Quotations about Teachers

I like a teacher who gives you something to take home to think about besides homework.  ~Lily Tomlin as "Edith Ann"


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 the profession that teaches all the other professions.  ~Author Unknown


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


Modern cynics and skeptics... see no harm in paying those to whom they entrust the minds of their children a smaller wage than is paid to those to whom they entrust the care of their plumbing.  ~John F. Kennedy

A teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary. ~Thomas Carruthers


Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater.  ~Gail Godwin

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


Most teachers have little control over school policy or curriculum or choice of texts or special placement of students, but most have a great deal of autonomy inside the classroom.  To a degree shared by only a few other occupations, such as police work, public education rests precariously on the skill and virtue of the people at the bottom of the institutional pyramid.  ~Tracy Kidder

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.  ~Henry Brooks Adams


A good teacher is like a candle - it consumes itself to light the way for others.  ~Author Unknown


The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence.  He inspires self-distrust.  He guides their eyes from himself to the spirit that quickens him.  He will have no disciple.  ~Amos Bronson Alcott


A good teacher is a master of simplification and an enemy of simplism.  ~Louis A. Berman


We expect teachers to handle teenage pregnancy, substance abuse, and the failings of the family.  Then we expect them to educate our children.  ~John Sculley

Good teachers are costly, but bad teachers cost more.  ~Bob Talbert

The mediocre teacher tells.  The good teacher explains.  The superior teacher demonstrates.  The great teacher inspires.  ~William Arthur Ward

The best teacher is the one who suggests rather than dogmatizes, and inspires his listener with the wish to teach himself.  ~Edward Bulwer-Lytton


A teacher's purpose is not to create students in his own image, but to develop students who can create their own image.  ~Author Unknown


What the teacher is, is more important than what he teaches.  ~Karl Menninger

Teaching should be full of ideas instead of stuffed with facts.  ~Author Unknown


A cross-eyed teacher can keep twice the number of children in order than any other, because the pupils do not know who she's looking at.  ~Four Hundred Laughs: Or, Fun Without Vulgarity, compiled and edited by John R. Kemble, 1902


Teaching is leaving a vestige of one self in the development of another.  And surely the student is a bank where you can deposit your most precious treasures.  ~Eugene P. Bertin


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


Teachers who inspire know that teaching is like cultivating a garden, and those who would have nothing to do with thorns must never attempt to gather flowers.  ~Author Unknown


Teachers who inspire realize there will always be rocks in the road ahead of us.  They will be stumbling blocks or stepping stones; it all depends on how we use them.  ~Author Unknown


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

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


The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind.  ~Kahlil Gibran


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


When you teach your son, you teach your son's son.  ~The Talmud


The best teachers teach from the heart, not from the book.  ~Author Unknown


Often, when I am reading a good book, I stop and thank my teacher.  That is, I used to, until she got an unlisted number.  ~Author Unknown


Who dares to teach must never cease to learn.  ~John Cotton Dana

There are three good reasons to be a teacher - June, July, and August.  ~Author Unknown


A teacher should have maximal authority, and minimal power.  ~Thomas Szaz

To teach is to learn twice.  ~Joseph Joubert, Pens¨¦es, 1842

The secret of teaching is to appear to have known all your life what you just learned this morning.  ~Author Unknown


Don't try to fix the students, fix ourselves first.  The good teacher makes the poor student good and the good student superior.  When our students fail, we, as teachers, too, have failed.  ~Marva Collins

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

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.  In teaching we rely on the "naturals," the ones who somehow know how to teach.  ~Peter Drucker

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

The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery.  ~Mark Van Doren

Quotations From Teachers:


The only reason I always try to meet and know the parents better is because it helps me to forgive their children.  ~Louis Johannot

If you promise not to believe everything your child says happens at school, I'll promise not to believe everything he says happens at home.  ~Anonymous Teacher