Teaching is one of the most rewarding careers you can do, it really is life changing both for the teacher and the impact is has on students. But it can also be challenging and exhausting. This is why sometimes, all teachers need a little inspiration to remember why you do the job and the impact it has..
To celebrate teaching, or to give you some encouragement to go into the profession, we have put together a list of our favourite teaching quotes.
We hope these quotes inspire you if you are already working in the profession, or possibly help you to make the decision to become a teacher. We have included some general travel style quotes too which we wanted to feature as they might push you to take a TEFL certification and start a new adventure teaching abroad.
“A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.”
Henry B Adams
“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”
Nelson Mandela
“The Best way to predict your Future is to create it.”
Abraham Lincoln
“Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.”
Helen Keller
“A ship in a harbor is safe, but it’s not what ships are built for.” – John A. Shedd.
“I’m in love with cities I’ve never been to and people I’ve never met.” – John Green.
“A man’s mind, stretched by new ideas, may never return to its original dimensions.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.”
Albert Einstein
“I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think.”
Socrates
“He who opens a school door, closes a prison.”
Victor Hugo
“Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.”
Mark Twain
“Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.”
Arthur Ashe
“Either you run the day or the day runs you.”
Jim Rohn
“Your attitude, not your aptitude, will determine your altitude.”
Zig Ziglar
“A great way to learn about your country is to leave it.”
Henry Rollins
“Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today.”
Malcolm X
“If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”
“The dream begins, most of the time, with a teacher who believes in you, who tugs and pushes and leads you on to the next plateau, sometimes poking you with a sharp stick called truth.”
Dan Rather
“The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn …and change.”
Carl Rogers
“Have you ever been at sea in a dense fog, when it seemed as if a tangible white darkness shut you in and the great ship, tense and anxious, groped her way toward the shore with plummet and sounding-line, and you waited with beating heart for something to happen? I was like that ship before my education began, only I was without compass or sounding line, and no way of knowing how near the harbor was. “Light! Give me light!” was the wordless cry of my soul, and the light of love shone on me in that very hour.”
Helen Keller
“Aim for success, not perfection. Never give up your right to be wrong, because then you will lose the ability to learn new things and move forward with your life. Remember that fear always lurks behind perfectionism.”
David M. Burns
“The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.”
Mark Twain
“Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.”
Will Durant
“Be miserable. Or motivate yourself. Whatever has to be done, it’s always your choice.”
Wayne Dyer
“The difference between school and life? In school, you’re taught a lesson and then given a test. In life, you’re given a test that teaches you a lesson.”
Tom Bodett
“Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.”
Andre Gide
“We learn more by looking for the answer to a question and not finding it than we do from learning the answer itself.”
Lloyd Alexander
“Don’t let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.”
John R. Wooden
“You will either step forward into growth, or you will step backward into safety.”
Abraham Maslow
“If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.”
Ben Franklin
“Without new experiences, something inside of us sleeps. The sleeper must awaken.”
Frank Herbert
“Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater.”
Gail Goldwin
“The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery.”
Mark Van Doren
“The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence.”
Amos Bronson Alcott
“The best teachers teach from the heart, not from the book.”
Unknown
“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”
William Butler Yeats
“Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.”
John Dewey
“Students don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”
Anonymous
“If people did not do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein
“We can easily manage if we will only take, each day, the burden appointed to it. But the load will be too heavy for us if we carry yesterday’s burden over again today, and then add the burden of the morrow before we are required to bear it.”
John Newton
“It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.”
Albert Einstein
“I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.”
Maya Angelou
“Who questions much, shall learn much, and retain much.”
Francis Bacon
“That is never too often repeated, which is never sufficiently learned.”
Seneca
“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”
Mahatma Gandhi
“Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.”
Jacques Barzun
“Real learning comes about when the competitive spirit has ceased.”
Jiddu Krishnamurti
“Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.”
Leonardo da Vinci
“It takes a big heart to help shape little minds.”
Unknown
“To accuse others for one’s own misfortunes is a sign of want of education. To accuse oneself shows that one’s education has begun. To accuse neither oneself nor others shows that one’s education is complete.”
Epictetus
“They cannot stop me. I will get my education, if it is in the home, school, or anyplace.”
Malala Yousafzai
“Learning is like rowing upstream: not to advance is to drop back.”
Chinese proverb
“Minds are like parachutes, they only function when they are open.”
James Dewar
“The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.”
Dorothy Parker
“Life itself is your teacher, and you are in a state of constant learning.”
Bruce Lee
“Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don’t.”
Bill Nye
“Success is a poor teacher.”
Robert Kiyosaki
“I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.”
Thomas Jefferson
“Time is the best teacher, but unfortunately, it kills all of its students.”
Robin Williams
“The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn.”
Cicero
“Apply yourself. Get all the education you can, but then, by God, do something. Don’t just stand there, make it happen.”
Lee Iacocca
“Despise school and remain a fool.”
German proverb
“As long as you live, keep learning how to live.”
Seneca
“If you don’t go after what you want, you’ll never have it. If you don’t ask, the answer is always no. If you don’t step forward, you’re always in the same place.”
Nora Roberts
“The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.”
Baruch Spinoza
“The learned man knows that he is ignorant.”
Victor Hugo
“Always do your best. What you plant now, you will harvest later.”
Og Mandino
“Keep on going, and the chances are that you will stumble on something, perhaps when you are least expecting it. I never heard of anyone ever stumbling on something sitting down.”
Charles F. Kettering
“The ideal school would teach health, wealth, and happiness. It‘d be free, self-paced, and available to all. It‘d show opposing ideas and students would self-verify truth. No grades, no tests, no diplomas – just learning. Actually, you’re already here. Careful who you follow.”
Naval Ravikant
“Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it.”
Albert Einstein
“Experience, travel – these are an education in themselves.”
Euripides
“If you don’t design your own life plan, chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much.”
Jim Rohn
“You can’t direct the wind but you can adjust the sails.”
Anonymous
“Remember that failure is an event, not a person.”
Zig Ziglar
“Teachers open the door, but you must enter by yourself.”
Chinese Proverb
“Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants.”
John W. Gardner
“Do you know the difference between education and experience? Education is when you read the fine print; experience is what you get when you don’t. ”
Pete Seeger
“To teach is to learn twice.”
Joseph Joubert
“The teachers who get “burned out” are not the ones who are constantly learning, which can be exhilarating, but those who feel they must stay in control and ahead of the students at all times.”
Frank Martin
“Do not confine your children to your own learning, for they were born in another time.”
Chinese proverb
“Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”
James Baldwin
“You can teach a student a lesson for a day; but if you can teach him to learn by creating curiosity, he will continue the learning process as long as he lives.”
Clay P. Bedford
“What we learn with pleasure we never forget.”
Alfred Mercier
“Why should society feel responsible only for the education of children, and not for the education of all adults of every age?”
Erich Fromm
“Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing.”
Albert Schweitzer
“The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think — rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with thoughts of other men.”
Bill Beattie
“Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.”
G.K. Chesterton
“Too often we give children answers to remember rather than problems to solve.”
Roger Lewin
“Children are apt to live up to what you believe of them.”
Lady Bird Johnson
“The best teachers are those who show you where to look but don’t tell you what to see.”
Alexandra K. Trenfor
“Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand.”
Chinese proverb
“Nine tenths of education is encouragement.”
Anatole France
“If someone is going down the wrong road, he doesn’t need motivation to speed him up. What he needs is education to turn him around.”
Jim Rohn
“The most beautiful things in the creating of the child are his “mistakes.” The more a child’s work is full of these individual mistakes the more wonderful it is. And the more a teacher removes them from the child’s work the duller, more desolate and impersonal it becomes.”
Franz Cizek
“Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them to become what they are capable of becoming.”
Goethe
“Education cost money, but then so does ignorance.”
Claus Moser
“I believe that education is all about being excited about something. Seeing passion and enthusiasm helps push an educational message.“
Steve Irwin
“Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.”
Margaret Mead
“The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future life.”
Plato
“Kids don’t remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are.”
Jim Henson
“I think the big mistake in schools is trying to teach children anything, and by using fear as the basic motivation. Fear of getting failing grades, fear of not staying with your class, etc. Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker.”
Stanley Kubrick
“Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.”
Aristotle
“Instruction does much, but encouragement everything.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“The person who asks questions is more helpful than the person who offers advice.”
James Clear
“You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance.”
Franklin P. Jones
“I’m not sayin’ I’m gonna change the world, but I guarantee that I will spark the brain that will.”
Tupac Shakur
“The more you make it easy for your kids, the more you remove the struggle necessary for learning.”
Maxime Lagacé
“All learning has an emotional base.”
Plato
“The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.”
C.S. Lewis
“The highest result of education is tolerance.”
Hellen Keller
“Teaching is the greatest act of optimism.”
Colleen Wilcox
“Education is supposed to juice your curiosity, not diminish or sate it.”
Walter Isaacson
“The school is the last expenditure upon which America should be willing to economize.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt
“The foundation of every state is the education of its youth.”
Diogenes
“People learn more on their own rather than being force fed.”
Socrates
“If a seed of a lettuce will not grow, we do not blame the lettuce. Instead, the fault lies with us for not having nourished the seed properly.”
Buddhist proverb
“The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.”
Plutarch
“By learning you will teach; by teaching you will understand.”
Latin proverb
“Teaching kids to count is fine, but teaching them what counts is best.”
Bob Talber
“Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.”
William James
“If you are planning for a year, sow rice; if you are planning for a decade, plant trees; if you are planning for a lifetime, educate people.”
Chinese proverb
“Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.”
Maya Angelou
“The key to everything is patience. You get the chicken by hatching the egg — not by smashing it.”
Arnold Glasow
“Do not train children to learning by force and harshness, but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.”
Plato
“We’re trying to give the young people something that can help them, and we don’t know exactly what it ought to be.”
Wendell Berry
“It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.”
Epictetus
“If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.”
Abraham Maslow
“No man who worships education has got the best out of education…. Without a gentle contempt for education no man’s education is complete.”
G.K. Chesterton
“When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course.”
Peter Drucker
“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”
Aristotle
“The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn.”
Gloria Steinem
“If a man is a fool, you don’t train him out of being a fool by sending him to university. You merely turn him into a trained fool, ten times more dangerous.”
Desmond Bagley
“The modern world belongs to the half-educated, a rather difficult class, because they do not realize how little they know.”
William R. Inge
“People learn something every day, and a lot of times it’s that what they learned the day before was wrong.”
Bill Vaughan
“What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.”
Henry David Thoreau
“If kids come to us from strong, healthy functioning families, it makes our job easier. If they do not come to us from strong, healthy, functioning families, it makes our job more important.”
Barbara Colorose
“Change is the end result of all true learning.”
Leo Buscaglia
“I’ve learned… that the best classroom in the world is at the feet of an elderly person.”
Andy Rooney
“Many highly intelligent people are poor thinkers. Many people of average intelligence are skilled thinkers. The power of the car is separate from the way the car is driven.”
Edward De Bono
“What sculpture is to a block of marble education is to the human soul.”
Joseph Addison
“Education makes a people easy to lead but difficult to drive: easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.”
Peter Brougham
“Upon the subject of education … I can only say that I view it as the most important subject which we as a people may be engaged in.”
Abraham Lincoln
“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”
Mark Twain
“The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.”
Albert Einstein
“Education would be much more effective if its purpose was to ensure that by the time they leave school every boy and girl should know how much they do not know, and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know it.”
William Haley
“A well-educated mind will always have more questions than answers.”
Helen Keller
“The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.”
Sydney J. Harris
“It is a thousand times better to have common sense without education than to have education without common sense.”
Robert G. Ingersoll
“Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune.“
Jim Rohn
“It is in fact a part of the function of education to help us escape, not from our own time – for we are bound by that – but from the intellectual and emotional limitations of our time.”
T.S. Eliot
“Let us think of education as the means of developing our greatest abilities, because in each of us there is a private hope and dream which, fulfilled, can be translated into benefit for everyone and greater strength for our nation.”
John F. Kennedy
“The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.”
Aristotle
“Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced.”
John Keats
“Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.”
Robert Frost
“The beautiful thing about learning is that no one can take it away from you.”
B.B. King
“There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly.”
Buckminster Fuller
“You educate a man; you educate a man. You educate a woman; you educate a generation.”
Brigham Young
“The mind once enlightened cannot again become dark.”
Thomas Paine
“Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young.”
Henry Ford
“The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living differ from the dead.”
Aristotle
“The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.”
Martin Luther King
“When you educate one person you can change a life, when you educate many you can change the world.”
Shai Reshef
“The more I live, the more I learn. The more I learn, the more I realize, the less I know.”
Michel Legrand
“A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.”
George Santayana
“I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. It might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.” (John Steinbeck)
“The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.” (William Ward)
“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
Einstein
“We learn geology the morning after the earthquake.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“There is no failure. Only feedback.”
Robert Allen
“The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future life.”
Plato
“If you are planning for a year, sow rice; if you are planning for a decade, plant trees; if you are planning for a lifetime, educate people.”
Chinese Proverb
“A good teacher is like a candle – it consumes itself to light the way for others.”
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
“Teaching kids to count is fine, but teaching them what counts is best.”
Bob Talbert
“The more that you read, the more things you will know, the more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.”
Dr. Seuss
“I am not a teacher, but an awakener.”
Robert Frost
“You cannot teach a crab to walk straight.”
Aristophenes
“In a completely rational society, the best of us would be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for something less.”
Lee Iacocca
“If a child can’t learn the way we teach, maybe we should teach the way they learn.”
Ignacio ‘Nacho’ Estrada
“You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.”
Khalil Gibran
“One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.” (Carl Jung)
“Teaching is the one profession that creates all other professions.”
Unknown
“Remember that failure is an event, not a person.”
Zig Ziglar
“It may be that when we no longer know which way to go that we have come to our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.”
Wendell Berry
“Learning is not a spectator sport.”
D. Blocher
“The next best thing to knowing something is knowing where to find it”
Samuel Johnson
“The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.”
Henri Bergson
“I never teach my pupils. I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn.”
Einstein
“Education breeds confidence. Confidence breeds hope. Hope breeds peace.”
Confucius
“There is a great difference between knowing and understanding: you can know a lot about something and not really understand it.”
Charles F. Kettering
“Never discourage anyone…who continually makes progress, no matter how slow.”
Plato
“I like a teacher who gives you something to take home to think about besides homework.”
Lily Tomlin
“What the teacher is, is more important than what he teaches.”
Karl Meninger
“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.”
Thomas Edison
“Thought flows in terms of stories–stories about events, stories about people, and stories about intentions and achievements. The best teachers are the best story tellers. We learn in the form of stories.”
Frank Martin
“Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.”
E. M. Forster
“If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow.”
John Dewey
Bonus: “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupér
“What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.”
George Bernard Shaw
If you would like to get start a career teaching English overseas view online TEFL courses today to get certified.
For inspiration about potential destinations view our country guides:
Teach in Asia
Teach in Africa
Teach in Europe
Teach in Middle East
Teach in Central America
Teach in South America