36 Teacher Quotes That Inspire a Love of Learning (2024)

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Updated: Aug. 13, 2024

These teacher quotes truly capture the priceless value of all educators

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Inspirational teacher quotes to show your appreciation for educators

Teachers are essential when it comes to the education of our children. They dedicate their time and resources to teach kids how to think critically, ask important questions and develop skills they’ll use for the rest of their lives. So why not show how much you appreciate their work by sharing one of these teacher quotes?

Dedicated teachers strive to provide the best for their students, after all—they deserve all the kind words, thank you notes and teacher appreciation quotes sent their way. These uplifting quotes about teachers also share how important education is for everyone. Send one in a thank-you note to a special teacher, complete with a red, juicy apple for their desk.

So, keep reading for some of the best quotes about teaching and teachers ever!

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Best teacher quotes

1. “One child, one teacher, one book, one pen can change the world.” —Malala Yousafzai

2. “Love is in all things a most wonderful teacher.” —Charles Dickens

3. “To learn one must be humble. But life is the great teacher.” —James Joyce

4. “Goodteachingis more a giving of right questions than a giving of right answers.” —Josef Albers

5. “In seeking wisdom, the first step is silence; the second, listening; the third, remembering; the fourth practicing; the fifth,teachingothers.” —Solomon ibn Gabirol

6. “Learning is finding out what you already know. Doing is demonstrating that you know it.Teaching is reminding others that they know just as well as you. You are all learners, doers and teachers.” —Richard Bach

7. “My whole existence has been devoted to science and toteaching, and these two intense passions have brought me very great joy.” —Charles Fabry

8. “Teachingmeant for the hands enters most easily through the eyes.” —Morgan Llywelyn

9. “Teachingthat impacts is not head to head, but heart to heart.” —Howard Hendricks

10. “The most effective teacher will always be biased, for the chief force inteachingis confidence and enthusiasm.” —Joyce Cary

11. “Teaching: one of the few professions that permit love.” —Theodore Roethke

12. “No one should teach who is not in love with teaching.” —Margaret Elizabeth Sangster

13. “What the teacher is, is more important than what he teaches.” —Karl Menninger

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

15. “Teaching kids to count is fine, but teaching them what counts is best.” —Bob Talbert

16. “The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.” —William A. Ward

17. “If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow.” —John Dewey

18. “It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.” —Albert Einstein

19. “The greatest sign of success for a teacher…is to be able to say, ‘The children are now working as if I did not exist.’” —Maria Montessori

20. “Tell me and I forget, teach me and I remember, involve me and I learn.” —Benjamin Franklin

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

22. “Those who know, do. Those that understand, teach.” —Aristotle

23. “You cannot teach a man anything. You can only help him find it within himself.” —Galileo Galilei

24. “What we instill in our children will be the foundation upon which they build their future.” —Steve Maraboli

25. “Teaching is only demonstrating that it is possible. Learning is making it possible for yourself.” —Paulo Coelho

26. “Once she knows how to read, there’s only one thing you can teach her to believe in—and that is herself.” —Virginia Woolf

27. “Our children are only as brilliant as we allow them to be.” —Eric Micha’el Leventhal

27. “We must become what we wish to teach.” —Nathaniel Branden

28. “Teachers, you don’t teach a subject. You teach a child.” —Deepa Bhushan

Loving these teacher quotes? Check out thesequotes about changethat will make you optimistic about the future.

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Teacher appreciation quotes

29. “Teachers, I believe, are the most responsible and important members of society because their professional efforts affect the fate of the earth.” —Helen Caldicott

30. “Teaching is the profession that teaches all the other professions.” —Unknown

31. “Teachers have three loves: love of learning, love of learners and the love of bringing the first two together.” —Scott Hayden

32. “What all good teachers have in common, however, is that they set high standards for their students and do not settle for anything less.” —Marva Collins

33. “The women I know with strong personalities, the ones who might have become generals or the heads of companies if they were men, become teachers.Teachingis a calling, too. And I’ve always thought that teachers in their way are holy—angles leading their flocks out of the darkness.” —Jeannette Walls

34. “In the end, excellence in education means excellence inteaching, and if this country would give the status to first grade teachers that we give to full professors, this one act alone would revitalize the nation’s schools.” —Ernest L. Boyer

35. “The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence. He inspires self-trust. He guides their eyes from himself to the spirit that quickens him. He will have no disciples. A noble artist, he has visions of excellence and revelations of beauty, which he has neither impersonated in character, nor embodied in words. His life andteachingsare but studies for yet nobler ideals.” —Amos Bronson Alcott

35. “A good teacher can inspire hope, ignite the imagination, and instill a love of learning.” —Brad Henry

36. “There is no recipe to be a great teacher, that’s what is unique about them.” —Robert Sternberg

Don’t forget to read these patience quotes that inspire peaceful persistence, especially when teaching!

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Teacher quotes about education

37. “Education is what survives when what has been learned is forgotten.” —B.F. Skinner

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

39. “Education is not to reform students or amuse them or to make them expert technicians. It is to unsettle their minds, widen their horizons, inflame their intellects, teach them to think straight, if possible.” —Robert M. Hutchins

40. “To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil’s soul.” —Muriel Spark, “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie”

41. “All television is educational television. The question is: What is itteaching?” —Nicholas Johnson

42. “A human being is not attaining his full heights until he is educated.” —Horace Mann

43. “Those parts of education, it is to be observed, for theteachingof which there are no public institutions, are generally the best taught.” —Adam Smith

44. “It is greater work to educate a child, in the true and larger sense of the world, than to rule a state.” —William Ellery Channing

We hope these teacher quotes are just as inspiring as these uplifting and motivational quotes.

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Funny teacher quotes

45. “The disposition for teaching is two percent inborn and ninety-eight percent reinvented every day of one’s career.” —Susan Ohanian

46. “I don’t know who had the bright idea ofteachingpneumonia how to walk, but I’d like to find that dunderhead before he decides he wants to teach it how to drive.” —Ellen DeGeneres

47. “Goodteaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater.” —Gail Godwin

48. “In a completely rational society, the best of us would be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for less.” —Lee Iacocca

49. “One of the things I miss aboutteachingis that students would tell me what I ought to read. One of my students, back in the 1960s, put me onto [Jorge Luis] Borges, and I remember another mentioning Flann O’Brien’s At Swim Two-Birds in the same way.” —John Barth

Need a chuckle? Browse through some funnyteacher memes.

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Quotes about teaching

50. “Teachingis not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.” —Jacques Barzun

51. “Teachingis an instinctual art, mindful of potential, craving of realizations, a pausing, seamless process.” —A. Bartlett Giamatti

52. “The art of being taught is the art of discovery, as the art ofteachingis the art of assisting discovery to take place.” —Mark Van Doren

53. “I liketeachingand the contact with young minds keeps one on one’s toes.” —Aaron Klug

54. “Teachingschool is like having jumper cables hooked to your brain, draining all the juice out of you.” –Stephen King

55. “Teachingby precept is a long road, but short and beneficial is the way by example.” —Seneca the Younger

56. “We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all laterteachingsare tuitions.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

57. “The test of a good teacher is not how many questions he can ask his pupils that they will answer readily, but how many questions he inspires them to ask him which he finds it hard to answer.” —Alice Wellington Rollins

58. “In theteachingof geography and history a sympathetic understanding (should) be fostered for the characteristics of the different peoples of the world, especially for those who we are in the habit of describing as “primitive.” —Albert Einstein

59. “There is noteachinguntil the pupil is brought into the same state or principle in which you are; a transfusion takes place; he is you, and you are he; then is ateaching; and by no unfriendly chance or bad company can he ever lose the benefit.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

60. “Teachingkeeps you sharp. The great thing aboutteachingconstitutional law is that all the tough questions land in your lap: abortion, gay rights, affirmative action. And you need to be able to argue both sides. I have to be able to argue the other side as well as Scalia does. I think that’s good for one’s politics.” —Barack Obama

61. “More important than the curriculum is the question of the methods ofteachingand the spirit in which theteachingis given.” —Bertrand Russell

62. “I believe inteachingpeople to be individuals, and to understand other individuals.” —E. M. Forster

63. “I hope that schools have changed since I was a little girl. My memory of theteachingof the public schools is that it showed the brutal incomprehension of children.” —Isadora Duncan

64. “As we have come to viewteaching, it begins with an act of reason, continues with a process of reasoning, culminates in performances of imparting, eliciting, involving or enticing, and is then thought about some more until the process can begin again.” —Lee Shulman

65. “Inteaching, compassion means doing whatever needs to be done to get to the next phase.” —Gabrielle Roth

66. “A central problem inteachingmathematics is to communicate a reasonable sense of taste—meaning often when to, or not to, generalize, abstract, or extend something you have just done.” —Richard Hamming

67. “Our task, regarding creativity, is to help children climb their own mountains, as high as possible. No one can do more.” —Loris Malaguzzi

68. “Inteachingthere can be too much emphasis on certainty and a proper appreciation of uncertainty is to be encouraged.” —Dennis Lindley

69. “The fundamental motive of trueteachingis the love that seeks and studies and performs.” —Robert Grudin

70. “Being excessively clever is foolish whenteachingthe ignorant.” —Publilius Syrus

71. “Sharing is the essence ofteaching.” —Bill Moyers

72. “The object ofteachinga child is to enable him to get along without his teacher.” —Elbert Hubbard

73. “Teachingliterature is impossible; that is why it is difficult.” —Northrop Frye

74. “Properteachingis recognized with ease. You can know it without fail because it awakens within you that sensation which tells you this is something you have always known.” —Frank Herbert

75. “The first task inteachingfor creativity in any field is to encourage people to believe in their creative potential and to nurture the confidence to try.” —Ken Robinson

We love our teachers! After reading these teacher quotes, check out these heartwarming classroom storiesfrom real-life teachers.

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Originally Published: September 28, 2021