Teaching quotes
3.8K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside teaching — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"I worked as a lawyer as a member of the teaching staff of a technical college and then I worked principally as legal adviser to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist German Workers Party."
"I am afraid that we are beginning to be over-educated; at least everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching -that is really what our enthusiasm for education has come to."
"Older boys often asked me to teach them “some bad words in your language”. At first I politely refused. My refusal merely increased their determination, so I solved the problem by teaching them phrases like 'man kharam' which means “I'm an idiot”. I told them that what I was teaching them was so nasty that they would have to promise never to repeat it to anyone. They would then spend all of recess running around yelling “I'm an idiot! I'm an idiot!”. I never told them the truth. I figured someday, somebody would"
"The best educators are the ones that inspire their students. That inspiration comes from a passion that teachers have for the subject they're teaching. Most commonly, that person spent their lives studying that subject, and they bring an infectious enthusiasm to the audience."
"My investment of time, as an educator, in my judgment, is best served teaching people how to think about the world around them. Teach them how to pose a question. How to judge whether one thing is true versus another."
"Everybody calls "clear" those ideas which have the same degree of confusion as his own."
"The fictitious worlds created for kids are nearly bereft of female presence. It's sending a very clear message from the beginning that women and girls do not have half of the adventures, that they're not as important. We're teaching kids that girls and women don't take up half the space in the world."
"There are always some people who are ready to embrace a doctrine, a notion, a dogma, and they miss the real teaching."
"The Buddha also counseled the monks and nuns to avoid wasting any precious time by engaging in idle conversation, oversleeping, pursuing fame and recognition, chasing after desires, spending time with people of poor character, and being satisfied with only a shallow understanding of the teaching."
"The real power of the Buddha was that he had so much love. He saw people trapped in their notions of small separate self, feeling guilty or proud of that self, and he offered revolutionary teachings that resounded like a lion's roar, like a great rising tide, helping people to wake up and break free from the prison of ignorance."
"It is often said that the Buddha's teaching is only a raft to help you cross the river, a finger pointing to the moon. Don't maistake the finger for the moon. The raft is not the shore. If we cling to the raft, if we cling to the finger, we miss everything. We cannot, in the name of the finger or the raft kill each other. Human life is more precious than any ideology, any doctrine."
"I do many kinds of work, and if you forbid me from binding books, from gardening, from writing poetry, from practicing walking meditation, from teaching children, I will be very unhappy. To me, work is pleasant. Pleasant or unpleaseant depends on our way of looking."
"The modern university does not exist to teach alone...It exists also to serve the democracy of which it is a product and an ornament...The university rests on the public will and on public appreciation."
"When I went to Egypt right after 9/11 I was very upset. I used to live in Egypt. I had a lot of friends there. I spent two years teaching there. I had very fond feelings for that part of the world, and the fact that a culture I liked so much had attacked my own culture was really very upsetting to me."
"I expect a zombie to show up on Sesame Street soon, teaching kids to count."
"Experience is bitter, but its teachings we retain; It has taught me this--who once has loved, loves never on earth again!"
"I think there is a rage against women. I've come to see that now although at the time I did not notice it. I was preoccupied with my teaching and my writing."
"Those kids aren't dumb. But the people who run these schools want to make sure they don't get smart: they are really teaching the kids to be slaves."
"The schoolmaster is the person who takes the children off the parents' hands for a consideration. That is to say, he establishes a child prison, engages a number of employee schoolmasters as turnkeys, and covers up the essential cruelty and unnaturalness of the situation by torturing the children if they do not learn, and calling this process, which is within the capacity of any fool or blackguard, by the sacred name of Teaching."
"I went to George Washington High School for six months before my 16th birthday, when I could legally quit. That was an even worse experience than the Catholic schools. I mean, they were still teaching fractions. But mostly, I played hooky."
