Teaching is more than just imparting knowledge; it's about inspiring students, igniting curiosity, and fostering a lifelong love for learning. Both educators and learners can benefit from words of wisdom that encapsulate the essence of education’s transformative power. In this collection, we've gathered 95 inspirational teaching quotes that capture the heart and soul of teaching, offering motivation and reflection for those who make education a profound journey. Whether you're a seasoned educator seeking a fresh perspective or a student looking to appreciate your teachers more, these quotes will resonate deeply, energizing your educational pursuits. Let's delve into the thoughts of great minds and find new inspiration in the timeless art of teaching.
1. “Quand tu veux construire un bateau, ne commence pas par rassembler du bois, couper des planches et distribuer du travail, mais reveille au sein des hommes le desir de la mer grande et large.If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
2. “You cannot teach a man anything, you can only help him find it within himself.” - Galileo
3. “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
4. “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
5. “[Kids] don't remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are.” - Jim Henson
6. “I am afraid that the schools will prove the very gates of hell, unless they diligently labor in explaining the Holy Scriptures and engraving them in the heart of the youth.” - Martin Luther
7. “Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else ... Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.” - Hermann Hesse
8. “the fundamental purpose of school is learning, not teaching.” - Richard DuFour
9. “All teachings are mere references. The true experience is living your own life. Then, even the holiest of words are only words.” - DENG MING-DAO
10. “The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence.” - Amos Bronson Alcott
11. “Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.” - Jacques Barzun
12. “Those who know, do. Those that understand, teach.” - Aristotle
13. “His older self had taught his younger self a language which the older self knew because the younger self, after being taught, grew up to be the older self and was, therefore, capable of teaching.” - Robert A. Heinlein
14. “The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot.” - Audre Lorde
15. “Sometimes I think that wisdoms slip from my mind like drool from the lips of an idiot...Where's all this stuff coming from? Is it any good? Any good in, you know, the wisdom sense? Who am I to spout this stuff anyway?Well, here's the thing. You too can find yourself shedding wisdom like cat hair if you only allow yourself the liberty of introspection.Think about what you alone know that no one else does. That one neat wonderful profound insight. It is fully yours. No one else on this planet of about six billion people understands it like you do.Now, see if you can share it with someone. Bestow it, a gift of yourself.Wisdom is like gossip. Except it's the good kind.” - Vera Nazarian
16. “No one learns as much about a subject as one who is forced to teach it.” - Peter Drucker
17. “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
18. “For the advice in a joke is sometimes more useful than the most serious teaching.” - Balthasar Gracian
19. “Don't fuck with an English major. They keep lots of useless crap trapped in their heads. Once in a while they let some of it out and it bites you square on the ass.” - P.C. Cast
20. “If thou wouldst seek justice, thyself must be just. ” - Stephen R. Lawhead
21. “[T]eaching has been for me an education (Lord knows what it has been for my students).” - Howard Nemerov
22. “I never teach my pupils, I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn.” - Albert Einstein
23. “If you want to use television to teach somebody, you must first teachthem how to use television.” - Umberto Eco
24. “You can't really teach a kid anything: you can only show him the way and motivate him to learn it himself.” - Dave Cullen
25. “When you study great teachers... you will learn much more from their caring and hard work than from their style.” - William Glasser
26. “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
27. “The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.” - William Arthur Ward
28. “Over the years, I have noticed that the child who learns quickly is adventurous. She's ready to run risks. She approaches life with arms outspread. She wants to take it all in. She still has the desire of the very young child to make sense out of things. She's not concerned with concealing her ignorance or protecting herself. She's ready to expose herself to disappointment and defeat. She has a certain confidence. She expects to make sense out of things sooner or later. She has a kind of trust.” - John Holt
29. “schools assume that children are not interested in learning and are not much good at it, that they will not learn unless made to, that they cannot learn unless shown how, and that the way to make them learn is to divide up the prescribed material into a sequence of tiny tasks to be mastered one at a time, each with it's approrpriate 'morsel' and 'shock.' And when this method doesn't work, the schools assume there is something wrong with the children -- something they must try to diagnose and treat.” - John Holt
30. “Without language, one cannot talk to people and understand them; one cannot share their hopes and aspirations, grasp their history, appreciate their poetry, or savor their songs.” - Nelson Mandela
31. “Rewards and punishment is the lowest form of education.” - Chuang Tzu
32. “When you wish to instruct, be brief; that men's [children's] minds take in quickly what you say, learn its lesson, and retain it faithfully. Every word that is unnecessary only pours over the side of a brimming mind.” - Cicero
33. “I will have to rely on that painful teacher, experience.” - Kirby Larson
34. “To instruct calls for energy, and to remain almost silent, but watchful and helpful, while students instruct themselves, calls for even greater energy. To see someone fall (which will teach him not to fall again) when a word from you would keep him on his feet but ignorant of an important danger, is one of the tasks of the teacher that calls for special energy, because holding in is more demanding than crying out. ” - Robertson Davies
35. “I want students to engage the way a clutch on a car gets engaged: an engine can be running, making appropriate noises, burning fuel and creating exhaust fumes, but unless the clutch is engaged, nothing moves. It's all sound and smoke, and nobody gets anywhere.” - Robert L. Fried
36. “Music and symbols, they're older than human race.Prehuman beings used them to teach early mankind.” - Toba Beta
37. “An alarming number of parents appear to have little confidence in their ability to "teach" their children. We should help parents understand the overriding importance of incidental teaching in the context of warm, consistent companionship. Such caring is usually the greatest teaching, especially if caring means sharing in the activites of the home.” - Raymond S. Moore
38. “Parents should also question much of the contemporary emphasis on special materials and equipment for learning in a child's environment. A clutter of toys can be more confusing than satisfying to a child. On the other hand, natural situations, with opportunieties to explore, seldom overstimulate or trouble a small child. Furthermore, most children will find greater satisfaction and demonsstrate greater learning from things they make and do with their parents or other people than from elaborate toys or learning materials. And there is no substitute for solitude - in the sandpile, mud puddle, or play area - for a yound child to work out his own fantasies. Yet this privilege is often denied in our anxiety to institutionalize children.” - Raymond S. Moore
39. “I dedicate the merit of the occasion to all beings. This gesture of universal friendship has been likened to a drop of fresh spring water. If we put it on a rock in the sunshine, it will soon evaporate. If we put it in the ocean, however, it will never be lost. Thus the wish is made that we not keep the teachings to ourselves but to use them to benefit others.” - Pema Chodron
40. “One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human. One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.” - Alan Bennett
41. “To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.” - Joseph Conrad
42. “When we did art with the kids, the demons would lie down.” - Anne Lamott
43. “their powerlessness, innocence, and imagination fused to enable them to turn time inside out, travel on the wind, and enter the souls of animals.” - Mark Helprin
44. “As a Jew, I had no desire to challenge my childhood prejudice. But as a teacher, I could not do otherwise.” - Sondra Perl
45. “The kind of teacher who never learned anything herself. Or taught anything, except sarcasm or fear.” - Tanith Lee
46. “History is an excellent teacher with few pupils.” - Will & Ariel durant
47. “This is precisely why I loathed being a teacher! Young people are so infernally convinced that they are absolutely right about everything. Has it not occurred to you, my poor puffed-up poppinjay, that there might be an excellent reason why the Headmaster of Hogwarts is not confiding every tiny detail of his plans to you? Have you never paused, while feeling hard-done-by, to note that following Dumbledore's orders has never yet led you into harm? No. No, like all young people, you are quite sure that you alone feel and think, you alone recognise danger, you alone are the only one clever enough to realise what the Dark Lord may be planning.” - J.K. Rowling
48. “What you do teaches faster, and has a lasting impression, far beyond what you say.” - T.F. Hodge
49. “Teaching English is (as professorial jobs go) unusually labor-intensive and draining. To do it well, you have to spend a lot of time coaching students individually on their writing and thinking. Strangely enough, I still had a lot of energy for this student-oriented part of the job. Rather, it was _books_ that no longer interested me, drama and fiction in particular. It was as though a priest, in midcareer, had come to doubt the reality of transubstantiation. I could still engage with poems and expository prose, but most fiction seemed the product of extremities I no longer wished to visit. So many years of Zen training had reiterated, 'Don't get lost in the drama of life,' and here I had to stand around in a classroom defending Oedipus.” - Mary Rose O'Reilley
50. “One night I begged Robin, a scientist by training, to watch Arthur Miller's 'Death of a Salesman' with me on PBS. He lasted about one act, then turned to me in horror: 'This is how you spend your days? Thinking about things like this?' I was ashamed. I could have been learning about string theory or how flowers pollinate themselves. I think his remark was the beginning of my crisis of faith. Like so many of my generation in graduate school, I had turned to literature as a kind of substitute for formal religion, which no longer fed my soul, or for therapy, which I could not afford.... I became interested in exploring the theory of nonfiction and in writing memoir, a genre that gives us access to that lost Middlemarch of reflection and social commentary.” - Mary Rose O'Reilley
51. “To be a philosopher, just reverse everything you have ever been told...and have a sense of humor doing it.” - Criss Jami
52. “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
53. “I probably felt more resentment for what I personally was to suffer than for the wrong they were doing to anyone and everyone. But at that time I was determined not to put up with badly behaved people more out of my own interest than because I wanted them to become good people.” - St. Augustine of Hippo
54. “If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don't bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.” - Richard Buckminster Fuller
55. “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
56. “Once she knows how to read there's only one thing you can teach her to believe in and that is herself.” - Virginia Woolf
57. “I would teach how science works as much as I would teach what science knows. I would assert (given that essentially, everyone will learn to read) that science literacy is the most important kind of literacy they can take into the 21st century. I would undervalue grades based on knowing things and find ways to reward curiosity. In the end, it's the people who are curious who change the world.” - Neil deGrasse Tyson
58. “They're horrible little creatures. All snot and smelly feet and pestering questions.""Then why did you go into teaching?""It was either that or sit at home with Mother all day. I picked the lesser of two evils.” - Brian Francis
59. “Share your knowledge. It is a way to achieve immortality.” - Dalai Lama XIV
60. “A teacher who loves learning earns the right and the ability to help others learn.” - Ruth Beechick
61. “...you seemed to be listening to me, not to find out useful information, but to try to catch me in a logical fallacy. This tells us all that you are used to being smarter than your teachers, and that you listen to them in order to catch them making mistakes and prove how smart you are to the other students. This is such a pointless, stupid way of listening to teachers that it is clear you are going to waste months of our time before you finally catch on that the only transaction that matters is a transfer of useful information from adults who possess it to children who do not, and that catching mistakes is a criminal misuse of time.” - Orson Scott Card
62. “The academic bias against subjectivity not only forces our students to write poorly ("It is believed...," instead of, "I believe..."), it deforms their thinking about themselves and their world. In a single stroke, we delude our students into believing that bad prose turns opinions into facts and we alienate them from their own inner lives.” - Parker J. Palmer
63. “[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
64. “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
65. “There was a time we laughed at the old guys up on the hill. The ones who graduated a couple of years before us, and who would hang around the school and the ballpark still, and would sit on the hoods of their cars and tell us how when they were seniors they did it better, faster, and further. We laughed, because we were still doing it, and all they could do was talk. If our goals were not met, there was next year, but it never occurred to us that one day there would not be a next year, and that the guys sitting on the hoods of their cars at the top of the hill, wishing they could have one more year, willing to settle for one last game, could one day be us.” - Tucker Elliot
66. “Real mystery - the very reason to read (and certainly write) any book - was to them a thing to dismantle, distill and mine out into rubble they could tyrannize into sorry but more permanent explanations; monuments to themselves, in other words. In my view all teachers should be required to stop teaching at age thirty-two and not allowed to resume until they're sixty-five, so that they can live their lives, not teach them away - live lives full of ambiguity and transience and regret and wonder, be asked to explain nothing in public until very near the end when they can't do anything else. Explaining is where we all get into trouble.” - Richard Ford, The Sportswriter
67. “It's why I went into teaching in the first place. I like the sound of my own voice. Well that, and I am addicted to the smell of chalk and white-board markers.” - Mercy Celeste
68. “Never talk back to a teacher. Teachers are like God. Actually, teachers are God's boss.” - Deborah Wiles
69. “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
70. “It is easier to write a book with footnotes than the same book written so that children can understand it.” - Fulton J. Sheen
71. “Leaders are more powerful role models when they learn than when they teach.” - Rosabeth Moss Kantor
72. “Before you can be effective in communication with ANYONE else, you must know who YOU are. It begins with you. Believe me when I say, I don't need anyone's approval in this classroom ... I'm great company for myself. Me, myself, and I ... we laugh a lot. (Said on the first week of class each phase, somewhat rewording each time, but the gist is always there).” - Dacia Wilkinson
73. “Proper teaching is recognized with ease. You can know it without fail because it awakens within you that sensation which tells you this is something you have always known.” - Frank Herbert
74. “People who teach you cram old ideas, old views, old ways, into you. Like covering plants with layer after layer of old earth; it's no wonder the poor things so rarely come up fresh and green.” - John Fowles
75. “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
76. “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
77. “Was I gleeful, settled, content, during the hours I passed in yonder bare, humble schoolroom this morning and afternoon? Not to decieve myself, I must reply -- No: I felt desolate to a degree. I felt -- yes, idiot that I am -- I felt degraded. I doubted I had taken a step which sank instead of raising me in the scale of social existence. I was weakly dismayed at the ignorance, the poverty, the coarseness of all I heard and saw around me. But let me not hate and despise myself too much for these feelings; I know them to be wrong -- that is a great step gained. I shall strive to overcome them.” - Charlotte Brontë
78. “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
79. “You shouldn't call then anything. They're poor unfortunate people who cannot help the way they look,” - Jacqueline Wilson
80. “So long as we learn it doesn’t matter who teaches us, does it?” - E.R. Braithwaite
81. “But for I am a woman should I therefore live that I should not tell you the goodness of God?” - Julian of Norwich
82. “My God can do it! My God will do it! My God wants to do it! My God has done it!” - Kathy Degraw
83. “Teaching others, he corrected himself.” - Dejan Stojanovic
84. “The light teaches you to convert life into a festive promenade.” - Dejan Stojanovic
85. “I meet them in this stadium, strangers at opposing desks until I wave my red flag.” - Marina Leigh Duff
86. “For the first time in his life, a teacher was pointing out things that Ender had not already seen for himself. For the first time, Ender had found a living mind he could admire.” - Orson Scott Card
87. “But one of the things I have learned during the time I have spent in the United States is an old African American saying: Each one, teach one. I want to believe that I am here to teach one and, more, that there is one here who is meant to teach me. And if we each one teach one, we will make a difference.” - Marcus Samuelsson
88. “One cannot always know what children are thinking. Children are hard to understand, especially when careful training has accustomed them to obedience, and experience has made them cautious in their conversation with their teachers. Will you not draw from this the fine maxim that one should not scold children too much, but should make them trustful, so that they will not conceal their stupidities from us?” - Catherine The Great
89. “Mengajar adalah semacam pertunjukan yang harus menarik.” - Helvy Tiana Rosa
90. “Shabelsky: O mind of genius, you think up things for everyone and teach everyone, but why not for once teach me... Teach me, great brain, show me the way out...” - Anton Chekhov
91. “The Grand Mistake in Education - To think that what's right for you is right for everyone. IT AIN'T. The Fly in this Ointment!http://youtu.be/6HpXUaQGY8I via @youtube” - Alan Share
92. “..English teachers often take a right-wrong stance. I'd rather my students take a thinking stance.” - Jeff Anderson
93. “In our modern world, we often separate faith from practice. But the way of Jesus rejects this notion. Only living our faith offers the credibility to teach our faith. Anything less is less that the teachings of Christ.” - Dillon Burroughs
94. “There's nothing sillier in the world than a teacher telling you don't do it after you already did it.” - Frank McCourt
95. “When I act tough they listen politely till the spasm passes. They know.” - Frank McCourt
