BEST QUOTES EVER ON TEACHING, LEARNING & EDUCATION | Exemplary Business Ethics & Leadership

Teaching, Learning & Education

Teaching

A teacher affects all eternity; you never know where his influence stops. – Henry Adams
What a block of marble is to a sculptor a ready mind is to a teacher. Adapted from Joseph Addison
Children don’t care what a teacher knows unless they know the teacher cares. – Unknown
The best teachers teach from the heart, not from the book. -Unknown
Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn. -Benjamin Franklin
Teaching is the one profession that creates all other professions. Unknown
Remember that failure is an event, not a person. – Zig Ziglar
The test of a good teacher is not how many questions he can ask his pupils that they will answer readily, but how many questions he inspires them to ask him which he finds it hard to answer. – -Alice Wellington Rollins
Great teachers are passionate about what they teach and respectful of those they teach. – Michael Josephson
One day with a great teacher is better than a thousand days of diligent study. -Japanese Proverb
What the teacher is, is more important than what he teaches -Karl Meninge)
Listen to the MUSTN’TS, child./ Listen to the DON’TS / Listen to the SHOULDN’TS / The IMPOSSIBLES, the WON’TS / Listen to the NEVER HAVES / Then listen close to me- Anything can happen, child, ANYTHING can be. – Shel Silverstein
Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon. -E. M. Forster
Education is not to reform students or amuse them or to make them expert technicians. It is to unsettle their minds, widen their horizons, inflame their intellects, teach them to think straight, if possible. —Robert M. Hutchins
If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow. -John Dewey
The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence. – Amos Bronson Alcott
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. It might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit. – John Steinbeck
If kids come to us from strong, healthy functioning families, it makes our job easier. If they do not come to us from strong, healthy, functioning families, it makes our job more important. – Barbara Colorose
I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think. -Socrates
You can teach a student a lesson for a day; but if you can teach him to learn by creating curiosity he will continue the learning process as long as he lives. -Clay P. Bedford
The hardest thing to teach is how to care. -Unknown
The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires. -William A. Ward
Any teacher can show students how to count; great teachers show them what counts. – Michael Josephson
Never discourage anyone…who continually makes progress, no matter how slow. – Plato
If a child can’t learn the way we teach, maybe we should teach the way they learn. – Ignacio ‘Nacho’ Estrada
One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.- Carl Jung)
Teaching is the greatest act of optimism. – Colleen Wilcox
The dream begins, most of the time, with a teacher who believes in you, who tugs and pushes and leads you on to the next plateau, sometimes poking you with a sharp stick called truth. – Dan Rather
I’m not sayin’ I’m gonna change the world, but I guarantee that I will spark the brain that will. – Tupac Shakur
A good teacher inspires hope, ignites the imagination, and instills a love of learning. – Brad Henry
Most of us end up with no more than five or six people who remember us. Teachers have thousands of people who remember them for the rest of their lives. Andy Rooney
Education is the key to success in life, and teachers make a lasting impact in the lives of their students. Solomon Ortiz
Failure is a better teacher than success. – Michael Josephson
Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose. – Bill Gates
Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose. Bill Gates
I think the teaching profession contributes more to the future of our society than any other single profession. – John Wooden
I have learned that, although I am a good teacher, I am a much better student, and I was blessed to learn valuable lessons from my students on a daily basis. They taught me the importance of teaching to a student – and not to a test. – Erin Gruwell
I touch the future. I teach. – Christa McAuliffe
Great teachers change lives. Students with one highly effective elementary school teacher are more likely to go to college, less likely to become pregnant as teens, and earn tens of thousands more over their lifetimes. – Wendy Kopp
The thing I loved the most – and still love the most about teaching – is that you can connect with an individual or a group, and see that individual or group exceed their limits. Mike Krzyzewski
Your best teacher is your last mistake. – Ralph Nader
The greatest sign of success for a teacher… is to be able to say, ‘The children are now working as if I did not exist.” – Maria Montessori
A professor is someone who talks in someone else’s sleep. W. H. Auden
Teaching is the only major occupation of man for which we have not yet developed tools that make an average person capable of competence and performance. In teaching we rely on the ‘naturals’, the ones who somehow know how to teach. – Peter Drucker
As any parent, teacher, or librarian knows, there is no richer experience than to see children’s faces light up at the suspense of a new tale or the surprise of a new poem. The uninhibited joy with which they listen is surely akin to that of adult audiences of
A word of encouragement from a teacher to a child can change a life. – John C. Maxwell
The dream begins with a teacher who believes in you, who tugs and pushes and leads you to the next plateau, sometimes poking
Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker. Failure is delay, not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead end. Failure is something we can avoid only by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing. – Denis Waitley
When your child does poorly on a test, your first step should not be to attack the teacher or the school’s curriculum. It should be to look at the idea that, maybe, the child didn’t work hard enough. Amy Chua
Every child deserves a champion – an adult who will never give up on them, who understands the power of connection and insists that they become the best that they can possibly be. -Rita Pierson
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. – Albert Einstein
There is no failure. Only feedback. – Robert Allen
A good teacher is like a candle – it consumes itself to light the way for others. – Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
Children must be taught how to think, not what to think. -Margaret Mead
Teaching is more than imparting knowledge, it is inspiring change. Learning is more than absorbing facts, it is acquiring understanding. -William Arthur Ward
I am not a teacher, but an awakener. -Robert Frost
Don’t just teach your kids to read, teach them to question what they read. Teach them to question everything! -George Carlin
We will remember with respect the good teacher in our lives that enlarged our minds and understanding of the world but we will remember with a feeling closer to love those who enriched our souls and taught us how to live our lives. – Michael Josephson
To teach well, we need not say all that we know, only what is useful for the pupil to hear. Anonymous
It is nobler to be good, and it is nobler to teach others to be good-and less trouble! Mark Twain
The secret of teaching is to appear to have known all your life what you just learned this morning.. Anon
That which we are we are all the while teaching, not voluntarily, but involuntarily. Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man should first direct himself in the way he should go. Only then should he instruct others. Buddha
Education…is a painful, continual and difficult work to be done in kindness, by watching, by warning,… by praise, but above all – by example. John Ruskin
The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence. Amos Bronson Alcott
The point is to develop the childlike inclination for play and the childlike desire for recognition and to guide the child over to important fields for society. Such a school demands from the teacher that he be a kind of artist in his province. Albert Einstein, Out of My Later Years
It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge. Albert Einstein
Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition. Jacques Barzun
To know how to suggest is the art of teaching. Henri-Frederic Amiel
Those who draw a distinction between education and entertainment don’t know the first thing about either. After: Marshall McLuhan, Classroom Without Walls as quoted in: Abbie Hoffman, Soon To Be A Major Motion Picture
Anyone who does not grasp the close juxtaposition of the vulgar and the scholarly, has either too refined or too compartmentalized a view of life. Stephen Jay Gould, The Flamigo’s Smile
Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater. Gail Godwin
I have been maturing as a teacher. New experiences bring new sensitivities and flexibility. Howard Lester
Men learn while they teach. Lucius A. Seneca
No man is so foolish but he may sometimes give another good counsel, and no man so wise that he may not easily err if he takes no other counsel than his own. He that is taught only by himself has a fool for a teacher. Ben Johnson
He who dares to teach must never cease to learn. Anonymous
Acquire new knowledge whilst thinking over the old, and you may become a teacher of others. Confucius
Those who educate children well are more to be honored than parents, for these only gave life, those the art of living well. Aristotle
We think of the effective teachers we have had over the years with a sense of recognition, but those who have touched our humanity we remember with a deep sense of gratitude. Anonynous
He that is taught only by himself has a fool for a master. Ben Jonson
I put the relation of a fine teacher to a student just below the relation of a mother to a son… Thomas Wolfe
When skating on thin ice, allow others to take the lead. There is no disgrace in learning from others, particularly when doing so avoids putting yourself in jeopardy.
There is no scorn more profound, or on the whole more justifiable, than that of the men who make for the men who explain. Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds. Godfrey H. Hardy, (1877 – 1947) A Mathematician’s Apology, London, Cambridge University Press, 1941.
Never regard study as a duty, but as the enviable opportunity to learn to know the liberating influence of beauty in the realm of the spirit for your own personal joy and to the profit of the community to which your later work belongs. Einstein
One should guard against preaching to young people success in the customary form as the main aim in life. The most important motive for work in school and in life is pleasure in work, pleasure in its result, and the knowledge of the value of the result to the community. —-Albert Einstein, “On Education”
When asked how much educated men were superior to those uneducated, Aristotle answered, “As much as the living are to the dead.” -Diogenes Laertius
The mediocre teacher tells; the good teacher explains; the superior teacher demonstrates; the great teacher inspires. William Arthur Ward
We worry about what a child will be tomorrow, yet we forget that he is someone today. Stacia Tauscher
It is not possible to spend any prolonged period visiting public school classrooms without being appalled by the mutilation visible everywhere — mutilation of spontaneity, of joy in learning, of pleasure in creating of sense of self. Charles Silberman
Science can be introduced to children well or poorly. If poorly, children can be turned away from science; they can develop a lifelong antipathy; they will be in a far worse condition than if they had never been introduced to science at all. Isaac Asimov
Try not to have a good time … This is supposed to be educational.-Charles Schulz
The room in which I found myself was very large and lofty. The windows were long, narrow, and pointed, and at so vast a distance from the black oaken floor as to be altogether inaccessible from within. Feeble gleams of encrimsoned light made their way through the trellissed panes, and served to render sufficiently distinct the more prominent objects around; the eye, however, struggled in vain to reach the remoter angles of the chamber, or recesses of the vaulted and fretted ceiling. [compiler’s view of his own science education, 1950’s] Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher
Awaken people’s curiosity. It is enough to open minds, do not overload them. Put there just a spark. Anatole France
The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards. –Anatole France
Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science. Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is in fact nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curious of inquiry. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty. Albert Einstein
Scientific “facts” are taught at a very early age and in the very same manner in which religious “facts” were taught only a century ago. There is no attempt to waken the critical abilities of the pupil so that he may be able to see things in perspective. At the universities the situation is even worse, for indoctrination is here carried out in a much more systematic manner … science has now become as oppressive as the ideologies it had once to fight. Paul Feyerabend, How To Defend Society Against Science
You don’t have to think too hard when you talk to teachers. J.D. Salinger
My idea of education is to unsettle the minds of the young and inflame their intellects. -Robert Maynard Hutchins
Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire. – William Yeats
The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled. Plutarch
In the education of children there is nothing like alluring the interest and affection; otherwise you only make so many asses laden with books. -Michel de Montaigne
A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering on a cold iron. – Horace Mann
The task of an educator should be to irrigate the desert not clear the forest. Anonymous
There are two ways to approach a subject which frightens you (science) and makes you feel stupid; you can embrace it with humility and an open mind, or you can ridicule it mercilessly. I’m still deciding which I prefer. Judith Stone: Light Elements
Seen only as a laundry list of theorems in a workbook, science can be a bore. But as a “hands-on” adventure guided by a knowledgeable teacher, it can sweep children up in the excitement of discovery. William Bennett
Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing; the rest is mere sheep-herding. Ezra Pound On Mediocrity and Education
It has been said that we have not had the three R’s in America, we had the six R’s: remedial readin’, remedial ‘ritin’ and remedial ‘rithmetic. Robert M. Hutchins
It isn’t evil that’s ruining the earth, but mediocrity. The crime is not that Nero played while Rome burned, but that he played badly. Ned Rorem
Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training. ANNA FREUD
The critical factor is not class size but rather the nature of the teaching as it affects learning. C.B Neblette
What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child. -George Bernard Shaw
If the colleges were better, if they really had it, you would need to get the police at the gates to keep order in the inrushing multitude. See in college how we thwart the natural love of learning by leaving the natural method of teaching what each wishes to learn, and insisting that you shall learn what you have no taste or capacity for. The college, which should be a place of delightful labor, is made odious and unhealthy, and the young men are tempted to frivolous amusements to rally their jaded spirits. I would have the studies elective. Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge. The wise instructor accomplishes this by opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for himself. The marking is a system for schools, not for the college; for boys, not for men; and it is an ungracious work to put on a professor. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
A good education should leave much to be desired. Alan Gregg
The central task of education is to implant a will and facility for learning. It should produce not learned but learning people. The truly human society, where grandparents, parents, and children are students together. In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists. Eric Hoffer

Learning

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever. -Mahatma Gandhi
What we learn with pleasure we never forget. -Alfred Mercier
When you learn, teach. When you get, give. Maya Angelou
The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend. -Henri Bergson
The beautiful thing about learning is that no one can take it away from you. -B.B. King
There is a great difference between knowing and understanding: you can know a lot about something and not really understand it. -Charles F. Kettering
The next best thing to knowing something is knowing where to find it. Samuel Johnson)
Once you have learned to ask questions – relevant and appropriate and substantial questions – you have learned how to learn and no one can keep you from learning whatever you want or need to know. -Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner
Around here, we don’t look backwards for very long… We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things because we’re curious… and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths. -Walt Disney
The finest hours of life are not those spent among groups of people, but in good conversation with a few, in reading great books, in listening to great music, wandering in a forest of giant sequoias, peering into a microscope, unraveling nature’s secrets in the laboratory. The men who have the most to give their fellowmen are those who have enriched their minds and hearts in solitude. It is a poor education that does not fit a man to be alone with himself. – Joel Henry Hildebrand

Importance of Education

If you are planning for a year, sow rice; if you are planning for a decade, plant trees; if you are planning for a lifetime, educate people. -Chinese Proverb
All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth. -Aristotle
Our progress as a nation can be no swifter that our progress in education. The human mind is our fundamental resource. John F. Kennedy
A free society is based on the premise that human beings are rational and can be trusted to make informed choices. Georgette Bennett
Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern but impossible to enslave. Lord Henry Peter Brougham (1828)
Since a democratic society repudiates the principle of external authority, it must find a substitute in voluntary disposition and interest; these can be created only by education. -John Dewey
Neither piety, nor liberty can long flourish in a community where the education of youth is neglected. Albert Cooper
Universal suffrage, without universal education, would be a curse. H. L. Wayland
Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing the ground. Frederick Douglass
Education is the transmission of civilization. -Ariel and Will Durant
I must study politics and war, that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, and naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain. –John Adams
Education has in America’s whole history been the major hope for improving the individual and society. -Gunnar Myrdal
Education, then, beyond all other devises of human origin, is the great equalizer of conditions of men, – the balance wheel of social machinery. It does better than to disarm the poor of their hostility toward the rich: it prevents being poor. Agrarianism is the revenge of poverty against wealth. Horace Mann
The ability to think straight, some knowledge of the past, some vision of the future, some skill to do useful service, some urge to fit that service into the well-being of the community–these are the most vital things education must try to produce. -Virginia Gildersleeve
A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad. Theodore Roosevelt
The more that you read, the more things you will know, the more that you learn, the more places you’ll go. -Dr. Seuss
The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education. -Martin Luther King, Jr.
Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world. -Nelson Mandela
It is better to support schools than jails. -Mark Twain,
He who opens a school door, closes a prison. – Victor Hugo
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
Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere. -Albert Einstein
Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself. -John Dewey
A mind when stretched by a new idea never regains its original dimensions. – Anonymous
Education is not filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire. -William Butler Yeats
The principal 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. -Jean Piaget
Do not confine your children to your own learning, for they were born in another time. -Chinese Proverb
Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten. -B.F. Skinner

Purpose of Education

Most people are mirrors, reflecting the moods and emotions of the times; few are windows, bringing light to bear on the dark corners where troubles fester. The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows. -Sydney J. Harris
Education is a social process. Education is growth. Education is, not a preparation for life; Education is life itself. -John Dewey
An educator should consider that he has failed in his job if he has not succeeded in instilling some trace of a divine dissatisfaction with our miserable social environment. – Anthony Standen
I call a complete and generous education that which fits a man to perform justly, skillfully, and magnanimously all the offices, both public and private, of peace and war. -John Milton
Education can be dangerous. It is very difficult to make it not dangerous. In fact, it is almost impossible. Robert M. Hutchins
The chief cause of human errors is to be found in the prejudices picked up in childhood. Rene Descartes
In school, every period ends with a bell. Every sentence ends with a period. Every crime ends with a sentence. Stephen Wright
Education should turn out the pupil with something he knows well and something he can do well. Alfred North Whitehead
Education today, more than ever before, must see clearly the dual objectives: Education for living and education for making a living. -James Mason Wood
The great end of education is to discipline rather than to furnish the mind; to train it to the use of its own powers, rather than fill it with the accumulation of others. -Tryon Edwards
An educational system isn’t worth a great deal if it teaches young people how to make a living but doesn’t teach them how to make a life. – Author unknown
Education is helping the child realize his potentialities. -Erich Fromm
The greatest good you can do for another is not just to share your riches but to reveal to him his own. Benjamin Disraeli
his uniqueness to teach him how to develop that uniqueness, and then to show him how to share it because that’s the only reason for having anything. Leo Buscaglia
The job of an educator is to teach students to see the vitality in themselves. Joseph Campbell
Learning makes a man fit company for himself. Thomas Fuller
Genius without education is like silver in the mine. – Ben Franklin
Do not confine your children to your own learning, for they were born in another time. Hebrew proverb
It is certain that a serious attention to the sciences and liberal arts softens and humanizes the temper, and cherishes those fine emotions in which true virtue and honor consist. It very rarely happens that a man of taste and learning is not, at least, an honest man, whatever frailties may attend him. – Basil Hume
A human being is not, in any proper sense, a human being till he is educated. Horace Mann
The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future life. -Plato, The Republic
Whoso neglects learning in his youth, loses the past and is dead to the future. Euripides
Education is the best provision for old age. Aristotle
The primary purpose of a liberal education is to make one’s mind a pleasant place in which to spend one’s leisure. -Sydney J. Harris
Tis education forms the common mind: Just as the twig is bent, the tree’s inclin’d. Alexander Pope, from Moral Essays
Education is not given for the purpose of earning a living; it’s learning what to do with a living after you’ve earned it. Abraham Lincoln
We know that you highly esteem the learning taught in those colleges… We thank you heartily, but our ideas of this kind of education happen not to be the same as yours… Several of our young people were instructed in all your sciences; but when they came back to us, they were bad runners, ignorant of every means of living in the woods… not fit for hunters, warriors, nor counsellors, they were totally good for nothing. Though we decline your kind offer, to show our grateful sense of it, if the gentlemen of Virginia will send us a dozen of their sons, we will take care of their education, instruct them in all we know, and make men of them.- Unknown Iroquois Representative