Our List – 94 of the Best Teacher Quotes
Quotes like these are the inspiration for giveaways like our $2,500 Academic Award! If you could use some extra cash for your classroom, click here to enter!
Our job is to teach the student we have. Not the ones we would like to have. Not the ones we used to have. Those we have right now. All of them. –Dr. Kevin Maxwell
Children will not remember you for the material things you provided but for the feeling that you cherished them. – Richard L. Evans
Children must be taught how to think, not what to think. –Margaret Mead
The self taught man seldom knows anything accurately, and he does not know a tenth as much as he could have known if he had worked under teachers. -Mark Twain
Be curious, not judgmental. -Walt Whitman
A mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge. -George R.R. Martin
Children’s talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives. -Maya Angelou
Your education is worth what Your are worth. -Anon
You must master a new way to think before you can master a new way to be. -Marianne Williamson
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 William Eliot
From kindergarten to college, certain teachers engaged my curiosity and motivated me to learn. While I was not the best student, their efforts left a lasting impact. -George Lucas
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
Don’t try to fix the students, fix ourselves first. The good teacher makes the poor student good and the good student superior. When our students fail, we as teacher, t0o, have failed. -Marva Collins
Children today are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers. —attributed to Socrates
What nobler employment, or more valuable to the state, than that of the man who instructs the rising generation. -Marcus Tullius Cicero
We teachers are rather good at magic, you know. -J.K. Rowling
True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us. –Socrates
It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge. -Einstein
If you employed study, thinking, and planning time daily, you could develop and use the power that can change the course of your destiny. -W. Clement Stone
You cant scare me. I teach.
You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother. -Albert Einstein
Always walk through life as if you have something new to learn and you will. -Vernon Howard
Wisdom is the lesson learned, applied. –Rick Beneteau
Technology is just a tool. In terms of getting the kids working together and motivating them, the teacher is the most important. -Bill Gates
If someone is going down the wrong road, he doesn’t need motivation to speed him up. What he needs is education to turn him around. -Jim Rohn
Learning is not compulsory but neither is survival. -W. Edwards Deming
We are giving some lucky educators a $2,500 academic award!
If you could use some extra cash for your classroom, click here to enter!
Even More Popular Teacher Quotes Below
Imagination decides everything. -Blaise Pascal
The beautiful thing about learning is that no one can take it away from you. –BB King
Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardour, for their curiosity and tolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision. -Aldous Huxley
To nourish and raise children against odds is in any time, any place, more valuable than to fix bolts in cars or design nuclear weapons. –Marilyn French
If you would thoroughly know anything, teach it to others. –Tyron Edwards
He is to be educated not because he’s to make shoes, nails, and pins, but because he is a man. -William Ellery Channing
The scientific mind does not so much provide the right answers as ask the right questions. –Claude Levi-Strauss
Nothing will stop you being creative so effectively as the fear of making a mistake. -John Cleese
Poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master. -Leonardo da Vinci
A good teacher is like a candle- it comsumes itself to light the way for others. -Unknown
What is done to children, they will do to society. -Karl Menninger
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army. -Edward Everett
The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery. -Mark Van Doren
The only reason I always try to meet and know the parents better is because it helps me to forgive their children. -Louise Johannot
Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another. -Gilbert K. Chesterton
Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. -William Butlet Yeats
My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. -Maya Angelou
The school is the last expenditure upon which America should be willing to economize. -Franklin D. Roosevelt
He who opens a school door, closes a prison. -Victor Hugo
In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day’s work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years. -Jacques Barzun
The dream begins with a teacher who believes in you, who tugs and pushes and leads you to the next plateau, sometimes poking you with a sharp stick called “truth.” -Dan Rather
If a doctor, lawyer, or dentist had 40 people in his office at one time, all of whom had different needs, and some of whom didn’t want to be there and were causing trouble, and the doctor, lawyer, or dentist, without assistance, had to treat them all with professional excellence for nine months, then he might have some conception of the classroom teacher’s job. -Donald D. Quinn
Modern cynics and skeptics… see no harm in paying those to whom they entrust the minds of their children a smaller wage than is paid to those to whom they entrust the care of their plumbing. -John F. Kennedy
Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater. –Gail Godwin
Most teachers have little control over school policy or curriculum or choice of texts or special placement of students, but most have a great deal of autonomy inside the classroom. To a degree shared by only a few other occupations, such as police work, public education rests precariously on the skill and virtue of the people at the bottom of the institutional pyramid. -Tracy Kidder
A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops. -Henry Brooks Adams
If you have knowledge, let others light their candles at it. –Margaret Fuller
The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires. -William Arthur Ward
What the teacher is, is more important than what he teaches. -Karl Menninger
Teachers who inspire know that teaching is like cultivating a garden, and those who would have nothing to do with thorns must never attempt to gather flowers.
The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind. -Kahlil Gibran
To teach is to learn twice. -Joseph Joubert, Pensées, 1842
Our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in education. The human mind is our fundamental resource. -John F. Kennedy
Let us think of education as the means of developing our greatest abilities, because in each of us there is a private hope and dream which, fulfilled, can be translated into benefit for everyone and greater strength for our nation. -John F. Kennedy
I am indebted to my father for living, but to my teacher for living well. -Alexander the Great
We are giving some lucky educators a $2,500 academic award!
If you could use some extra cash for your classroom, click here to enter!
The very spring and root of honesty and virtue lie in good education. –Plutarch
“The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind.” -Khalil Gibran
Teachers are expected to reach unattainable goals with inadequate tools. The miracle is that at times they accomplish this impossible task. —Haim Ginott
Teachers are the only professionals who have to respond to bells every forty-five minutes and come out fighting. —Frank McCourt
Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition. —Jacques Martin Barzun
There is no recipe to be a great teacher, that’s what is unique about them. -Robert Sternberg
I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit. — John Steinbeck
I got into acting because my teachers kept nudging me into it. The power a teacher has to influence someone is so great. I can’t think of a profession I have more respect for. — Jon Hamm
In a completely rational society, the best of us would be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for something less. -Lee Iacocc
The need to be right all the time is the biggest bar to new ideas. It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong than to be always right by having no ideas at all. –Edward de Bour
Imagination is the only limit to what we can hope to have in the future. -Charles F. Kettering
Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or self-confidence. – Robert Frost
We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them. –Einstein
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. -Aristotle
Children will not remember you for the material things you provided. But for the feeling that you cherished them. -Richard L Evans
Creativity is intelligence having fun. -Einstein
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. -Frederick Douglass
There is no greater gift you can give or receive than to honor your calling. It’s why you were born. And how you become most truly alive. –Oprah
If you cant explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough. –Einstein
Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself. -Rumi
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. –Aristotle
Every student can learn, just not on the same day, or in the same way. -George Evans
Take the attitude of a student, never be too big to ask questions, never know too much to learn something new. -Og Mandino
Tell if you know, ask if you don’t. -Duane Alan Hahn
Who dares to teach must never cease to learn. -John Cotton Dana
Life affords no greater responsibility, no greater privilege, than the raising of the next generation. –Everett Coop
It is only the ignorant who despise education. –Publilius Syrus
You can’t learn less. –Buckminster Fuller
Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself. -John Dewey
Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living. -John Dewey
I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn’t learn something from him. -Galileo Galilei
You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother. -Albert Einstein
There is only one way… to get anybody to do anything. And that is by making the other person want to do it. –Dale Carnegie
