Education Quotes

"The roots of education … are bitter, but the fruit is sweet."

- Aristotle

"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 which he finds it hard to answer."

- Alice Wellington Rollins

"It must be remembered that the purpose of education is not to fill the minds of students with facts...it is to teach them to think, if that is possible, and always to think for themselves."

- Robert Hutchins

"Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition."

- Jacques Barzun

"Teaching is the only major occupation...for which we have not 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

"The most important part of teaching is to teach what it is to know."

- Simone Weil

"Teaching is the perpetual end and office of all things. Teaching, instruction is the main design that shines through the sky and earth."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Teaching is truth mediated by personality."

- Phyllis Brooks

"The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next."

- Abraham Lincoln

"A capacity, and taste, for reading, gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others. It is the key, or one of the keys, to the already solved problems. And not only so. It gives a relish, and facility, for successfully pursuing the [yet] unsolved ones."

- Abraham Lincoln

"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

"A teacher's job is to take a bunch of live wires and see that they are well-grounded."

- Darwin D. Martin

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

- Chinese Proverb

"The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards; curiosity itself can be vivid and wholesome only in proportion as the mind is contented and happy."

- Anatole France

"Benevolence alone will not make a teacher, nor will learning alone do it. The gift of teaching is a peculiar talent, and implies a need and a craving in the teacher himself."

- John Jay Chapman

"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 the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit."

- John Steinbeck

"Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one."

- Malcolm Forbes

"Among the many purposes of schooling, four stand out to us as having special moral value: to love and care, to serve, to empower and, of course, to learn."

- Andy Hargreaves and Michael Fullan

"I entered the classroom with the conviction that it was crucial for me and every other student to be an active participant, not a passive consumer...education that connects the will to know with the will to become."

- Bell Hooks

"Grandparents are, without a doubt, some of the world’s best educators."

- Charles W. Shedd

"Some of the world's best educators are grandparents."

- Dr. Charlie W. Shedd

"La educación es, tal vez, la forma más alta de buscar a Dios."

- Gabriela Mistral

"The most important function of education at any level is to develop the personality of the individual and the significance of his life to himself and to others. This is the basic architecture of a life; the rest is ornamentation and decoration of the structure."

- Grayson Kirk

"No one has yet fully realized the wealth of sympathy, kindness, and generosity hidden in the soul of a child. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure."

- Emma Goldman

"The object of teaching a child is to enable him [or her] to get along without his [or her] teacher."

- Elbert Hubbard

"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

"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

"Education is much more than a matter of imparting the knowledge and skills by which narrow goals are achieved. It is also about opening the child’s eyes to the needs and rights of others."

- Dalai Lama

"It is not possible for one to teach others who cannot teach his own family."

- Confucius

"There are three good reasons to be a teacher—June, July, and August."