"[Kids] don't remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are."
— Jim Henson (It's Not Easy Being Green: And Other Things to Consider)

"'It would seem that you have no useful skill or talent whatsoever,' he said. 'Have you thought of going into teaching?'"
— Terry Pratchett (Mort)

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

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea."
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

"You cannot teach a man anything, you can only help him find it within himself."
— Galileo Galilei

"A person can learn a lot from a dog, even a loopy one like ours. Marley taught me about living each day with unbridled exuberance and joy, about seizing the moment and following your heart. He taught me to appreciate the simple things-a walk in the woods, a fresh snowfall, a nap in a shaft of winter sunlight. And as he grew old and achy, he taught me about optimism in the face of adversity. Mostly, he taught me about friendship and selflessness and, above all else, unwavering loyalty."
— John Grogan (Marley & Me: Love and Life with the World's Worst Dog)

"Those who know, do. Those that understand, teach."
— Aristotle

"I am afraid that the schools will prove the very gates of hell, unless they diligently labor in explaining the Holy Scriptures and engraving them in the heart of the youth."
— Martin Luther

"In my youth, it was my good luck to have a few good teachers, men and women, who came into my head and lit a match."
— Yann Martel

"Only those who look with the eyes of children can lose themselves in the object of their wonder. "
— Eberhard Arnold

"Experience teaches only the teachable."
— Aldous Huxley

"Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, be fortified by it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it. "
— Hermann Hesse

"The object of teaching a child is to enable him to get along without a teacher."
— Elbert Hubbard

"part of the art of teaching is the ability to rearrange the world for students - to force them to see things in a new way. i've known too many stupid intellectuals to believe that education and wisdom come as a package deal along with facts, it's your perspective that counts - your ability to see differently, not just to see a lot."
— Sunny Decker (An Empty Spoon)

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

"No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.
The teacher who walks in the shadow of the temple, among his followers, gives not of his wisdom but rather of his faith and his lovingness.
If he 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 Gibrán (The Prophet)

"Adults constantly raise the bar on smart children, precisely because they're able to handle it. The children get overwhelmed by the tasks in front of them and gradually lose the sort of openness and sense of accomplishment they innately have. When they're treated like that, children start to crawl inside a shell and keep everything inside. It takes a lot of time and effort to get them to open up again. Kids' hearts are malleable, but once they gel it's hard to get them back the way they were."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"A child who is protected from all controversial ideas is as vulnerable as a child who is protected from every germ. The infection, when it comes- and it will come- may overwhelm the system, be it the immune system or the belief system."
— Jane Smiley

"The main reason I became a teacher is that I like being the first one to introduce kids to words and music and people and numbers and concepts and idea that they have never heard about or thought about before. I like being the first one to tell them about Long John Silver and negative numbers and Beethoven and alliteration and "Oh, What a Beautiful Morning" and similes and right angles and Ebenezer Scrooge. . . Just think about what you know today. You read. You write. You work with numbers. You solve problems. We take all these things for granted. But of course you haven't always read. You haven't always known how to write. You weren't born knowing how to subtract 199 from 600. Someone showed you. There was a moment when you moved from not knowing to knowing, from not understanding to understanding. That's why I became a teacher."
— Phillip Done (32 Third Graders and One Class Bunny: Life Lessons from Teaching)

"I’ve come to a frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element in the classroom. It’s my personal approach that creates the climate. It’s my daily mood that makes the weather. As a teacher, I possess a tremendous power to make a child’s life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated and a child humanized or dehumanized."
— Haim G. Ginott

"In a completely rational society, the best of us would be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for something else."
— Lee Iacocca

"If thou wouldst seek justice, thyself must be just. "
— Stephen R. Lawhead (Hood)

"The biggest challenge facing the great teachers and communicators of history is not to teach history itself, nor even the lessons of history, but why history matters. How to ignite the first spark of the will o'the wisp, the Jack o'lantern, the ignis fatuus [foolish fire] beloved of poets, which lights up one source of history and then another, zigzagging across the marsh, connecting and linking and writing bright words across the dark face of the present. There's no phrase I can come up that will encapsulate in a winning sound-bite why history matters. We know that history matters, we know that it is thrilling, absorbing, fascinating, delightful and infuriating, that it is life. Yet I can't help wondering if it's a bit like being a Wagnerite; you just have to get used to the fact that some people are never going to listen."
— Stephen Fry (Making History)

"If a doctor, lawyer, or dentist had 40 people in his office at one time, all of whom had different needs, and some of whom didn't want to be there and were causing trouble, and the doctor, lawyer, or dentist, without assistance, had to treat them all with professional excellence for nine months, then he might have some conception of the classroom teacher's job. "
— Donald D. Quinn

"When you study great teachers... you will learn much more from their caring and hard work than from their style."
— William Glasser

"The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence."
— Amos Bronson Alcott

"There's a lot of talk these days about giving children self-esteem. It's not something you can give; it's something they have to build. Coach Graham worked in a no-coddling zone. Self-esteem? He knew there was really only one way to teach kids how to develop it: You give them something they can't do, they work hard until they find they can do it, and you just keep repeating the process."
— Randy Pausch (The Last Lecture)

"All teachings are mere references. The true experience is living your own life. Then, even the holiest of words are only words."
— Deng Ming- Dao

""We cannot hold a torch to light another's path without brightening our own."
"
— Ben Sweetland

"His older self had taught his younger self a language which the older self knew because the younger self, after being taught, grew up to be the older self and was, therefore, capable of teaching."
— Robert A. Heinlein

"The only person who is spiritually smart is the one who has learned how to learn, unlearn, and change directions instantly, and start all over again, if your soul calls for it.
----Michelle L. Casto
"
— Michelle L. Casto

"We now understand that higher-level thinking is more likely to occur in the brain of a student who is emotionally secure than in the brain of a student who is scared, upset, anxious, or stressed."
— Mawhinney and Sagan

"[T]eaching has been for me an education (Lord knows what it has been for my students)."
— Howard Nemerov

"But the purpose of a story is to teach and to please at once, and what it teaches is how to recognize the snares of the world."
— Umberto Eco (The Island of the Day Before)

"Our musicians in residence carry this belief into the classroom. They don't think of children's self-esteem as so fragile that it will be shattered by the suggestion that the child guessed wrong or jumped to an invalid conclusion. They make corrections matter-of-factly, with no feeling that a chid is a failure because she has made an error, but with ocnfidence that the feedback will help the child learn and be accurate the next time."
— Peter Perret (A Well-Tempered Mind: Using Music to Help Children Listen and Learn)

"To know how to suggest is the art of teaching."
— Henri Frederic Amiel

""...the fundamental purpose of school is learning, not teaching." "
— PLC Educators - R Dufour

"Teaching is only demonstrating that it is possible. Learning is making it possible for yourself."
— Paulo Coelho (The Pilgrimage)

"The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of the mind for the purpose of satesfying it afterwards."
— Anatole France (The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard)

""We cannot hold a torch to light another's path without brightening our own."
"
— Ben Sweetland