out what they were. He walked into school every day like the fat lonely nerdy kid he was, and all he could think about was the day of his manumission, when he would at last be set free from its unending horror. Hey, Oscar, are there faggots on Mars?—Hey, Kazoo, catch this. The first time he heard the term moronic inferno he know exactly where it was located and who were its inhabitants.” - Junot Diaz

42. “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

43. “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

44. “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

45. “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

46. “Now, I have nothing against the public school system as it is presently organized, once you allow the humor of its basic assumption about how it is possible to teach things to children....” - Shirley Jackson

47. “When I went to school every teacher had a BOARD of education.” - Stanley Victor Paskavich

48. “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

49. “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

50. “When I was a schoolboy in England, the old bound volumes of Kipling in the library had gilt swastikas embossed on their covers. The symbol's 'hooks' were left-handed, as opposed to the right-handed ones of the Nazi hakenkreuz, but for a boy growing up after 1945 the shock of encountering the emblem at all was a memorable one. I later learned that in the mid-1930s Kipling had caused this 'signature' to be removed from all his future editions. Having initially sympathized with some of the early European fascist movements, he wanted to express his repudiation of Hitlerism (or 'the Hun,' as he would perhaps have preferred to say), and wanted no part in tainting the ancient Indian rune by association. In its origin it is a Hindu and Jainas symbol for light, and well worth rescuing.” - Christopher Hitchens

51. “A good education helps us make sense of the world and find our way in it” - Mike Rose

52. “The more expensive a school is, the more crooks it has — I'm not kidding.” - J.D. Salinger

53. “Stupid English.""English isn't stupid," I say."Well, my English teacher is." He makes a face. "Mr. Franklin assigned an essay about our favorite subject, and I wanted to write about lunch, but he won't let me.""Why not?""He says lunch isn't a subject."I glance at him. "It isn't.""Well," Jacob says, "it's not a predicate, either. Shouldn't he know that?” - Jodi Picoult

54. “I fancy my father thought me an odd child, and had little fondness for me; though he was very careful in fulfilling what he regarded as a parent's duties. But he was already past the middle of life, and I was not his only son. My mother had been his second wife, and he was five-and-forty when he married her. He was a firm, unbending, intensely orderly man, in root and stem a banker, but with a flourishing graft of the active landholder, aspiring to county influence: one of those people who are always like themselves from day to day, who are uninfluenced by the weather, and neither know melancholy nor high spirits. I held him in great awe, and appeared more timid and sensitive in his presence than at other times; a circumstance which, perhaps, helped to confirm him in the intention to educate me on a different plan from the prescriptive one with which he had complied in the case of my elder brother, already a tall youth at Eton. My brother was to be his representative and successor; he must go to Eton and Oxford, for the sake of making connexions, of course: my father was not a man to underrate the bearing of Latin satirists or Greek dramatists on the attainment of an aristocratic position. But intrinsically, he had slight esteem for "those dead but sceptred spirits"; having qualified himself for forming an independent opinion by reading Potter's Aeschylus, and dipping into Francis's Horace. To this negative view he added a positive one, derived from a recent connexion with mining speculations; namely, that scientific education was the really useful training for a younger son. Moreover, it was clear that a shy, sensitive boy like me was not fit to encounter the rough experience of a public school. Mr. Letherall had said so very decidedly. Mr. Letherall was a large man in spectacles, who one day took my small head between his large hands, and pressed it here and there in an exploratory, suspicious manner - then placed each of his great thumbs on my temples, and pushed me a little way from him, and stared at me with glittering spectacles. The contemplation appeared to displease him, for he frowned sternly, and said to my father, drawing his thumbs across my eyebrows -'The deficiency is there, sir-there; and here,' he added, touching the upper sides of my head, 'here is the excess. That must be brought out, sir, and this must be laid to sleep.'I was in a state of tremor, partly at the vague idea that I was the object of reprobation, partly in the agitation of my first hatred - hatred of this big, spectacled man, who pulled my head about as if he wanted to buy and cheapen it. ("The Lifted Veil")” - Mary Ann Evans

55. “Sometimes, in my world where parents hated one another and school was a battleground, it sucked to be me.” - Jennifer Brown

56. “You love tests?""Well, yeah. There are questions and answers. True or false, multiple choice, essay. What's not to love?” - Nora Roberts

57. “You show me a school with a principal behind the desk, and I'll show you a school without principal leadership. (Quoting Baruti Kafele)” - William Sterrett

58. “He smiled all the way to physics class. He almost laughed out loud when he passed through the door and saw her shadowy, hunched-over form casting around for a seat in the back.She was in his class; this was excellent. Maybe she’d call him a name if he struck up another conversation. Even curse him out. That might fun. God, he’d probably earn himself a restraining order if he tried to sit next to her.He was so tired of saccharine smiles and cloying tones of voice. People always plastered their eyes to his face for fear of looking anywhere else. He was fed up with everybody being so goddamned nice.That’s why he’d already fallen in love with this weird, maladjusted, beautiful girl who carried a chip the size of Ohio on her shoulder. Because nobody was ever mean to the guy in the wheelchair.” - Francine Pascal

59. “When we unnecessarily elongate the process of "learning to read," we postpone "reading to learn" - learning itself - by years.” - Mike Schmoker

60. “These programs and reading series are the fruit of an intellectually exhausted literacy industry that lost its way long ago, even as we mutely accepted its misguided agenda - to complicate reading and literacy so that we will purchase its programs and materials.” - Mike Schmoker

61. “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

62. “The school is a mother” - Edmundo de Amicis

63. “That empty sick feeling came over me again. In a big school it was easy to fade into the background, but I didn’t know if that would be possible here. I tried not to think about it anymore.” - Dana Michelle Burnett

64. “At school, everything feels weird. No one looks at me or pays attention to me, no one says hi, no one asks how I am feeling, and everyone is so quite. It’s like I don’t even exist.” - abraham m. alghanem

65. “Nein, die Schule hat keinen bestimmenden Einfluss auf meine Entwicklung gehabt. Die Schule hat von meinen besonderen Anlagen wohl instinktiv etwas gespürt, sie aber als obstinate Untauglichkeit gewertet und verworfen. Ein Lehrer drohte, zufällig nicht mir, sondern einem anderen Schüler, mit den Worten: "Ich werde dir deine Karriere schon verderben!" Am gleichen Tag las ich bei Storm den Spruch: "Was du immer kannst, zu werden, scheue Arbeit nicht und Wachen, aber hüte deine Seele vor dem Karrieremachen.” - Thomas Mann

66. “I said school starts tomorrow. I didn’t say I was going to be there.” - Kim Harrison

67. “The central challenge for educational systems around the world is the substitution of effectiveness for popularity.” - Douglas B. Reeves

68. “I confess myself utterly at a loss in suggesting particular reforms in our ways of teaching. No discretion that can be lodged with a school-committee, with the overseers or visitors of an academy, of a college, can at all avail to reach these difficulties and perplexities, but they solve themselves when we leave institutions and address individuals.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

69. “What grinds me the most is we're sending kids out into the world who don't know how to balance a checkbook, don't know how to apply for a loan, don't even know how to properly fill out a job application, but because they know the quadratic formula we consider them prepared for the world`With that said, I'll admit even I can see how looking at the equation x -3 = 19 and knowing x =22 can be useful. I'll even say knowing x =7 and y= 8 in a problem like 9x - 6y= 15 can be helpful. But seriously, do we all need to know how to simplify (x-3)(x-3i)??And the joke is, no one can continue their education unless they do. A student living in California cannot get into a four-year college unless they pass Algebra 2 in high school. A future psychologist can't become a psychologist, a future lawyer can't become a lawyer, and I can't become a journalist unless each of us has a basic understanding of engineering.Of course, engineers and scientists use this shit all the time, and I applaud them! But they don't take years of theater arts appreciation courses, because a scientist or an engineer doesn't need to know that 'The Phantom of the Opoera' was the longest-running Broadway musical of all time.Get my point?” - Chris Colfer

70. “For in today’s generation of teenagers finding acceptance is hard, especially for those who dare to be different-then it’s impossible.” - Rebecah McManus

71. “I’ve been thinking that you, me and Kristy should all have a sleepover or something like that. Wouldn‘t that be so cool! - Carol” - Matthew Leeth

72. “Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the nonsucker, not exactly the same thing” - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

73. “On nous veut avec les stigmates des grandes écoles, je le veux avec les stigmates de la vie.” - Jean Giono

74. “[On hearing that 86% of gay teens have experienced harassment] Eighty-six percent? Eighty-six per-fuckin-cent WERE harassed?! That means fourteen per-fuckin-cent WEREN'T harassed? WHAT?!At MY school a hundred percent of the children - gay, straight, transgendered, bi, sell... or trade - WERE harassed. She's saying that fourteen percent of the gay students were NOT harassed? That seems impossible.At MY school any one of us would have sucked Elton John's COCK at a mandatory school assembly for a fourteen percent chance of NOT being harassed.” - Penn Jillette

75. “The most important thing we ever learn at school is the fact that the most important things can't be learned at school.” - Haruki Murakami

76. “Reading relaxes me.” - Elizabeth Newton

77. “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

78. “For a lack of education, a child's future may hold no fortune.” - Dennis E. Adonis