50 Great Education Quotes

“Man’s mind stretched by a new idea never goes back to its original dimensions.”
— Oliver Wendell Holmes

“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 task of the excellent teacher is to stimulate “apparently ordinary” people to unusual effort. The tough proplem is not in identifying winners: it is in making winners out of ordinary people.”
— K. Patricia Cross

“The educator must above all understand how to wait; to reckon all effects in the light of the future, not of the present.”
— Ellen Key

“It’s not what is poured into a student that counts, but what is planted.”
— Linda Conway

“The most important knowledge teachers need to do good work is a knowledge of how students are experiencing learning and perceiving their teacher’s actions.”
— Steven Brookfield

“Any genuine teaching will result, if successful, in someone’s knowing how to bring about a better condition of things than existed earlier.”
— John Dewey

“Our best chance for happiness is education.”
— Mark VanDorn

“I like a teacher who gives you something to take home to think about besides homework.”
— Lily Tomlin

“A good teacher is a master of simplification and an enemy of simplism.”
— Louis A. Berman

“Who dares to teach must never cease to learn.”
— John Cotton Dana

“Teachers are expected to reach unattainable goals with inadequate tools. The miracle is that at times they accomplish this impossible task.”
— Haim G. Ginott

“Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement, nothing can be done without hope and confidence.”
— Helen Keller

“A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering on cold iron.”
— Horace Mann

“Good teaching is more a giving of right questions than a giving of right answers.”
— Josef Albers

“The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind.”
— Kahlil Gibran

“A good teacher must be able to put himself in the place of those who find learning hard.”
— Eliphas Levi

“Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.”
— Benjamin Franklin

“The beautiful thing about learning is that no one can take it away from you.”
— B.B. King

“Whoever ceases to be a student has never been a student.”
— George Iles

“Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence.”
— Abigail Adams

“A teacher affects eternity:  he can never tell where his influence stops.”
— Henry Adams

“What nobler employment, or more valuable to the state, than that of the man who instructs the rising generation.”
— Marcus Tullius Cicero

“The important thing is not so much that every child should be taught, as that every child should be given the wish to learn.”
— John Lubbock

“Those who educate children well are more to be honored than parents, for these only gave life, those the art of living well.”
— Aristotle

“What office is there which involves more responsibility, which requires more qualifications, and which ought, therefore, to be more honorable than teaching?”
— Harriet Martineau

“By learning you will teach; by teaching you will understand.”
— Latin Proverb

“Education is the mother of leadership.”
— Wendell L. Willkie

“Seldom was any knowledge given to keep, but to impart; the grace of this rich jewel is lost in concealment.”
— Bishop Hall

“If you would thoroughly know anything, teach it to others.”
— Tryon Edwards

“We cannot hold a torch to light another’s path without brightening our own.”
— Ben Sweetland

“Grammar speaks; dialectics teach us truth; rhetoric gives coloring to our speech; music sings; arithmetic numbers; geometry weighs and measures; astronomy teaches us to know the stars.”
— Latin Maxim

“We learn by teaching.”
— James Howell

“Natural ability is by far the best, but many men have succeeded in winning high renown by skill that is the fruit of teaching.”
— Pindar

“It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.”
— Albert Einstein

“The most effective teacher will always be biased,for the chief force in teaching is confidence and enthusiasm.”
— Joyce Cary

“Education is the guardian genius of democracy. It is the only dictator that free men recognize, and the only ruler that free men require.”
— Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar

“Whatever you want to teach, be brief.”
— Horace

“To me, education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil’s soul.”
— Muriel Spark

“Nine-tenths of education is encouragement.”
— Anatole France

“The true aim of every one who aspires to be a teacher should be, not to impart his own opinions, but to kindle minds.”
— F. W. Robertson

“He that teaches us anything which we knew not before is undoubtedly to be reverenced as a master.”
— Samuel Johnson

“I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.”
— Chinese Proverb

“Be careful to leave your sons well instructed rather than rich, for the hopes of the instructed are better than the wealth of the ignorant.”
— Epictetus

“I am indebted to my father for living, but to my teacher for living well.”
— Alexander of Macedon

“To know how to suggest is the great art of teaching. To attain it we must be able to guess what will interest: we must learn to read the childish soul as we might a piece of music. Then, by simply changing the key, we keep up the attraction anil vary the song.”
— Henri Frederic Amiel

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

“Education is the transmission of civilization.”
— Will Durant

“To teach is to learn twice over.”
— Joseph Joubert

“A schoolmaster should have an atmosphere of awe, and walk wonderingly, as if he was amazed at being himself.”
— Newton D. Baker

“One good teacher in a lifetime may sometimes change a delinquent into a solid citizen.”
— Philip Wylie

“A child miseducated is a child lost.”
— John F. Kennedy

“A master can tell you what he expects of you. A teacher, though, awakens your own expectations.”
— Patricia Neal