Inspiring Words: A Heartfelt Collection of Quotes for Teacher Appreciation

"Your heart is slightly bigger than the average human heart, but that’s because you’re a teacher."

- Aaron Bacall

"A good teacher is like a candle – it consumes itself to light the way for others."

- Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

"A teacher is a compass that activates the magnets of curiosity, knowledge, and wisdom in the pupils."

- Ever Garrison

"Children are likely to live up to what you believe of them."

- Lady Bird Johnson

"I am indebted to my father for living, but to my teacher for living well."

- Alexander the Great

"The task of the excellent teacher is to stimulate ‘apparently ordinary’ people to unusual effort."

- K. Patricia Cross

"Give me a fish and I eat for a day. Teach me to fish and I eat for a lifetime."

- Chinese Proverb

"It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge."

- Albert Einstein

"Teaching is a very noble profession that shapes the character, caliber, and future of the individual."

- A.P.J. Abdul Kalam

"Nine-tenths of education is encouragement."

- Anatole France

"A good teacher can inspire hope; ignite the imagination, and instill a love of learning."

- Brad Henry

"Everyone who remembers his own education remembers teachers, not methods and techniques. The teacher is the heart of the educational system."

- Sidney Hook

"Teaching is not just a job. It is a human service, and it must be thought of as a mission."

- Dr. Ralph Tyler

"Better than a thousand days of diligent study is one day with a great teacher."

- Japanese Proverb

"To teach is to learn twice."

- Joseph Joubert

"What greater or better gift can we offer the republic than to teach and instruct our youth?"

- Cicero

"One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings."

- Carl Jung

"When we strive to become better teachers than we are, everyone in our classroom becomes better too."

- Robert John Meehan

"Great teachers empathize with kids, respect them, and believe that each one has something special that can be built upon."

- Ann Lieberman

"Teacher appreciation makes the world of education go around."

- Helen Peters

"Be a wonderful role model because you will be the window through which many children will see their future."

- Thomas McKinnon

"He who opens a school door closes a prison."

- Victor Hugo

"Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths pure theatre."

- Gail Godwin

"In order to be an effective teacher, you have to love your students as human beings, and you have to love teaching."

- Maribeth Sublette

"Education is the key to success in life, and teachers make a lasting impact in the lives of their students."

- Solomon Ortiz

"One good teacher in a lifetime may sometimes change a delinquent into a solid citizen."

- Philip Wylie

"When you teach your son, you teach your son’s son."

- The Talmud

"If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow."

- John Dewey

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire."

- W.B. Yeats

"The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away."

- Pablo Picasso

"A good teacher can inspire hope, ignite the imagination, and instill a love of learning."

- Brad Henry

"Those who know do. Those who understand, teach."

- Aristotle

"Teaching kids to count is fine, but teaching them what counts is best."

- Bob Talbert

"In learning you will teach, and in teaching you will learn."

- Phil Collins

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

- Henry Adams

"The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery."

- Mark van Doren

"The beautiful thing about learning is that no one can take it away from you."

- BB King

"I like a teacher who gives you something to take home to think about besides homework."

- Lily Tomlin

"Teachers can change lives with just the right mix of chalk and challenges."

- Joyce Meyer

"If you have to put someone on a pedestal, put teachers. They are society’s heroes."

- Guy Kawasaki

"Teaching is the greatest act of optimism."

- Colleen Wilcox

"A teacher enlarges people in all sorts of ways besides just his subject matter."

- Wallace Stegner

"The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires."

- William A. Ward

"What the teacher is, is more important than what he teaches."

- Karl Menninger

"Teachers have three loves: love of learning, love of learners, and the love of bringing the first two loves together."

- Scott Hayden

"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

"Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world."

- Nelson Mandela

"One child, one teacher, one book, one pen can change the world."

- Malala Yousafzai

"The art of teaching is to teach, to teach well, and to teach even better."

- Henri Frederic Amiel

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

- D. Martin

"The best teacher is the one who suggests rather than dogmatizes and inspires his listener with the wish to teach himself."

- Edward Bulwer-Lytton

"The influence of teachers extends beyond the classroom, well into the future."

- F. Sionil Jose

"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."

- Peter Drucker

"Teaching is not about answers but about questions; not about knowing but about learning; not about the destination but about the journey."

- Glenn Doman

"I am not a teacher, but an awakener."

- Robert Frost

"If you have to put someone on a pedestal, put teachers. They are society's heroes."

- Guy Kawasaki

"One book, one pen, one child and one teacher can change the world."

- Malala Yousafzai

"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 they can possibly be."

- Rita Pierson

"How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world."

- Anne Frank

"Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire."

- William Butler Yeats

"We never know which lives we influence, or when or why."

- Stephen King

"[Kids] don't remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are."

- Jim Henson

"Children must be taught how to think, not what to think."

- Margaret Mead

"Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today."

- Malcolm X

"Don’t just teach your children to read, teach them to question what they read. Teach them to question everything!"

- George Carlin

"If you fell down yesterday, stand up today."

- H.G. Wells

"We can’t help everyone, but everyone can help someone."

- Ronald Reagan

"If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours."

- Henry David Thoreau

"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."

- Maya Angelou

"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."

- Thomas A. Edison

"The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more you learn, the more places you'll go."

- Dr. Seuss

"Those who know, do. Those who understand, teach."

- Aristotle

"Teach the children so it will not be necessary to teach the adults."

- Abraham Lincoln

"The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts."

- C. S. Lewis

"If kids come to us from strong, healthy functioning families, it makes our job easier. If they do not come from strong, healthy functioning families, it makes our job more important."

- Barbara Colorose

"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

"One child, one teacher, one pen, and one book can change the world."

- Malala Yousafzai

"A teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary."

- Thomas Carruthers

"Education breeds confidence. Confidence breeds hope. Hope breeds peace."

- Confucius

"Every now and then a man’s mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions."

- Oliver Wendell Holmes

"Everyone who remembers his own educational experience remembers teachers, not methods and techniques. The teacher is the kingpin of the educational situation."

- Sidney Hook

"What is the greatest sign of success for a teacher thus transformed? It is to be able to say, “The children are now working as if I did not exist.”"

- Maria Montessori

"If you can read this, thank a teacher."

- American Proverb

"The task of the excellent teacher is to stimulate “apparently ordinary” people to unusual effort. The tough problem is not in identifying winners: it is in making winners out of ordinary people."

- K. Patricia Cross

"If you give a man a fish he is hungry again in an hour. If you teach him to catch a fish you do him a good turn."

- Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie

"Teaching is a very noble profession that shapes the character, caliber, and future of an individual. If the people remember me as a good teacher, that will be the biggest honor for me."

- A.P.J. Abdul Kalam

"If [the teacher] is indeed wise, he does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind."

- Kahlil Gibran

"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

"Experience is the only teacher, and we get his lesson indifferently in any school."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"In spite of some bad experiences, I’m a firm believer in the trial-and-error method of learning."

- Andy Rooney

"The best CEOs I know are teachers, and at the core of what they teach is strategy."

- Michael Porter

"A garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience and careful watchfulness; it teaches industry and thrift; above all it teaches entire trust."

- Gertrude Jekyll

"The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence. He inspires self-trust. He guides their eyes from himself to the spirit that quickens him. He will have no disciples."

- Amos-Bronson-Alcott

"Few have been taught to any purpose who have not been their own teachers."

- Joshua Reynolds

"Shakespeare, Dickens, Mark Twain, and so many others were my dearest friends and greatest teachers."

- Lloyd Alexander

"Teachers are expected to reach unattainable goals with inadequate tools. The miracle is that at times they accomplish this impossible task."

- Haim Ginott

"Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual."

- Arthur Koestler

"Good teachers know how to bring out the best in students."

- Charles Kuralt

"Anyone who does anything to help a child in his life is a hero to me."

- Fred Rogers

"The great teacher inspires."

- William Arthur Ward

"If you look behind every exceptional person there is an exceptional teacher."

- Stephen Hawking

"Teaching is more than imparting knowledge; it is inspiring change. Learning is more than absorbing facts; it is acquiring understanding."

- William Arthur Ward

"Good teaching is more a giving of right questions than a giving of right answers."

- Josef Albers

"The best teachers are those who show you where to look but don’t tell you what to see."

- Alexandra K. Trenfor

"It’s the teacher that makes the difference, not the classroom."

- Michael Morpurgo

"Teachers appreciate being appreciated, for teacher appreciation is their highest award."

- William Prince

"The teacher … must have a kind of faith that the child will reveal himself through work."

- Maria Montessori

"To this end, the greatest asset of a school is the personality of the teacher."

- John Strachan

"The best teacher of children, in brief, is one who is essentially childlike."

- H. L. Mencken

"The duties of a teacher are neither few nor small, but they elevate the mind and give energy to the character."

- Dorothea Dix

"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

"In teaching, you cannot see the fruit of a day’s work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years."

- Jacques Barzun

"Teaching is not about answering questions but about raising questions – opening doors for them in places that they could not imagine."

- Yawar Baig

"Teachers, I believe, are the most responsible and important members of society because their professional efforts affect the fate of the earth."

- Helen Caldicott

"how little interested a scientist usually is in the work of any other, with the possible exception of the teacher who backs him or the student who honors him."

- Jean Rostand

"The best teacher lodges an intent not in the mind but in the heart."

- Anne Michaels

"Technology is just a tool. In terms of getting the kids working together and motivating them, the teacher is the most important."

- Bill Gates

"A teacher who establishes rapport with the taught, becomes one with them, learns more from them than he teaches them."

- Mahatma Gandhi

"Not to keep from error, is the duty of the educator of men, but to guide the erring one, even to let him swill his error out of full cups—that is the wisdom of teachers."

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"But remain the teacher of the young teachers. Advise and direct us, and we will be ready to learn. I will have need of you as long as I live."

- Jean Jacques Rousseau

"What do I consider a teacher should be? One who breathes life into knowledge so that it takes new form in progress and civilization."

- Helen Keller

"I have always felt that the true text-book for the pupil is his teacher."

- Mahatma Gandhi

"Education is for improving the lives of others and for leaving your community and world better than you found it."

- Marian Wright Edelman

"An understanding heart is everything in a teacher and cannot be esteemed highly enough."

- Carl Jung

"Let us remember: One book, one pen, one child, and one teacher can change the world."

- Malala Yousafzai

"Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever."

- Mahatma Gandhi

"They may forget what you said — but they will never forget how you made them feel."

- Carl Buehner

"What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Education is the key to unlocking the world, a passport to freedom."

- Oprah Winfrey

"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

"Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another."

- G.K. Chesterton

"The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running."

- Simone Weil

"When one teaches, two learn."

- Robert Heinlein

"The road to freedom — here and everywhere on earth — begins in the classroom."

- Hubert Humphrey

"The desire to reach for the stars is ambitious. The desire to reach hearts is wise."

- Maya Angelou

"Education doesn’t make us smarter. It makes us whole."

- Jill Biden

"The fact that you worry about being a good teacher, means that you already are one."

- Jodi Picoult

"The world is changed by your example not by your opinion."

- Paulo Coelho

"I cannot teach anybody anything; I can only make them think."

- Socrates

"What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to a human soul."

- Joseph Addison

"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

"I am always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught."

- Winston Churchill

"If I am walking with two other men, each of them will serve as my teacher. I will pick out the good points of the one and imitate them, and the bad points of the other and correct them in myself."

- Confucius

"Acquire new knowledge whilst thinking over the old, and you may become a teacher of others."

- Confucius

"The good man is the teacher of the bad, and the bad is the material from which the good may learn. He who does not value the teacher, or greatly care for the material, is greatly deluded."

- Lao Tzu

"The greatest teacher has nothing to say. He simply gives himself in service, and never worries."

- Lao Tzu

"Of course you will insist on modesty in the children, and respect to their teachers, but if the boy stops you in your speech, cries out that you are wrong and sets you right, hug him!"

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The real job of every moral teacher is to keep bringing us back to the simple principles, which we’re so anxious not to see."

- C.S. Lewis

"Academic chairs are many, but wise and noble teachers are few; lecture-rooms are numerous and large, but the number of young people who genuinely thirst after truth and justice is small."

- Albert Einstein

"Be versed in ancient lore, and familiarize yourself with the modern; then may you become teachers."

- Confucius

"Find a teacher who is an integral being, a beacon who extends his light and virtue with equal ease to those who appreciate him and those who don’t. Shape yourself in his mold, bathe in his nourishing radiance, and reflect it out to the rest of the world."

- Lao Tzu

"The whole secret of the teacher’s force lies in the conviction that men are convertible."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"If you become a teacher, by your pupils you’ll be taught."

- Oscar Hammerstein II

"One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil."

- Friedrich Nietzsche

"My father followed, during most of his life, the precarious occupation of a country school teacher."

- Simon Newcomb

"The best method for a given teacher is the one which is most familiar to the teacher."

- Leo Tolstoy

"Change is the end result of all true learning."

- Leo Buscaglia

"Let everything you do be done as if it makes a difference."

- William James

"If you can dream it, you can do it."

- Walt Disney

"Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can."

- Arthur Ashe

"You can never be overdressed or overeducated."

- Oscar Wilde

"My studies gave me only a very superficial knowledge of philosophy but sharpened my interest in it. I benefited greatly from being a teacher—that is, from being able to spend a great deal of time reading, writing and educating myself."

- Simone de Beauvoir

"Like any teenager who reads The Great Gatsby, probably, I was madly in love with the teacher who had opened it up for me."

- Rob Sheffield

"When I was sixteen I started publishing all kinds of things in school magazines. My main feedback came from my English teacher, Miss Bessie B. Billings, who said, “I can’t understand this at all, dear, so it must be good.”"

- Margaret Atwood

"Nothing you do for children is ever wasted. They seem not to notice us, hovering, averting our eyes, and they seldom offer thanks, but what we do for them is never wasted."

- Garrison Keillor

"But as I grew, my heroes changed so that now I can honestly say that anyone who does anything to help a child in this life is a hero to me."

- Fred Rogers

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

- Jacques Barzun

"They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel."

- Carl W. Buechner

"When educating the minds of our youth, we must not forget to educate their hearts."

- Dalai Lama

"Teachers teach because they care. Teaching young people is what they do best. It requires long hours, patience, and care."

- Horace Mann

"Students don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care."

- Anonymous

"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.’"

"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."

"One test of the correctness of educational procedure is the happiness of the child."

"What a gift for any teacher to see the students smile and live up to their potential. That’s the reward. That’s humbling to be a witness to something like that."

"I think the teaching profession contributes more to the future of our society than any other single profession."

"A truly special teacher is very wise and sees tomorrow in every child’s eyes."

- Unknown

"The best teachers teach from the heart, not from the book."

"Teaching: the only profession where you steal things from home and bring them to work."

"Don’t judge a teacher until you’ve walked a mile in her shoes."

- Unknown

"What a teacher writes on the blackboard of life can never be erased."

"Summer vacation is the time when parents realize teachers are grossly underpaid."

- Unknown

"Cheers to all of the teachers who give out pencils every single day knowing that they’ll never get them back."

- Unknown

"A good teacher is like a candle: It consumes itself to light the way for others."

- Unknown

"Without teachers, life would have no class."

- Unknown

"Good teachers are the ones who can challenge young minds without losing their own."

"A truly amazing teacher is hard to find, difficult to part with, and impossible to forget."

- Unknown

"A teacher nourishes the soul of a child for a lifetime."

- Unknown

"My teacher thought I was smarter than I was—so I was."

- Unknown

"Not all superheroes wear capes—some have teaching degrees."

- Unknown

"It takes a big heart to help shape little minds."

- Unknown

"A teacher takes a hand, opens a mind, and touches a heart."

- Unknown

"Not all superheroes wear capes; some have teaching degrees."

- Unknown

"Teaching is the profession that teaches all the other professions."

"Teachers are the builders of tomorrow."

- Unknown

"To the world, you may just be a teacher, but to your students, you are a hero."

"Cheers to all of the teachers who give out pencils every single day who know that they’ll never get them back."

- Unknown

"The influence of a good teacher can never be erased."

"In the classroom, you’re not just a teacher; you’re a dream builder."

- Unknown

"A teacher’s purpose is not to create students in his own image, but to develop students who can create their own image."

- Unknown

"Teachers plant the seeds of knowledge that will grow forever."

- Unknown

"A great teacher takes a hand, opens a mind, and touches a heart."