Quotes about teaching

Here are some quotes about teaching that speak to the challenges, joys and influence of the profession. If you are giving a speech honoring a retiring teacher, one of these quotes can add humor or inspiration to your talk. The quotes come form educators, philosophers, ordinary people and humorists who offer their insight into the formidable task teachers take on in teaching us to read and write, to think and solve problems.

The power of a teacher

There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
--Elizabeth Wharton

Train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old, he will not depart from it.
--Bible, Proverbs 22:6

A teacher is one who makes two ideas grow where only one grew before.
--Elbert Hubbard
 
The best teacher lodges an intent not in the mind but in the heart.
--Anne Michaels

Wisdom from intellectual pursuits

A teacher should have maximal authority and minimal power.
-- Thomas S. Szasz

What was hard to endure is sweet to recall.
--Anonymous

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
--William James

All learning has an emotional base.
--Plato

“If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”
--Derrek Bok

The lasting influence of a great teacher

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stop.
--Henry Adams

You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him to find it within himself.
--Galileo

You are today where your thoughts have brought you; you will be tomorrow where you thoughts take you.
--James Allen



Humorous quotes about teaching

Never engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed person.
--Anonymous

For every person wishing to teach, there are 30 wishing not to be taught.
--W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman

A professor is one who talks in someone else’s sleep.
--W.H. Auden

One of the main truths of all education is that if the young are not always right, the old are always wrong.
-- R.H. Tawney

The Romans would never have had time to conquer the world if they had been obliged to learn Latin first of all.
--Heinrich Heine

I am not young enough to know everything.
--Oscar Wilde

A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled.
--Barnett Cocks

Some people do not become deep thinkers simply because their memories are too good.
--Frederich Wilhelm Nietzsche
 
There are two sides to every question: my side and the wrong side.
--Oscar Levant
 
Nothing is more terrible than ignorance in action.
--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Old teachers never die; they just grade away.
--Unknown

Expanding the mind

Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable reason why so few people engage in it.
--Henry Ford, Sr.

The purpose of education is to teach people how to study on their own.
--R.E. Phillips

If your ship doesn’t come in, swim out to it.
--Jonathan Winters
 
Why not go out on a limb. Isn’t that where the fruit is?
--Frank Scully


The purpose of education is to teach people how to study on their own.
--R.E. Phillips

If your ship doesn’t come in, swim out to it.
--Jonathan Winters
 
Why not go out on a limb. Isn’t that where the fruit is?
--Frank Scully

Vision is the art of seeing things invisible.
--Jonathan Swift

There is a path from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect.
--G.K. Chesterton

The splendid thing about education is that everyone wants it.  Like influenza, you can give it away without losing any of it yourself.
--Evelyn Waugh

A wise man sees as much as he ought, not as much as he can.
--Montaigne
 
No mind is thoroughly well organized that is deficient in a sense of humor.
--Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Educate men without religion and you make them clever devils.
--Duke of Wellington

Our minds are lazier than our bodies.
--Francoise Duc de La Rochefoucould

There are moments when everything goes well. Don’t be frightened by it; it won’t last.
--Jules Renard

The best speeches include stories and anyone who knows a retiring teacher well probably has a good collection  of stories to tell.  But if you need inspiration, check out this collection of humorous teacher stories from Woman's Day magazine.