Teacher Quotes: Inspirational, Thoughtful and Funny
Everyone can relate to teacher quotes. Everyone has been taught something.
Instructors and their words are something that you carry forever with you in your hearts. A teacher can take any form – that of an educator, a mentor, a guru, an instructor, or a guide.
Maybe they share insights that provide a new direction to your life, something no one else suggested. Many people will come and go in your life, but a good teacher leaves lasting memories.
Enjoy these inspiring teacher quotes.
Inspirational Quotes for Teachers
1.) The best teachers are those who show you where to look but don’t tell you what to see.
Unknown
2.) Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.
John Steinbeck
3.) A teacher takes a hand, opens a mind, and touches a heart.
Unknown
4.) Teachers should guide without dictating and participate without dominating.
C.B. Neblett
5.) Do not train a child to learn by force or 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
6.) The great teacher inspires.
William Arthur Ward
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Best Teacher Quotes
7.) I touch the future. I teach.
Christa McAuliffe
8.) Be an opener of doors for such as come after thee.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
9.) The delicate balance of mentoring someone is not creating them in your own image but giving them the opportunity to create themselves.
Steven Spielberg
10.) 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
11.) I’m not a teacher but an awakener.
Robert Frost
12.) Teaching is a calling too. And I’ve always thought that teachers, in their own way, are holy—angels leading their flocks out of the darkness.
Jeannette Walls
See Good Messages for Teachers.
Funny Teacher Quotes
13.) A teacher’s job is to take a bunch of live wires and see that they are well-grounded.
Darwin D. Martin
14.) Experience is a good teacher, but she sends in terrific bills.
Minna Thomas Antrim
15.) A cross-eyed teacher can keep twice the number of children in order than any other because the pupils do not know who she’s looking at.
John R. Kemble
See our Teacher Appreciation Paragraphs for more heartfelt messages for educators.
16.) There are three good reasons to be a teacher — June, July, and August.
Unknown
17.) Teachers are the only professionals who have to respond to bells every forty-five minutes and come out fighting.
Frank McCourt
18.) Schoolteachers are not fully appreciated by parents until it rains all day Saturday.
A. Whitney Brown
19.) As long as teachers give tests, there will always be prayer in schools.
Unknown
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Inspirational Teacher Quotes
20.) Teaching is the profession that teaches all the other professions.
Unknown
21.) Teaching is the greatest act of optimism.
Colleen Wilcox
22.) The secret of teaching is to appear to have known all your life what you learned this afternoon.
Unknown
23.) Nine-tenths of education is encouragement.
Anatole France
24.) Mentoring is a brain to pick, an ear to listen, and a push in the right direction.
John C. Crosby
25.) The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery.
Mark van Doren
Check out 200 Back-To-School Quotes and Captions.
Teaching Quotations
26.) In teaching, you cannot see the fruit of a day’s work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years.
Jacques Barzun
27.) What office is there which involves more responsibility, which requires more qualifications, and which ought, therefore, to be more honorable than teaching?
Harriet Martineau
28.) To know how to suggest is the great art of teaching.
Henri Frederic Amiel
29.) Good teaching is more a giving of the right questions than a giving of the right answers.
Josef Albers
Teach Quotes
30.) In learning you will teach, in teaching, you will learn.
Phil Collins
31.) Teaching kids to count is fine, but teaching them what counts is best.
Bob Talbert
Check out our Thank you note to teacher ideas.
32.) Seldom was any knowledge given to keep but to impart; the grace of this rich jewel is lost in concealment.
Bishop Hall
33.) The educator must, above all, understand how to wait, to reckon all effects in the light of the future, not of the present.
Ellen Key
34.) A very wise old teacher once said: I consider a day’s teaching wasted if we do not all have one hearty laugh.
Gilbert Highet
35.) Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.’
Jacques Barzun
Teacher Appreciation Quotes
36.) A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
Henry Adams
37.) 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 a vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.
Carl Jung
38.) I like a teacher who gives you something to take home to think about besides homework.
Lily Tomlin as Edith Ann
40.) I’ve seen and met angels wearing the disguise of ordinary people living ordinary lives.
Tracy Chapman
41.) Most of us end up with no more than five or six people who remember us. Teachers have thousands of people who remember them for the rest of their lives.
Andy Rooney
42.) I can no other answer make, but thanks, and thanks.
William Shakespeare
43.) Teacher appreciation makes the world of education go around.
Helen Peters
44.) He who opens a school door closes a prison.
Victor Hugo
Find out how to become a teacher.
Back-to-School Quotes
45.) Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.
Gracie Allen
46.) It’s like going back to school. You know, autumn! Time for ‘Harry Potter’.
Robbie Coltrane
47.) I allowed myself to think, if I could be doing anything in the world, what would I be doing? And what came to mind is I’d be traveling a little bit, I’d be going to classes, and I’d be going back to school.
Ricky Williams
48.) The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.
Ralph W. Sockman
49.) We all learn by experience, but some of us have to go to summer school.
Peter De Vries
Best Teacher Sayings
50.) The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence.
Amos Bronson Alcott
51.) A mentor is someone who sees more talent and ability within you than you see in yourself and helps bring it out of you.
Bob Proctor
52.) The task of the educator lies in seeing that the child does not confound good with immobility and evil with activity.
Maria Montessori
53.) A true teacher would never tell you what to do. But he would give you the knowledge with which you could decide what would be best for you to do.
Christopher Pike
54.) Without a mentor in life, one can easily succumb to folly. Without a mentor in life, one can easily become self-centered, capricious, and arrogant.
Unknown
55.) Our fingerprints don’t fade from the lives we touch.
Judy Blume
Motivational Quotes For Teachers
56.) Teachers can make such a profound impact on our lives and should be honored as heroes.
Rainn Wilson
57.) If you have to put someone on a pedestal, put teachers. They are society’s heroes.
Guy Kawasaki
58.) Everyone who remembers his own education remembers teachers, not methods and techniques. The teacher is the heart of the educational system.
Sidney Hook
59.) One of the greatest values of mentors is the ability to see ahead what others cannot see and to help them navigate a course to their destination.
John C. Maxwell
60.) The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind.
Khalil Gibran
61.) 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
62.) A human being is not attaining his full heights until he is educated.
Horace Mann
Inspiring Teachers
63.) 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, Jr
64.) Education is the key to success in life, and teachers make a lasting impact on the lives of their students.
Solomon Ortiz
65.) In a completely rational society, the best of us would be teachers, and the rest of us would have to settle for something else.
Lee Iacocca
66.) If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow.
John Dewey
67.) The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.
Sydney J. Harris
68.) If a child can’t learn the way we teach, maybe we should teach the way they learn.
Ignacio ‘Nacho’ Estrada
70.) A hundred years from now, it will not matter what kind of car I drove, what kind of house I lived in, how much money I had in the bank…but the world may be a better place because I made a difference in the life of a child.
Forest Witcraft
Short Teacher Quotes
71.) The best teachers teach from the heart, not from the book.
Unknown
72.) Without teacher appreciation, there can’t be any student progress.
Theresa Grimm
73.) Teachers appreciate being appreciated, for teacher appreciation is their highest award.
William Prince
74.) There’s no one quite like a special teacher, and no teacher quite as special as you.
Unknown
75.) A good teacher is like a candle – it consumes itself to light the way for others.
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
76.) One child, one teacher, one book, one pen can change the world.
Malala Yousafzai
77.) What a block of marble is to a sculptor, a ready mind is to a teacher.
Joseph Addison
78.) A great teacher takes a hand, opens a mind, and touches a heart.
Unknown
79.) Confidence breeds hope. Hope breeds peace.
Confucius
80.) A truly special teacher is very wise and sees tomorrow in every child’s eyes.
Unknown
81.) Ye great teachers: listen to what you say!
Goethe
82.) The best way a mentor can prepare another leader is to expose him or her to other great people.
John C. Maxwell
83.) Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.
Benjamin Franklin
Thank You Teacher Quotes
84.) What nobler employment, or more valuable to the state, than that of the man who instructs the rising generation?
Marcus Tullius Cicero
85.) We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.
Albert Schweitzer
86.) I am indebted to my father for living, but to my teacher for living well.
Alexander the Great
87.) Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
Marcel Proust
88.) A mentor is someone who allows you to see the hope inside yourself.
Oprah Winfrey
89.) The dream begins, most of the time, with a teacher who believes in you, who tugs and pushes and leads you onto the next plateau, sometimes poking you with a sharp stick called truth.
Dan Rather
90.) The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.
William A. Ward
Grateful Teacher Quotes
91.) Teachers have three loves: love of learning, love of learners, and the love of bringing the first two loves together.
Scott Hayden
92.) Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire.
William Butler Yeats
93.) Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today.
Malcolm X
94.) The duties of a teacher are neither few nor small, but they elevate the mind and give energy to the character.
Dorothea Dix
95.) It takes a big heart to help shape little minds.
Unknown
96.) Teachers can change lives with just the right mix of chalk and challenges.
Joyce Meyer
Heartfelt Teacher Quotes
97.) Better than a thousand days of diligent study is one day with a great teacher.
Japanese Proverb
98.) What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to a human soul.
Joseph Addison
99.) I can’t believe I just saw my teacher at the grocery store! I thought she lived in her classroom!
Heidi McDonald
100.) The best teacher of children, in brief, is one who is essentially childlike.
H. L. Mencken
Teacher Day
101.) Sunday is a teacher’s day of REST: the REST of the laundry, the REST of the housework, and grade the REST of the papers.
Heidi McDonald
102.) To stimulate life, leaving it then free to develop and unfold, herein lies the first task of the teacher.
Maria Montessori
103.) The universal mission of all educators is to let the torch of knowledge illuminate the world.
Eraldo Banovac
104.) It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.
Albert Einstein
105.) The average teacher explains complexity; the gifted teacher reveals simplicity.
Robert Brault
106.) By learning, you will teach; by teaching, you will learn.
Latin Proverb
107.) Teachers are not in it for the income but for the outcome.
Unknown
108.) What a teacher writes on the blackboard of life can never be erased.
Unknown
109.) Ideal teachers are those who use themselves as bridges over which they invite their students to cross, then having facilitated their crossing, joyfully collapse, encouraging them to create bridges of their own.
Nikos Kazantzakis
Importance of Educator
110.) To this end, the greatest asset of a school is the personality of the teacher.
John Strachan
111.) A good teacher can inspire hope, ignite the imagination, and instill a love of learning.
Brad Henry
112.) The job of an educator is to teach students to see vitality in themselves.
Joseph Campbell
113.) Educators are the only people who lose sleep over other people’s kids.
Nicholas A. Ferroni
114.) Teachers, I believe, are the most responsible and important members of society because their professional efforts affect the fate of the earth.
Helen Caldicott
115.) Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths pure theatre.
Gail Godwin
116.) I think the teaching profession contributes more to the future of our society than any other single profession.
John Wooden
117.) A teacher affects eternity.
Henry Brooks Adams
Education Quotes
118.) Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.
Nelson Mandela
119.) Good teachers know how to bring out the best in students.
Charles Kuralt
120.) Education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.
Malcolm Forbes
121.) The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts.
C. S. Lewis
122.) Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today.
Malcolm X
123.) Education is not the filling of a pot but the lighting of a fire.
W.B. Yeats
Learning And Teaching
124.) The beautiful thing about learning is that no one can take it away from you.
B.B. King
125.) When educating the minds of our youth, we must not forget to educate their hearts.
Dalai Lama
126.) Every child deserves a champion, an adult who will never give up on them, who understands the power of connection and insists that they become the best they can possibly be.
Rita Pierson
127.) Not all superheroes wear capes—some have teaching degrees.
Unknown
128.) Cheers to all of the teachers who give out pencils daily, knowing they’ll never get them back.
Unknown
By Michael O’Halloran
Michael O’Halloran founded Greeting Card Poet in 2014 and has worked as its publisher and editor ever since. He has co-authored four books on kids’ trivia and four on coaching. Previously, Michael was the president of Magnetic Poetry. He has invented and brought over 75 new gift and toy products to market, most of which deal with wordplay. Mike is married and a father of four daughters.
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