Back to School Quotes and Sayings

If there were no schools to take the children away from home part of the time, the insane asylums would be filled with mothers.  ~Edgar W. Howe


Being a child at home alone in the summer is a high-risk occupation.  If you call your mother at work thirteen times an hour, she can hurt you.  ~Erma Bombeck


Labor Day is a glorious holiday because your child will be going back to school the next day.  It would have been called Independence Day, but that name was already taken.  ~Bill Dodds

The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.  ~Sydney J. Harris


You send your child to the schoolmaster, but 'tis the schoolboys who educate him.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


Holidays are enticing only for the first week or so.  After that, it is no longer such a novelty to rise late and have little to do.  ~Margaret Laurence


The simplest schoolboy is now familiar with truths for which Archimedes would have given his life.  ~Ernest Renan, Souvenirs d'enfance et de jeunesse, 1883

Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.  ~John Dewey

The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives. ~Robert Maynard Hutchins


As long as there are tests, there will be prayer in schools.  ~Author Unknown


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


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


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


The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.  ~Ralph W. Sockman


What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.  ~George Bernard Shaw


The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.  ~Aristotle

A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep.  ~W.H. Auden


An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.  ~Author unknown, commonly attributed to Benjamin Franklin


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


Anyone who thinks the art of conversation is dead ought to tell a child to go to bed.  ~Robert Gallagher


It doesn't make much difference what you study, as long as you don't like it.  ~Finley Peter Dunne

You can get all A's and still flunk life.  ~Walker Percy

Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.  ~Albert Einstein

If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.  ~Attributed to both Andy McIntyre and Derek Bok


Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.  ~Edward Everett


He who opens a school door, closes a prison. ~Victor Hugo

Why should society feel responsible only for the education of children, and not for the education of all adults of every age?  ~Erich Fromm


Education aims to give you a boost up the ladder of knowledge.  Too often, it just gives you a cramp on one of its rungs.  ~Martin H. Fischer

Education would be much more effective if its purpose was to ensure that by the time they leave school every boy and girl should know how much they do not know, and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know it.  ~William Haley


Home computers are being called upon to perform many new functions, including the consumption of homework formerly eaten by the dog.  ~Doug Larson


Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.  ~Malcolm S. Forbes


Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing worth knowing can be taught.  ~Oscar Wilde, "The Critic as Artist," 1890


Did you know America ranks the lowest in education but the highest in drug use?  It's nice to be number one, but we can fix that.  All we need to do is start the war on education.  If it's anywhere near as successful as our war on drugs, in no time we'll all be hooked on phonics.  ~Leighann Lord

Children have to be educated, but they have also to be left to educate themselves.  ~Abbé Dimnet, Art of Thinking, 1928

When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course.  ~Peter Drucker

Education is the movement from darkness to light.  ~Allan Bloom


Much education today is monumentally ineffective.  All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants.  ~John W. Gardner

Education is not filling a pail but the lighting of a fire.  ~William Butler Yeats

I think everyone should go to college and get a degree and then spend six months as a bartender and six months as a cabdriver.  Then they would really be educated.  ~Al McGuire

Education is learning what you didn't even know you didn't know.  ~Daniel J. Boorstin, Democracy and Its Discontents

The founding fathers... provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called education.  School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.  ~John Updike, The Centaur, 1963

The one real object of education is to have a man in the condition of continually asking questions.  ~Bishop Mandell Creighton


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


When the student is ready, the master appears.  ~Buddhist Proverb


You learn something every day if you pay attention.  ~Ray LeBlond


The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr.  ~Mohammed


Learning is a treasure that will follow its owner everywhere.  ~Chinese Proverb


All the world is a laboratory to the inquiring mind.  ~Martin H. Fischer

I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught.  ~Winston Churchill

The purpose of learning is growth, and our minds, unlike our bodies, can continue growing as we continue to live.  ~Mortimer Adler


Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem.  That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily.  ~Thomas Szasz


I am what the librarians have made me with a little assistance from a professor of Greek and a few poets.  ~Bernard Keble Sandwell

Learn as much as you can while you are young, since life becomes too busy later.  ~Dana Stewart Scott

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.  ~Alvin Toffler


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


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


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

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