Teaching Quotes

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

School should become the place where teachers, not just students, learn.

~ Vijay Dhameliya

Now, it is of course well known that Christ continually uses the expression 'imitators.' He never says that he asks for admirers, adoring admirers, adherents; and when he uses the expression 'follower' he always explains it in such a way that one perceives that 'imitators' is meant by it, that is not adherents of a teaching but imitators of a life....

~ Søren Kierkegaard

This teaching job did not pay a lot of money, because, let's face it, nobody gives a flying fuck about education, but it was a temporary position.

~ Daniel Handler

..English teachers often take a right-wrong stance. I'd rather my students take a thinking stance.

~ Jeff Anderson

When I act tough they listen politely till the spasm passes. They know.

~ Frank Mccourt

If I could make money making armpit farts, I would. But since I can't, I teach. And write.

~ Richard B. Knight

There's nothing sillier in the world than a teacher telling you don't do it after you already did it.

~ Frank Mccourt

Test-oriented teaching strikes me as anti-educational, a kind of unpleasant game that subverts the real aim of education: to waken a student to her or his potential, and to pursue a subject of considerable importance without restrictions imposed by anything except the inherent demands of the material.

~ Jay Parini

A good teacher is one, that never stops listening; a good listener is one, that never stops teaching.

~ Anthony Liccione

People respond when they are taught, and that primarily by example, rather than preached at. Jesus modeled just this approach in His life.~R. Alan Woods [2013]

~ R. Alan Woods

Teaching is a sacred art. This is why the noblest druid is not the one who conjures fires and smoke but the one who brings the news and passes on the histories. The teacher, the bard, the singer of tales is a freer of men's minds and bodies, especially when he roams without allegiance to one chieftain or another. But he is also a danger to the masters if he insists upon telling the truth. The truth will inevitably cause tremors in those who cling to power without honoring justice.

~ Kate Horsley

The question is not why should we change but rather what sort of death wish are we promoting by refusing to change?

~ William Badke

We are both a student and a teacher from birth. How eagerly we embrace these roles determines how fulfilled we are with our lives.

~ Simon Boylan

Love this quote from a teacher about their class This is four walls around the future!

~ #Name?

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

Roses and thorns are parts of the same plant. Somehow though, some people are concerned mainly about the roses. The rose is not on the plant for more than a week, but the thorns are there forever.Roses are teaching that the beauty of life will bloom, once you have taught yourself the lessons given by living with the thorns.

~ Grigoris Deoudis

You shouldn't call then anything. They're poor unfortunate people who cannot help the way they look

~ Jacqueline Wilson

Without books we should very likely be a still-primitive people living in the shadow of traditions that faded with years until only a blur remained, and different memories would remember the past in different ways. A parent or a teacher has only his lifetime; a good book can teach forever.Without books we should very likely be a still-primitive people living in the shadow of traditions that faded with years until only a blur remained, and different memories would remember the past in different ways. A parent or a teacher has only his lifetime; a good book can teach forever.

~ Louis L'amour

We are more than role models for our students, we are leaders and teachers of both an academic curriculum and a social curriculum.

~ Patricia Sequeira Belvel

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

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

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

I don't teach lies, but I do not teach all I know is true.

~ Patricia A. Mckillip

Any school for free citizens must begin by teaching distrust, not trust. It must teach questioning, not acceptance of stock answers.

~ Brian Herbert

It is so delightful to teach those one loves!

~ Andrew Lang

I meet them in this stadium, strangers at opposing desks until I wave my red flag.

~ Marina Leigh Hatfield

Another Mexican American in another class, approaches Victor after class, carrying his copy of Fahrenheit 451, required reading for the course. The student doesn't understand the reference to a salon. Victor explains that this is just another word for the living room. No understanding in the student's eyes. He tries Spanish: la salon. Still nothing. The student has grown up as a migrant worker. And Victor remembers the white student who had been in his class a quarter ago, who had written about not understanding racism, that there was none where he had grown up, in Wennatchee, that he has played with the children of his father's migrant workers without there being any hostility. His father's workers. Property. Property that doesn't know of living rooms. And Victor thought of what the man from Wennatchee knew, what the ROTC Mexican American knew, what the migrant worker knew. And he thought of getting up the next morning to go with Serena to St. Mary's for cheese and butter. And he knew there was something he was not doing in his composition classrooms.

~ Victor Villanueva

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

Before I started (college), that's the advice my dad gave me. He said to pick classes based on the teacher whenever you can, not the subject...his point was that good teachers are priceless. They inspire you, they entertain you, and you end up learning a ton even when you don't know it.

~ Nicholas Sparks

So much of teaching is sharing. Learning results in sharing, sharing results in change, change is learning. The only other job with so much sharing is parenting. That's probably why the two are so often confused.

~ Esmé Raji Codell

Sometimes a little song is sweet to hear, even if the orchestra is more accomplished

~ Esmé Raji Codell

you cannot be friends either with boy or man unless you give yourself away in the process, and Mr. Pembroke did not commend this. He, for “personal intercourse,” substituted the safer “personal influence,” and gave his junior hints on the setting of kindly traps, in which the boy does give himself away and reveals his shy delicate thoughts, while the master, intact, commends or corrects them.Originally Rickie had meant to help boys in the anxieties that they undergo when changing into men: at Cambridge he had numbered this among life’s duties. But here is a subject in which we mustinevitably speak as one human being to another, not as one who has authority or the shadow of authority, and for this reason the elder school-master could suggest nothing but a few formulae. Formulae, like kindly traps, were not in Rickie’s line, so he abandoned thesesubjects altogether and confined himself to working hard at what was easy.

~ E.m. Forster

First he wrought and afterwards he taught.

~ Geoffrey Chaucer

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

~ Chinese Proverb

The school teacher is certainly underpaid as a child minder but ludicrously overpaid as an educator.

~ John Osborne

There is no crisis to which academics will not respond with a seminar.

~ Old Saying

A teacher affects eternity he can never tell where his influence stops.

~ Henry Adams

It would be a great advantage to some schoolmasters if they would steal two hours a day from their pupils and give their own minds the benefit of the robbery.

~ J. F. Boyse

If the student fails to learn the teacher fails to teach.

~ Anonymous