Education Quotes

“The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards. ” Anatole France

 

“Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right paths, but the final forming of a person’s character lies in their own hands.” Anne Frank

 

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” Abraham Lincoln

 

“It takes a village to raise a child.” African proverb

 

“It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry.” Albert Einstein

 

“It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.” Albert Einstein

 

“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

 

“Children require guidance and sympathy far more than instruction.” Annie Sullivan

 

“Your ability to learn faster than your competition is your only sustainable competitive advantage.” Arie de Gues

 

“All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth.” Aristotle

 

“Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.” Arthur Koestler

 

“Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced.” Barbara Tuchman

 

“Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality.” Beatrix Potter

 

“We cannot hold a torch to light another’s path without brightening our own.” Ben Sweetland

 

“We cannot seek or attain health, wealth, learning, justice or kindness in general. Action is always specific, concrete, individualized, unique.” Benjamin Jowett

 

“I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: ‘The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that’s fair.’ In these words he epitomized the history of the human race.” Bertrand Russell

 

“If we value independence, if we are disturbed by the growing conformity of knowledge, of values, of attitudes, which our present system induces, then we may wish to set up conditions of learning which make for uniqueness, for self-direction, and for self-initiated learning.” Carl Rogers

 

“Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilized by education; they grow there, firm as weeds among rocks.” Charlotte Bronte

 

“With all their faults, trade unions have done more for humanity than any other organization of men that ever existed. They have done more for decency, for honesty, for education, for the betterment of the race, for the developing of character in men, than any other association of men.” Clarence Darrow

 

“The aim of education is the knowledge not of fact, but of values.” Dean William R. Inge

 

“Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.” Douglas Adams

 

“It has always seemed strange to me that in our endless discussions about education so little stress is laid on the pleasure of becoming an educated person, the enormous interest it adds to life. To be able to be caught up into the world of thought that is to be educated.” Edith Hamilton

 

“It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.” Epictetus

 

“In times of change, learners inherit the Earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.” Eric Hoffer

 

“You must learn day by day, year by year, to broaden your horizon. The more things you love, the more you are interested in, the more you enjoy, the more you are indignant about, the more you have left when anything happens.” Ethel Barrymore

 

“Ye can lead a man up to the university, but you can’t make him think.” Finley Peter Dunne

 

“Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.” Flannery O’Conner

 

“Education: a debt due from present to future generations.” George Peabody

 

“Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” George Santayana

 

“The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn.” Gloria Steinem

 

“Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being.” Goethe

 

“It is not so important to know everything as to appreciate what we learn.” Hannah More

 

“If all the rich and all of the church people should send their children to the public schools they would feel bound to concentrate their money on improving these schools until they met the highest ideals.” Susan B. Anthony

 

“Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever or whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing.” Thomas H. Huxley

 

“Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.” Thomas Jefferson

 

“History is Philosophy teaching by examples.” Thucydides

 

“These days people seek knowledge, not wisdom. Knowledge is of the past, wisdom is of the future.” Vernon Cooper

 

“Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.” Will Durant

 

“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” William Butler Yeats

 

“It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.” Winston Churchill

“Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.” Henry B. Adams

 

“A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.” Henry B. Adams

 

“I was determined to know beans. Walden” Henry David Thoreau

 

“Change does not necessarily assure progress, but progress implacably requires change. Education is essential to change, for education creates both new wants and the ability to satisfy them.” Henry Steele Commager

 

“There is no greater crime than to stand between a man and his development; to take any law or institution and put it around him like a collar, and fasten it there, so that as he grows and enlarges, he presses against it till he suffocates and dies.” Henry Ward Beecher

 

“Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.” James Baldwin

 

“Laws for the liberal education of youth, especially for the lower classes of people, are so extremely wise and useful that to a humane and generous mind, no expense for this purpose would be thought extravagant.” John Adams

 

“Nature teaches more than she preaches. There are no sermons in stones. It is easier to get a spark out of a stone than a moral.” John Burroughs

 

“Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.” John Dewey

 

“Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.” John Dewey

 

“Remember that our nation’s first great leaders were also our first great scholars.” John F. Kennedy

 

“The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.” John Powell

 

“Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win. On Being a Teacher” Jonathan Kozol

 

“Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.” Lord Brougham

 

“Theories and goals of education don’t matter a whit if you don’t consider your students to be human beings.” Lou Ann Walker

 

“We have a hunger of the mind which asks for knowledge of all around us, and the more we gain, the more is our desire; the more we see, the more we are capable of seeing.” Maria Mitchell

 

“Study as if you were going to live forever; live as if you were going to die tomorrow.” Maria Mitchell

 

“Establishing lasting peace is the work of education; all politics can do is keep us out of war.” Maria Montessori

 

“Education is for improving the lives of others and for leaving your community and world better than you found it.” Marian Wright Edelman

 

“First, God created idiots. That was just for practice. Then He created school boards.” Mark Twain

 

“Many public-school children seem to know only two dates 1492 and 4th of July; and as a rule they don’t know what happened on either occasion.” Mark Twain

 

“All schools, all colleges, have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal, valuable knowledge. The theological knowledge which they conceal cannot justly be regarded as less valuable than that which they reveal. That is, when a man is buying a basket of strawberries it can profit him to know that the bottom half of it is rotten.” Mark Twain

 

“To repeat what others have said, requires education, to challenge it, requires brains.” Mary Pettibone Poole

 

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

“In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.” Mortimer Adler

 

“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” Nelson Mandela

 

“All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” Pablo Picasso

 

“A master can tell you what he expects of you. A teacher, though awakens your own expectations.” Patricia Neal

 

“Education is when you read the fine print. Experience is what you get if you don’t.” Pete Seeger

 

“If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in.” Rachel Carson

 

“The man who can make hard things easy is the educator.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

“Life is a succession of lessons, which must be lived to be understood.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

“All I really need to know … I learned in kindergarten.” Robert Fulghum

 

“It is a thousand times better to have common sense without education than to have education without common sense.” Robert Green Ingersoll

 

“Too often we give our children answers to remember rather than problems to solve.” Roger Lewin

 

“Leaders are more powerful role models when they learn than when they teach.” Rosabeth Moss Kantor

 

“An educated person is one who has learned that information almost always turns out to be at best incomplete and very often false, misleading, fictitious, mendacious - just dead wrong.” Russell Baker

 

“Home is the place where boys and girls first learn how to limit their wishes, abide by rules, and consider the rights and needs of others.” Sidonie Gruenberg

 

“The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running. Where it is lacking there are no real students, but only poor caricatures of apprentices who, at the end of their apprenticeship, will not even have a trade.” Simone Weil