Inspiring Students Quotes

Learning is like rowing upstream; not to advance is to drop back.
- Chinese proverb ~ Alvin Toffler

The best teacher teaches by inspiring students to learn by showing them the ultimate purpose of learning. ~ Debasish Mridha

Everybody, professors and students and Proctors the same, knew that if the sign said 'do not walk on the grass', one hopped. Anybody who didn't had failed to understand what Oxford was. ~ Natasha Pulley

We reaffirm that on days like this, there are no Republicans or Democrats. We are Americans, united in concern for our fellow citizens. ~ Barack Obama

The feelings I thought I had left behind returned when, almost nineteen years later, the Islamic regime would once again turn against its students. This time it would open fire on those it had admitted to the universities, those who were its own children, the children of the revolution. Once more my students would go to the hospitals in search of the murdered bodies that where stolen by the guards and vigilantes and try to prevent them from stealing the wounded.
I would like to know where Mr. Bahri is right now, at this moment, and to ask him: How did it all turn out, Mr. Bahri - was this your dream, your dream of the revolution? Who will pay for all those ghosts in my memories? Who will pay for the snapshots of the murdered and the executed that we hid in our shoes and closets as we moved on to other things? Tell me, Mr. Bahri-or, to use that odd expression of Gatsby's, Tell me, old sport- what shell we do with all this corpses on our hands? ~ Azar Nafisi

Education best serves students by helping them be more self-reflective. ~ Randy Pausch

And I thought of a cresting wave of water, lit by a moon, rushing past and vanishing upstream, pursued by a band of yelping students whose torchbeams criss-crossed in the dark. There is accumulation. There is responsibility. And beyond these, there is unrest. There is great unrest. ~ Julian Barnes

Girls shouldn't worry about being the equal of men in the business world. ~ Marilyn Monroe

Many students go through "imposter syndrome" as they try to assimilate into a professional culture. ~ Claude M. Steele

And now here you are, at peace in your Garden of Eden with your brother and your acreage and your students and your Inklings and you friends and your quaint town. All these things both inspire you and protect you. But a change might be in order. Not a change that disrupts, but one that expands." I paused. "Let new things touch your soul. ~ Patti Callahan

It's a matter of the heart ... I take teaching at Harvard very seriously and supervision of my students very seriously. Harvard should have a bona fide commitment to me. ~ Margaret Geller

Every student of physics knows the axiom 'nature abhors a vacuum.' A little known corollary is that 'rowing coaches detest sending their crews in early.' Coaches will always find something to fill the end-of-practice vacuum. ~ Brad Alan Lewis

Teach your students real-world writing purposes, add a teacher who models his or her struggles with the writing process, throw in lots of real-world mentor texts for students to emulate, and give our kids the time necessary to enable them to stretch as writers. ~ Kelly Gallagher

Beethoven said that it's better to hit the wrong note confidently, than hit the right note unconfidently. Never be afraid to be wrong or to embarrass yourself; we are all students in this life, and there is always something more to learn. ~ Mike Norton

The mind is refrigerated by interruption; the thoughts are diverted from the principle subject; the reader is weary, he suspects not why; and at last throws away the book, which he has too diligently studied. ~ Samuel Johnson

Two Dutch researchers did a study in which they had groups of students answer forty-two fairly demanding questions from the board game Trivial Pursuit. Half were asked to take five minutes beforehand to think about what it would mean to be a professor and write down everything that came to mind. Those students got 55.6 percent of the questions right. The other half of the students were asked to first sit and think about soccer hooligans. They ended up getting 42.6 percent of the Trivial Pursuit questions right. The "professor" group didn't know more than the "soccer hooligan" group. They weren't smarter or more focused or more serious. They were simply in a "smart" frame of mind, and, clearly, associating themselves with the idea of something smart, like a professor, made it a lot easier - in that stressful instant after a trivia question was asked - to blurt out the right answer. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

We have lived in a world where the discoveries of physics and genetics are far more awe-inspiring, as well as infinitely more liberating, than the claims of any religion. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Much music teaching seems more concerned with controlling the student than with encouraging the student's own impulses. ~ William Westney

It is a great thing to be at your age ... You are at a very specific time of age ... an age where you can follow all your dreams. But also at an age when you can change-you can change your dreams, you can change paths. When you start something when you're young, you should not decide 'this is it, this is my way and I will go all the way.' You have the age where you can change. You get experience, and maybe dislike it and go another way. Your age is still an age of exploration. ~ Christian Louboutin

When Annunziata said she loved me or any of her thousands of other friends and beloveds, she was really saying, at least in my mind, "God loves you." To quote the singer/songwriter James Taylor, she showered the people she loved with love, always showing the way that she felt without holding back. Even as her body could barely contain her soul any longer, she'd open wide the gates of herself with a smile, that giggle, her twinkling eyes, and she'd let the supernatural love flow through her. Walking out of the chapel after her funeral, a woman I'd never seen before stopped me and said, "You're Cathleen, aren't you?" "Yes," I croaked, tears rolling off my nose as I fingered the prayer card with Annunziata's picture on it. Slipping an arm around my shoulders, the woman explained that she was one of Annunziata's former students and said, "She loved you so much." I know. ~ Cathleen Falsani

I almost never do free writing. Unless I am forcing my students to do it. ~ Rachel Zucker

[A] people needs to understand what freedom is. We Americans are fortunate that the Founders and their generation possessed that understanding. They knew that freedom, per se, is not enough. They knew that freedom must be limited to be preserved. This paradox is difficult for many students to grasp. Young people generally think freedom means authority figures leaving them alone so they can "do their own thing." That's part of what it means to be free, but true freedom involves much, much more. As understood by our Founders and by the best minds of the young republic, true freedom is always conditioned by morality. John Adams wrote, "I would define liberty as a power to do as we would be done by." In other words, freedom is not the power to do what one can, but what one ought. Duty always accompanies liberty. Tocqueville similarly observed, "No free communities ever existed without morals." The best minds concur: there must be borders: freedom must be limited to be preserved.

What kinds of limits are we talking about?
* The moral limits of right and wrong, which we did not invent but owe largely to our Judeo-Christian heritage.
* Intellectual limits imposed by sound reasoning. Again, we did not invent these but are in debt largely to Greco-Roman civilization, from the pre-Socratic philosophers forward.
* Political limits such as the rule of law, inalienable rights, and representative institutions, which we inherited primarily from the British.
* ~ Russell Kirk

I'd forgotten not all victories are about saving the universe. ~ Steven Moffat

Teaching by example, radical obedience, justice, mercy, activism, and sacrifice wholly inspires me. I'm at that place where "well done" trumps "well said." When I see kingdom work in the middle of brokenness, when mission transitions from the academic soil of the mind into the sacrificial work of someone's hands, I am utterly affected. Obedience inspires me. Servant leaders inspire me. Humility inspires me. Talking heads dissecting apologetics stopped inspiring me a few years ago. ~ Jen Hatmaker

Behind every adversity - is an opportunity! ~ Napoleon Hill

I went to seven colleges. I was a professional transfer student. I had to drop out 'cause I couldn't see out the back window. ~ Rosie O'Donnell

Your losses are the starting points of your gains. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

Happiness is a state of mind and not a state of possession. Be as you are and you will be happy, if you try to be someone else you will be miserable. ~ Apoorve Dubey

He glared at me and said, "Look how you're dressed." I looked down and could see only what I had seen in the mirror that morning, the suit and shirt and tie that was customary for students at the time. "Your suit is blue," he said. "Your shirt is blue, your tie is blue. That's what's wrong with your writing." When my ordeal was over I slunk away from Goodman's cubicle to rethink the sameness of my writing and to learn the value of variety. It took some time for me to learn the other lesson, that a writer, shy or not, needs a tough skin, for no matter how advanced one's experience and career, expert criticism cuts to the quick, and one learns to endure and to perfect, if for no other reason than to challenge the pain-maker. ~ Sol Stein

Hard work always hurts somewhere. ~ Katherine Rundell

I made 10 times as many images as the other students," he says of the early years. "I destroyed all those negatives except a few. I did it as a reminder that you can't afford to waste time: take it seriously. ~ Emmet Gowin

An individual has not begun to live until he can rise above the narrow horizons of his particular individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity. And this is one of the big problems of life, that so many people never quite get to the point of rising above self. And so they end up the tragic victims of self-centeredness. They end up the victims of distorted and disrupted personality. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Feelings and emotion
ran through my veins
like a hurricane.
And that's when
everything
began to look like poetry.

- You look like poetry ~ Ka.ya

If you would persuade, you must appeal to interest rather than intellect. ~ Benjamin Franklin

The further you go in life, the more you realize what you're going to leave this Earth. It's not going to be, 'It was a great platform. It was great to win the Super Bowl,' but really and truly what you're going to leave on this Earth is the influence on others. ~ Joe Gibbs

I didn't mind studying. Obviously math and the physical science subjects interested me more than some of the more artistic subjects, but I think I was a pretty good student. ~ Alan Shepard

What had I intuited at last? Namely this: while nothing is more precious than independence and freedom, nothing is also more precious than independence and freedom! These two slogans are almost the same, but not quite. The first inspiring slogan was Ho Chi Min's empty suit, which he no longer wore. How could he? He was dead. The second slogan was the tricky one, the joke. It was Uncle Ho's empty suit turned inside out, a sartorial sensation that only a man of two minds, or a man with no face, dared to wear. This odd suit suited me, for it was of a cutting-edge cut. Wearing this inside-out suit, my seams exposed in an unseemly way, I understood, at last, how our revolution had gone from being the vanguard of political change to the rearguard hoarding power. In this transformation, we were not unusual. Hadn't the French and the Americans done exactly the same? Once revolutionaries themselves, they had become imperialists, colonizing and occupying our defiant little land, taking away our freedom in the name of saving us. Our revolution took considerably longer than theirs, and was considerably bloodier, but we made up for lost time. When it came to learning the worst habits of our French masters and their American replacements, we quickly proved ourselves the best. We, too, could abuse grand ideals! Having liberated ourselves in the name of independence and freedom - I was so tired of saying these words! - we then deprived our defeated brethren of the same. ~ Viet Thanh Nguyen

Students should not only be trained to live in a democracy when they grow up; they should have the chance to live in one today. ~ Alfie Kohn

Librarians seemed to have a sixth sense for noticing when students were doing things they weren't supposed to. ~ Brandon Sanderson