Share these teacher appreciation quotes with your favorite educator
80 Teacher Quotes That Inspire a Love of Learning
Updated on Apr. 14, 2025
Best teacher quotes
1. “Teaching meant for the hands enters most easily through the eyes.” —Morgan Llywelyn
2. “Teaching that impacts is not head to head, but heart to heart.” —Howard Hendricks
3. “The most effective teacher will always be biased, for the chief force in teaching is confidence and enthusiasm.” —Joyce Cary
4. “Teaching: one of the few professions that permit love.” —Theodore Roethke
5. “No one should teach who is not in love with teaching.” —Margaret Elizabeth Sangster
6. “An understanding heart is everything in a teacher, and cannot be esteemed highly enough.” —Carl Jung
7. “A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.” —Henry Brooks Adams
8. “What office is there which involves more responsibility, which requires more qualifications and which ought, therefore, to be more honorable, than that of teaching?” —Harriet Martineau
9. “One child, one teacher, one book and one pen can change the world.” —Malala Yousafzai
10. “Love is in all things a most wonderful teacher.” —Charles Dickens
11. “To learn one must be humble. But life is the great teacher.” —James Joyce
12. “Good teaching is more a giving of right questions than a giving of right answers.” —Josef Albers
13. “In seeking wisdom, the first step is silence; the second, listening; the third, remembering; the fourth practicing; the fifth, teaching others.” —Solomon ibn Gabirol
14. “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
15. “My whole existence has been devoted to science and to teaching, and these two intense passions have brought me very great joy.” —Charles Fabry
16. “The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.” —William Arthur 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. “The educator must believe in the potential power of his pupil, and he must employ all his art in seeking to bring his pupil to experience this power.” —Alfred Adler
21. “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
22. “By my teaching I hope to inspire you to personal activity and to present your vision.” —Robert Henri
23. “A teacher can never truly teach unless he is still learning himself.” —Rabindranath Tagore
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. “Everyone who remembers his own educational experience remembers teachers, not methods and techniques. The teacher is the kingpin of the educational situation.” —Sidney Hook
28. “The finest teaching touches in a student a spring neither teacher nor student could possibly have preconceived.” —Anne Truitt
Teacher appreciation quotes
29. “The great teachers fill you up with hope and shower you with a thousand reasons to embrace all aspects of life.” —Pat Conroy
30. “A teacher enlarges people in all sorts of ways besides just his subject matter.” —Wallace Stegner
31. “What do I consider a teacher to be? One who breathes life into knowledge so that it takes new form in progress and civilization.” —Helen Keller
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. Teaching is a calling too. And I’ve always thought that teachers in their way are holy—angels leading their flocks out of the darkness.” —Jeannette Walls
34. “In the end, excellence in education means excellence in teaching, 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. “One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings.” —Carl Jung
36. “A teacher can arouse a feeling for one single good action, for one single good poem, accomplishes more than he who fills our memory with rows on rows of natural objects, classified with name and form.” —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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. “The central task of education is to implant a will and a facility for learning; it should produce not learned but learning people. The truly human society is a learning society, where grandparents, parents and children are students together.” —Eric Hoffer
40. “To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil’s soul.” —The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
41. “All television is educational television. The question is: What is it teaching?” —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 the teaching of which there are no public institutions, are generally the best taught.” —Adam Smith
44. “Education is the great engine of personal development.” —Nelson Mandela
45. “The light of understanding has shone upon my little pupil’s mind, and behold, all things are changed.” —Anne Sullivan
46. “Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.” —Virginia Woolf
47. “The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.” —Plutarch
48. “Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.” —Margaret Mead
49. “Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.” —G.K. Chesterton
Funny teacher quotes
50. “The disposition for teaching is 2% inborn and 98% reinvented every day of one’s career.” —Susan Ohanian
51. “I don’t know who had the bright idea of teaching pneumonia how to walk, but I’d like to find that dunderhead before he decides he wants to teach it how to drive.” —Ellen DeGeneres
52. “Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater.” —Gail Godwin
53. “When a teacher calls a boy by his entire name, it means trouble.” —Mark Twain
54. “One of the things I miss about teaching is 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
Quotes about teaching
55. “Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.” —Jacques Barzun
56. “Teaching is an instinctual art, mindful of potential, craving of realizations, a pausing, seamless process.” —A. Bartlett Giamatti
57. “The art of being taught is the art of discovery, as the art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery to take place.” —Mark Van Doren
58. “I like teaching, and the contact with young minds keeps one on one’s toes.” —Aaron Klug
59. “Teaching school is like having jumper cables hooked to your brain, draining all the juice out of you.” —Stephen King
60. “Teaching by precept is a long road, but short and beneficial is the way by example.” —Seneca the Younger
61. “We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all later teachings are tuitions.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson
62. “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
63. “In the teaching of 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
64. “There is no teaching until 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 a teaching; and by no unfriendly chance or bad company can he ever lose the benefit.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson
65. “Teaching keeps you sharp. The great thing about teaching constitutional 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
66. “More important than the curriculum is the question of the methods of teaching and the spirit in which the teaching is given.” —Bertrand Russell
67. “I believe in teaching people to be individuals, and to understand other individuals.” —E.M. Forster
68. “I hope that schools have changed since I was a little girl. My memory of the teaching of the public schools is that it showed the brutal incomprehension of children.” —Isadora Duncan
69. “As we have come to view teaching, 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
70. “In teaching, compassion means doing whatever needs to be done to get to the next phase.” —Gabrielle Roth
71. “A central problem in teaching mathematics 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
72. “I am firm in my belief that a teacher lives on and through his students. Good teaching is forever, and the teacher is immortal.” —Jesse Stuart
73. “In teaching there can be too much emphasis on certainty, and a proper appreciation of uncertainty is to be encouraged.” —Dennis Lindley
74. “The fundamental motive of true teaching is the love that seeks and studies and performs.” —Robert Grudin
75. “Being excessively clever is foolish when teaching the ignorant.” —Publilius Syrus
76. “Sharing is the essence of teaching.” —Bill Moyers
77. “The object of teaching a child is to enable him to get along without his teacher.” —Elbert Hubbard
78. “Teaching literature is impossible; that is why it is difficult.” —Northrop Frye
79. “Proper teaching is 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
80. “The first task in teaching for creativity in any field is to encourage people to believe in their creative potential and to nurture the confidence to try.” —Ken Robinson
Why trust us
At Reader’s Digest, we’ve been sharing our favorite quotes for over 100 years. The sayings and quips that appear in the magazine’s “Quotable Quotes” (formerly “Remarkable Remarks”) are curated from interviews and essays originally published in the magazine, reprints from trusted titles and other verified sources. For this piece, Claire Nowak tapped her experience as a former editor at Reader’s Digest to ensure that all information is accurate. We’ve gone the extra step and had Marcy Lovitch, a fact-checker with 20-plus years of experience researching for national publications including Marie Claire, Good Housekeeping, Family Circle, Glamour, Seventeen, Real Simple, Forbes and InStyle magazines, verify that all these teacher quotes are attributed correctly and have credible sourcing. Read more about our team, our contributors and our editorial policies.
