Great Teachers Quotes

There are some great teachers who have had great students, but they themselves can't play a note. I don't understand it, because the most I learned from my teacher was just hearing him play. ~ Joshua Bell

Suffering is one of life's great teachers. ~ Bryant McGill

I've been very lucky in my life to have some great teachers. ~ Brian Lindstrom

To get enough of the teachers we need, teaching has to be a great job where talented people are supported and rewarded. ~ Michael Bennet

That was like my safe place with great teachers where everyone could let down their guard and not feel judged. As soon as we walk outside, it was like, 'Look at these weird drama club kids.' But we all had our own agreement that we were cool in our own way. ~ Keith Stanfield

I am a big believer in education, because when I grew up in Austria - when I grew up in Austria I had a great education. I had great teachers. ~ Arnold Schwarzenegger

Take the teacher not the course. Find out who the great professors are - the great teachers - and take their courses because a subject that you may not think you're interested in may turn out to be infinitely fascinating because of the way it's taught. ~ David McCullough

Research confirms that great teachers change lives. Students with one highly effective elementary school teacher are more likely to go to college, less likely to become pregnant as teens, and earn tens of thousands more over their lifetimes. ~ Wendy Kopp

The biggest challenge facing the great teachers and communicators of history is not to teach history itself, nor even the lessons of history, but why history matters. How to ignite the first spark of the will o'the wisp, the Jack o'lantern, the ignis fatuus [foolish fire] beloved of poets, which lights up one source of history and then another, zigzagging across the marsh, connecting and linking and writing bright words across the dark face of the present. There's no phrase I can come up that will encapsulate in a winning sound-bite why history matters. We know that history matters, we know that it is thrilling, absorbing, fascinating, delightful and infuriating, that it is life. Yet I can't help wondering if it's a bit like being a Wagnerite; you just have to get used to the fact that some people are never going to listen. ~ Stephen Fry

He only knows great teachers can bore into someone else's mind like this -- only they have this kind of power. Maybe that's why teachers are paid so little: what they earn has more power than money. ~ Stephen Davenport

Meditate on enlightenment. Read the exploits of the great teachers, the great saints. They'll inspire you. Their power is there. ~ Frederick Lenz

Dogs are great teachers. They are at home in the world. They live in the moment, and they force us to stay there with them. Dogs love us unconditionally, not for our bodies or bank accounts. ~ Susan Cheever

The great teachers are always those who can live the tension. They are not criticizing everybody, they're not complaining. They give young people a vision. ~ Henri Nouwen

Those who tell of two ways and praise one are recognized as prophets or great teachers. They save men from confusion and hard choices. They offer a single choice that is easy to make because those who do not take the path that is commended to them live a wretched life. To walk far on this path may be difficult, but the choice is easy, and to hear the celebration of this path is pleasant. Wisdom offers simple schemes, but truth is not so simple. ~ Martin Buber

Public libraries are our great teachers and storytellers, and are a vital adjunct to our schools. In this day of standardized and homogenized education, a library offers individual and personalized learning opportunities second to none. ~ Julie Andrews

Great teachers should be paid like doctors or corporate attorneys. I worry about what will happen to our economy and our democracy if we don't start to take teachers' jobs seriously. ~ Ninive Clements Calegari

In this very breath that we take now lies the secret that all great teachers try to tell us. ~ Peter Matthiessen

The next step is for the great teachers to arise, and for them to clearly understand the challenges ahead and mentor accordingly. Where most generations focus the education of their children on preparing to make a living or succeed financially, leadership generations are taught by parents who see a higher role for their children. ~ Oliver DeMille

Cats are great teachers! Their teaching is very simple: You are too busy with life; give time to yourself! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

When you study great teachers ... you will learn much more from their caring and hard work than from their style. ~ William Glasser

It is a fact, indeed, that most of
the great teachers of mankind have been not writers
but speakers. Think of Pythagoras, Christ, Socrates,
the Buddha, and so on. And since I have spoken of
Socrates, I would like to say something about Plato. I
remember Bernard Shaw said that Plato was the dramatist
who invented Socrates ~ Jorge Luis Borges

The most powerful method of improving education is to invest in the improvement of teaching and the status of great teachers. ~ Ken Robinson

Great teachers are wonderful. They change lives. We need them. The problem is that most schools don't like great teachers. They're organized to stamp them out, bore them, bureaucratize them, and make them average. Why ~ Seth Godin

You can have great teachers, but if you don't have a good principal, you won't have a good school. ~ Eli Broad

The great teachers fill you up with hope and shower you with a thousand reasons to embrace all aspects of life. I wanted to follow Mr. Monte around for the rest of my life, learning everything he wished to share of impart, but I didn't know how to ask. ~ Pat Conroy

Great teachers who are faithful to God's Word are a blessing to God's church. ~ Anonymous

Good teachers deserve apples; great teachers deserve chocolate. A favorite quotation, written in calligraphy on his office door. ~ Richard Hamming

Good teachers teach. Great teachers transform. ~ Queen Rania Of Jordan

Saints are the great teachers of the loving-kindness and fascination with God. ~ Evelyn Underhill

As a complete product of Issaquah public schools, there is absolutely no way I would be here if I didn't have well-funded arts programs and some great teachers who were constantly pushing me intellectually and personally. ~ David Call

Great teachers are precious. Lousy teachers cause damage that lasts forever. We need to reorganize our schools to free the great teachers from tests and reports and busywork, and to expel the lousy ~ Seth Godin

My foot slips on a narrow ledge; in that split second, as needles of fear pierce heart and temples, eternity intersects with present time. Thought and action are not different, and stone, air, ice, sun, fear, and self are one. What is exhilarating is to extend this acute awareness into ordinary moments, in the moment-by-moment experiencing of the lammergeier and the wolf, which, finding themselves at the center of things, have no need for any secret of true being. In this very breath that we take now lies the secret that all great teachers try to tell us ... the present moment. The purpose of mediation practice is not enlightenment' it is to pay attention even at unextraordinary times, to be of the present, nothing-but-the-present, to bear this mindfulness of now into each event of ordinary life. ~ Peter Matthiessen

I believe that curiosity, wonder and passion are defining qualities of imaginative minds and great teachers; that restlessness and discontent are vital things; and that intense experience and suffering instruct us in ways that less intense emotions can never do. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

I heard great teachers say: "Give what you have need of." I need love, so I will give love. ~ E'yen A. Gardner

I didn't learn much about writing at Sarah Lawrence, but I learned a lot about the sources of poems - dreams, myth, history - from the really great teachers, Joseph Campbell, Charles Trinkhaus, Bert Loewenberg, and a young Australian anthropologist named Harry Hawthorne. ~ Carolyn Kizer

I just want to make a point that it's not just great teachers that sometimes shape your life. Sometimes it's the absence of great teachers that shapes your life and being ignored can be just as good for a person as being lauded. ~ Julia Roberts

As with all great teachers, his curriculum was an insignificant part of what he communicated. From him you didn't learn a subject, but a life ... Tolerance and justice, fearlessness and pride, reverence and pity, are learned in a course on long division if the teacher has those qualities ... ~ William Alexander Percy

Learning to drive in Canberra is pretty easy and I had great teachers in my parents. ~ Melissa Breen

In the evening we shall be examined on love." –St. John of the Cross

And it won't be multiple choice,
though some of us would prefer it that way.
Neither will it be essay, which tempts us to run on
when we should be sticking to the point, if not together.
In the evening there shall be implications
our fear will change to complications. No cheating,
we'll be told, and we'll try to figure out the cost of being true
to ourselves. In the evening when the sky has turned
that certain blue, blue of exam books, blue of no more
daily evasions, we shall climb the hill as the light empties
and park our tired bodies on a bench above the city
and try to fill in the blanks. And we won't be tested
like defendants on trial, cross-examined
till one of us breaks down, guilty as charged. No,
in the evening, after the day has refused to testify,
we shall be examined on love like students
who don't even recall signing up for the course
and now must take their orals, forced to speak for once
from the heart and not off the top of their heads.
And when the evening is over and it's late,
the student body asleep, even the great teachers
retired for the night, we shall stay up
and run back over the questions, each in our own way:
what's true, what's false, what unknown quantity
will balance the equation, what it would mean years from now
to look back and know
we d ~ Thomas Centolella

When all good and great teachers die, ignorance will awake and teach so well, with an understandable vigor, and all students of ignorance will do all things because of ignorance, with an unthinkable joy and vigor! ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

I have not seen that standardised tests make the profession less attractive, though some principals respond to them in a way that drives the best teachers out of their schools (by over-emphasising test prep in the school curriculum for example). On the other hand, great teachers want benchmarks to measure progress and tests can help with that. ~ Wendy Kopp

Teachers teach and students educate. Students are the only true educators. Historically, every other method of education has failed. Education occurs when students get excited about learning and apply themselves; students do this when they experience great teachers. ~ Oliver DeMille

Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit. My three [great teachers] did not tell - they catalyzed a burning desire to know. Under their influence, the horizons sprung wide and fear went away and the unknown became knowable. But most important of all, the truth, that dangerous stuff, became beautiful and very precious. ~ John Steinbeck

Just the actual physical ability to hold four instruments simultaneously and do some of the things that Vivien was able to do is mind blowing to any surgeon. He never went to medical school and he became one of the great teachers of medicine himself, people are just amazed. ~ Mary Stuart Masterson

The Jesuits I know who have died and all their lives were great teachers, they're the least remembered people. ~ Daniel Berrigan

Online education, then, can serve two goals. For students lucky enough to have access to great teachers, blended learning can mean even better outcomes at the same or lower cost. And for the millions here and abroad who lack access to good, in-person education, online learning can open doors that would otherwise remain closed. ~ Daphne Koller

The great teachers of your Christian religion understand this. They know that Jesus was not perturbed by the crucifixion, but expected it. He could have walked away, but he did not. He could have stopped the process at any point. He had that power. Yet he did not. He allowed himself to be crucified in order that he might stand as man's eternal salvation. Look, he said, at what I can do. Look at what is true. And know that these things, and more, shall you also do. For have I not said, ye are gods? Yet you do not believe. If you cannot, then, believe in yourself, believe in me. Such was Jesus' compassion that he begged for a way - and created it - to so impact the world that all might come to heaven (Self realization) - if in no other way, then through him. For he defeated misery and death. And so might you. The grandest teaching of Christ was not that you shall have everlasting life - ~ Neale Donald Walsch

Few things are more important to our country's future than recruiting and keeping great teachers in our schools. ~ Wendy Kopp

I did my English A level in England, and we studied Shakespeare. I had great, great high school teachers, and we parsed the text within an inch of its life. ~ Joss Whedon

My life has been transformed by great teachers all the way ... ~ Jeff Goldblum

Students deserve great teachers. And teachers deserve the support they need to become great. ~ Bill Gates

Ancient philosophers and spiritual teachers were explorers. They wanted us to be as well. They thought we should understand this physical world, but not get stuck here. For thousands of years we have shared their insights, over-analyzed and repeated their words; quoting and re-translating until all meaning has been lost. These great minds, great souls, great beings sought to be jumping off points, not merely the originators of emptied out and desiccated clichés. They wanted to be doorways, not doorstops. ~ Edward Fahey

Great teachers have high expectations for their students, but even higher expectations for themselves. ~ Todd Whitaker

Teaching is a creative profession, not a delivery system. Great teachers do [pass on information], but what great teachers also do is mentor, stimulate, provoke, engage. ~ Ken Robinson

Great teachers are usually a little crazy. ~ Andy Rooney

Great teachers had great personalities and that the greatest teachers had outrageous personalities. I did not like decorum or rectitude in a classroom; I preferred a highly oxygenated atmosphere, a climate of intemperance, rhetoric, and feverish melodrama. And I wanted my teachers to make me smart. A great teacher is my adversary, my conqueror, commissioned to chastise me. He leaves me tame and grateful for the new language he has purloined from other kings whose granaries are filled and whose libraries are famous. He tells me that teaching is the art of theft: of knowing what to steal and from whom. Bad teachers do not touch me; the great ones never leave me. They ride with me during all my days, and I pass on to others what they have imparted to me. I exchange their handy gifts with strangers on trains, and I pretend the gifts are mine. I steal from the great teachers. And the truly wonderful thing about them is they would applaud my theft, laugh at the thought of it, realizing they had taught me their larcenous skills well. ~ Pat Conroy

Teaching is very important. The nature of your personality isn't that important. Lombardi was very extraverted, very bombastic. Landry very quiet, reserved. Both were great teachers and great coaches. ~ Marv Levy

It brings tears of joy to a teacher's eye when the student becomes a great success. ~ Debasish Mridha

Good teachers make the best of a pupil's means; great teachers foresee a pupil's ends. ~ Maria Callas

My mom was a teacher - I have the greatest respect for the profession - we need great teachers - not poor or mediocre ones. ~ Condoleezza Rice

I just want to be with great teachers. If that means I'm in a horror film with good teachers, I'll do another horror film. But I would love to branch out and do more comedy or just more straight dramas. ~ Jennifer Carpenter

I got to thinking that the world would be a better place if they gave medals to great teachers rather than just soldiers who kill their enemies in wars. ~ Matthew Quick

We disagree with the assertion that great teachers can be replaced by online alternatives. The futuristic claim that technology will triumph over teachers ignores all the social and relational dimensions of teaching and learning. ~ Andy Hargreaves

Cult leaders are often self-styled prophets who have not studied with great teachers or undergone lengthy training or discipline themselves ... Many of the most dangerous cultic figures of our times have no such stabilizing context of tradition, lineage or transmission, but are self-proclaimed gurus who sway their followers through their charismatic talents ... ~ John Welwood

He disregarded everything, he gave everything to art. He tirelessly visited galleries, spent whole hours standing before the works of great masters, grasped and pursued a wondrous brush. He never finished anything without testing himself several times by these great teachers and reading wordless but eloquent advice for himself in their paintings. ~ Nikolai Gogol

The best teachers coach their students and the best coaches are great teachers. ~ Grant Teaff

I had a number of great teachers and the ones that really were the strongest influences on me were women. They were really, really smart and interesting women. ~ Meryl Streep

I was a disadvantaged child from a non-educated family, yet I had the advantage of being in the company of great teachers. ~ A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

Great teachers will never be able to make up for bad parents, nor should they be expected to. ~ Taylor Mali

Why, Daddy?" she asked. She still had that strange look on her face. "Why do dogs die so young? Shadow was only seventeen. He was not even as old as my babysitter."
"To teach us," he said.
"Teach us what, Daddy?"
"Compassion," he replied.
"But why, Daddy?" she asked.
"So that we might be kinder. So we might make the world kinder. They leave, but they leave us with their lesson. All great teachers do that."
"Yes," said Emma. "He was a good teacher to me too. He was also a wonderful runway model."
He handed her the polaroid. She examined its rivulets and splotches. She put her thumb on the smudges, rubbing them. To Theo, it seemed she knew of the eyes and mouth that once had been. Then the full gravity of the circumstance fell upon her. Emma wept. She was now a girl with a crack in her heart. The sorrows of the world were now available to her. Soon, she would know their beauty. ~ Steven James Taylor

Great Teachers are passionate and compassionate - they have a powerful personality to engage every mind in the classroom. They are never forgotten. ~ Kavita Bhupta Ghosh

Looking back to the earlier centuries of the church, most of the great teachers were also bishops and vice versa. It's only fairly recently that the church has had this great divide. ~ N. T. Wright

Find the god in your own heart and you will understand by direct intuition what all the great teachers, real mystics, true philosophers and inspired people have been trying to tell you by the tortuous method of using words. ~ Paul Brunton

If we are to wield great magic, then let us learn from great teachers: the alchemists -- magicians par excellence. ~ Lawren Leo

As Mary delivered what was to be her last lecture about the Galapagos Islands, she would be stopped mid-sentence for five seconds by a doubt which, if expressed in words, might have come out something like this: "Maybe I'm just a crazy lady who had wandered off the street and into this classroom and started explaining the mysteries of life to these people. And they believe me, although I am utterly mistaken about simply everything."
She had to wonder, too, about all the supposedly great teachers of the past, who, although their brains were healthy, had turned out to be as wrong as Roy about what was really going on. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

The great teachers believe in the growth of the intellect and talent, and they are fascinated with the process of learning. ~ Carol S. Dweck

Finding great training, I think, is number one. I did a lot of research and found really great teachers, and it just takes - I took a year off from school and did independent studies so that I could devote all of my time to it. But I think that training is the key, definitely, and it's not a sport. ~ Misty Copeland

True basketball coaches are great teachers and you do not humiliate, you do not physically go after, you do not push or shove, you do not berate, if you are a true coach. If you humiliate or curse them, that won't do it. Coaches like that are not coaches. ~ Morgan Wootten

I was reading Emily Dickinson and Edwin Arlington Robinson, but these weren't the poets that influenced me. I think Gwendolyn Brooks influenced me because she wrote about Chicago, and she wrote about poor people. And she influenced me in my life by giving me a blurb. I would see her in action, and she listened to every single person. She didn't say, "Oh, I'm tired. I gotta go." She was there, and present, with every single person. She's one of the great teachers. ~ Sandra Cisneros

The problem doesn't lie with the great teachers. Great teachers strive to create linchpins. The problem lies with the system that punishes artists and rewards bureaucrats instead. Here ~ Seth Godin

The greatest wisdom is in simplicity. Love, respect, tolerance, sharing, gratitude, forgiveness. It's not complex or elaborate. The real knowledge is free. It's encoded in your DNA. All you need is within you. Great teachers have said that from the beginning. Find your heart, and you will find your way. ~ Carlos Barrios

If you're lucky you find your way into a spiritual community and you start to find the great teachers of all the ages who said the same thing. There's only love, you're made of love. ~ Anne Lamott

Elephants are living treasures. Nature's gardeners. Nature's great teachers. Tragically some people don't give a damn. They prefer the dead treasure to the living one. The ivory. We must challenge this so-called 'trade' with all our might and shame on those who would condone it. ~ Virginia McKenna

Great teachers emanate out of knowledge, passion and compassion. ~ A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

The first discovery of Dostoievsky is, for a spiritual adventurer, such a shock as is not likely to occur again. One is staggered, bewildered, insulted. It is like a hit in the face, at the end of a dark passage; a hit in the face, followed by the fumbling of strange hands at one's throat. Everything that has been forbidden, by discretion, by caution, by self-respect, by atavistic inhibition, seems suddenly to leap up out of the darkness and seize upon one with fierce, indescribable caresses.

　　All that one has felt, but has not dared to think; all that one has thought, but has not dared to say; all the terrible whispers from the unspeakable margins; all the horrible wreckage and silt from the unsounded depths, float in upon us and overpower us.

There is so much that the other writers, even the realists among them, cannot, will not, say. There is so much that the normal self-preservative instincts in ourselves do not want said. But this Russian has no mercy. Such exposures humiliate and disgrace? What matter? It is well that we should be so laid bare. Such revelations provoke and embarrass? What matter? We require embarrassment. The quicksilver of human consciousness must have no closed chinks, no blind alleys. It must be compelled to reform its microcosmic reflections, even down there, where it has to be driven by force. It is extraordinary how superficial even the great writers are; how lacking in the Mole's claws, in the Woodpecker's beak! They seem l ~ John Cowper Powys

The great questions of the day will not be settled by means of speeches and majority decisions but by iron and blood ~ Otto Von Bismarck

The CIA has a great reputation and a terrible record. It relies on machines, not men, to understand the other side. They counted Soviet weapons with spy satellites but never figured that in the meantime communism was crumbling. They poured billions into Afghanistan to give the Russians their Vietnam – which they did, only by ending up breeding an entirely new menace, the Islamic jihadis. They claimed the existence of WMD in Iraq and provided a war-mongering President with a pretext for war. Want me to go on?' Harry snorted. ~ Manreet Sodhi Someshwar

'Party Down' was one of the most magical, special experiences of my professional career. Also special in my personal life, too. I made really good friends, and I had just a great time, and it was a great part. ~ Ken Marino

I lived in Greece for about four years of my life, and living there had a huge impact on my life growing up. My father was very much adamant that we would learn about our culture. It's a very rich culture to be a part of since it has such a great history behind it. I definitely carry that in my job, and I am very passionate. ~ Marina And The Diamonds

We'll all go out together when we go.
Yes, we'll all go out together when we go.
Oh, how the world will die
From great fire in the sky.
Yes, we'll all go out together when we go.
(Total) Call me old fashioned but I'll take 'She'll Be Coming 'Round the Mountain' any day. ~ James Patterson

If there is any substance in what I have said, will not the great missionary bodies of India, to whom she owes a deep debt of gratitude for what they have done and are doing, do still better and serve the spirit of Christianity better by dropping the goal of proselytising while continuing their philanthropic work? ~ Mahatma Gandhi

Urban planner and historian Lewis Mumford, though no Marxist, could see how the vast gulf between the promise of technological progress and its capitalist application was a glaring contradiction at the heart of the system: "Those machines whose output was so great that all men might be clothed; those new methods of agriculture and new agricultural implements which promised crops so big that all men might be fed - the very instruments that were to give the whole community the basis of a good life, turned out, for the vast majority of people who possessed neither capital nor land, to be nothing short of instruments of torture. ~ Paul D'Amato

I was encouraged to hear that GM has made great progress on the hydrogen car. ~ Albert Wynn

Pushing myself against my own will really, because some of this stuff is hard. I don't consider myself to be a great guitar player, so pushing myself as a guitar player or pushing myself as a singer, as a performer, and just riding that fine line between being so hard on yourself that it's counter-productive and being so hard on yourself that nothing is ever good enough is what drives me. ~ Cody Johnson

London

The Institute

Year of Our Lord 1878


"Mother, Father, my chwaer fach,

It's my seventeenth birthday today. I know that to write to you is to break the law, I know that I will likely tear this letter into pieces when it is finished. As I have done on all my birthdays past since I was twelve. But I write anyway, to commemorate the occasion - the way some make yearly pilgrimages to a grave, to remember the death of a loved one. For are we not dead to each other?

I wonder if when you woke this morning you remembered that today, seventeen years ago, you had a son? I wonder if you think of me and imagine my life here in the Institute in London? I doubt you could imagine it. It is so very different from our house surrounded by mountains, and the great clear blue sky and the endless green. Here, everything is black and gray and brown, and the sunsets are painted in smoke and blood. I wonder if you worry that I am lonely or, as Mother always used to, that I am cold, that I have gone out into the rain again without a hat? No one here worries about those details. There are so many things that could kill us at any moment; catching a chill hardly seems important.

I wonder if you knew that I could hear you that day you came for me, when I was twelve. I crawled under the bed to block out the sound of you crying my name, but I heard you. I heard mother call for her fach, her little one. I bit my hands until they bl ~ Cassandra Clare

I meet people, and we can get past small talk pretty quickly if they've read my books. It's a great shortcut. ~ Ruth Reichl

Our concern is the invisible wounding from war. The physical wounds are most visible to our veterans who deserve first concern. But in truth we are all wounded. Grandparents, parents, siblings, children, friends, neighbors, care providers, teachers, taxpayers are all caught in war's long and crushing tentacles. Our entire society reels in pain, exhaustion, despair, and debt. Look closely. All lives are affected and we all need be concerned. ~ Edward Tick

The judges of England have rarely been original thinkers or great jurists. Many have been craftsmen rather than creators. ~ Patrick Devlin, Baron Devlin

Just say it: I'm angry and no one will like me. God: No, I will not say that. But don't you think we ached for you to find a love you could share your whole life with? I used your teachers to encourage you creatively when the church could not ... I worked with whatever I got my hands on. Can you see that? ~ Susan E. Isaacs

People will insist on building high and wide barriers directly in your path, often with the intent of closing you in. If you treat these obstacles like fencing walls, they will prove mightily so. I choose to see them as grand towers meant to be scaled and conquered, providing an added victory as well as a great view of the journey ahead. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich