quotes, quotations and nice thoughts dedicated to teachers

Teachers

I am not a teacher, but an awakener.

Robert Frost

Every piece of marble has a statue in it waiting to be released by a person of sufficient skill to chip away the unnecessary parts. Just as the sculptor is to the marble, so is education to the soul. It releases it. For only educated people are free people. You cannot create a statue by smashing the marble with a hammer, and you cannot by the force of arms release the spirit or the soul of people. Confucius

The entire object of true education is to make people not merely to do the right things, but to enjoy them; not merely industrious, but to enjoy industry; not merely learned, but to love knowledge; not merely pure, but to love purity; not merely just, but to hunger and thirst after justice. John Ruskin

Teachers usually have no way of knowing that they have made a difference in a child's life, even when they have made a dramatic one. But for children who are used to thinking of themselves as stupid or not worth talking to or as deserving beatings, a good teacher can provide an astonishing revelation. Good teachers put snags in the river of children passing by, and over the years they redirect hundreds of lives. Many people find it easy to imagine unseen webs of malevolent conspiracy in the world, and they are not always wrong. But there is also an innocence that conspires to hold humanity together, and it is made of people who never fully know the good that they have done. Tracy Kidder

To know how to suggest is the great art of teaching. Ralph Waldo Emerson

Teachers open the door. You enter by yourself.

Chinese proverb

A teacher affects eternity; no one can tell
where his or her influence stops.

Henry Adams

A teacher who can arouse a feeling for one single good action,
for one single good poem, accomplishes more than he or she who
fills our memory with rows on rows of natural objects,
classified with name and form.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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The true teachers defend their pupils against their own personal influence.
They inspire self-trust. They guide their student's eyes from themselves
to the spirit that quickens them. They will have no disciple.

Amos Bronson Alcott

The prosperity of a country
depends not on the abundance
of its revenues, nor on
the strength of its
fortifications, nor on the
beauty of its public
buildings; but it consists
in the number of
its cultivated citizens,
its people of education,
enlightenment, and character.

Martin Luther

learning - knowledge

You cannot teach people anything; you can only help them to find it within themselves.

Galileo

I am not a teacher: only a fellow-traveler of whom you
asked the way. I pointed ahead--ahead of myself as well as of you.

George Bernard Shaw

A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil
with a desire to learn is hammering on cold iron.

Horace Mann

Education should be of value to men and women both as private individuals
and as free, self-reliant, and responsible members of the community to
which they belong. It should help them, as individuals, to grow in
self-mastery and personal depth, to develop wider and deeper appreciations,
to acquire an enthusiasm for hard work, to love good talk and good books,
to delight in the adventures of intellectual curiosity, to become fair-minded,
open-minded, and generous in all their human responses.

American Association of Colleges

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

Joyce A. Myers

Teach the young people how to think, not what to think.

Sidney Sugarman

If you plan for a year, plant a seed. If for ten years, plant a tree.
If for a hundred years, teach the people. When you sow
a seed once, you will reap a single harvest. When
you teach people, you will reap a hundred harvests.

Kuan Chung

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Everyone who remembers his or her own educational experience
remembers teachers, not methods and techniques.

Sidney Hook

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

A woman attended her 20-year high school reunion. There she
encountered her freshman year art teacher. She told him that she
decided to go to college as a result of his inspiration, and that she
was now an art professor at a large state university.

At the end of the evening's festivities, the teacher searched out his
former student, shook her hand and said, "Thank you for saying
those nice things about my teaching. You've really made my day."

"You're welcome," said the woman as she hugged him, "But let me
thank you--you've made my life!"

author unknown

Teaching is the greatest act of optimism.

Colleen Wilcox

We definitely have the ability to be teachers ourselves.
We may not be qualified to teach algebra, but we certainly
can read a poem to a child (or even a friend!) and discuss
what it might mean to us. We can go through a book on
animals, looking at amazing pictures, learning ourselves by
reading captions as we "teach" someone else. We can listen
carefully as someone explains his or her ideas, helping that
person to clarify those ideas. There are many, many "teaching
moments" in every day, and if we keep our eyes and ears open,
we can recognize them and use them for all that they're worth.
And the more we do it, the more we learn ourselves,
and the better we get at it.

The most important lessons in life rarely happen in a classroom.
But if we step back and think that we can't teach because we're
not "teachers," then we lose many opportunities to do many
wonderful things. And if we don't teach because we assume
that someone else will, then everyone loses.

tom walsh

No person can reveal to you aught but that which already
lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.
The teachers who walk in the shadow of the temple, among their
followers, give not of their wisdom but rather of their faith and their lovingness.
If they are indeed wise they do not bid you enter the house of their wisdom,
but rather lead you to the threshold of your own mind.

Khalil Gibran

Teaching is one of the most crucial, responsible, and important professions--
since it consists of communicating knowledge and guiding the intellectual
development of men and women. The objective purpose of teaching is the
spread and communication of the right ideas, of intellectual values,
which means: the creation of a culture.

Ayn Rand

Articles and book excerpts on teaching:

If. . . .      Author Unknown
The Teachers in My Life      tom walsh
A Teaching on Heaven and Hell
Two Versions of "Three Letters"      Elizabeth Silance Ballard

In a completely rational society the best of us would aspire to be teachers
and the rest of us would have to settle for something less, because passing
civilization along from one generation to the next ought to be the highest
honor and the highest responsibility anyone could have.

Lee Iacocca

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

Albert Einstein

A good teacher can never be fixed in a routine... each moment
requires a sensitive mind that is constantly changing
and constantly adapting.
A teacher must never impose this student to fit his favourite pattern;
a good teacher functions as a pointer, exposing his student's
vulnerability, causing him or her to explore both internally
and finally integrating oneself with one's being.

Bruce Lee

learning - knowledge

On Teachers

A person wasn't a teacher because they had been elected or got a certificate.
They were a teacher because they knew something and were respected. If
they didn't know enough, they weren't teachers. Or if we didn't need to
know what they knew, we didn't go to them.
Now you send us teachers and you tell us to send our children, when we
aren't even sure what the teachers know. We don't even know if they are
good people who will build up the hearts of our children. All we know is that
they are teachers because someone gave them a piece of paper
saying they had taken courses about teaching.
What we want to know is what kind of person they are and what they have
in their hearts to share. Telling us they have a paper that lets them teach is like
putting a fancy wrapping on a box. We want to know what's in that box. An
empty box with a fancy wrapper is still an empty box.

Kent Nerburn
Neither Wolf nor Dog

All teachers are capable of creating responsible young men and
women who go forth to live good lives. The influence of the
creative teacher touches about everything. Every nook and
corner of human activity calls for creative people. We look to
teachers to supply those people.
Creative teaching is one of our greatest needs.

Wilferd A. Peterson
The Art of Creative Thinking