Teacher Quotes

Your worst enemy can be your best teacher! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

The teacher is of course an artist, but being an artist does not mean that he or she can make the profile, can shape the students. What the educator does in teaching is to make it possible for the students to become themselves. ~ Paulo Freire

My first job was baby-sitting. I had a great time because I love kids. Sometimes, when I'm having a bad day, I'm like: "Oh, you know what? I'm going to chuck it in and become a kindergarten teacher!" ~ Anne Hathaway

A few years back, when my style was 'punk grandma,' I picked up an amazing pair of sandals - orthopaedic ones, with really thick soles. I've given them away to a friend now, because these days my look is more '1980s substitute teacher gone wild.' ~ Beth Ditto

I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God.' That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher ... You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool ... or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. ~ C.S. Lewis

Communities must plan for a variety of uses and income levels. Why do we care about housing as high-tech employers? If teachers, firefighters, peace officers, retail or restau- rant workers can't live here, then we're going to fail. ~ Carl Guardino

The teachers that we actually learn more from are the ones that taught us life lessons more than trigonometry. And they have such a huge responsibility and they're under-appreciated and underpaid. So that's my opinion of teachers. ~ Justin Timberlake

We encounter the grinding wheels that sharpen our mental blades many places in life. Adversity, school, parents, spiritual guides, books, experience are all sharpening teachers. As we grow older, to stay sharp we must find new grindstones to whet and sharpen our potential and keep us at our brightest, most penetrating best. ~ Rob Kall

I am not a teacher in my heart," she said. "I am a doer, and all these little shitheads in front of me are do-nothings. There is racism in the world and they acknowledge it, but they sit in class listening to bullshit professors. Give me a bricklayer with a racist attitude. It is just more honest. ~ Allan Dare Pearce

Most remarks made by children consist of correct ideas very badly expressed. A good teacher will be very wary of saying 'No, that's wrong.' Rather, he will try to discover the correct idea behind the inadequate expression. This is one of the most important principles in the whole of the art of teaching. ~ W.W. Sawyer

You know, you hear about these writers reading 'Lolita' at 12. I wanted to be a chemistry teacher. ~ Susan Barker

Last semester was intense," I said to Dad.

"Intense?" he echoed, picking up my file. "Let's see. On your first day at Hecate, you were attacked by a werewolf. You insulted a teacher, which resulted in semester-long cellar duty with one Archer Cross. According to the notes, the two of you became 'close.' Apparently close enough for you to see the mark of L'Occhio di Dio on his chest.

I flushed at that, and felt Mom's arm tighten around me. Over the past six months, I'd filled her in on a lot of the story with Archer, but not all of it.

Specifically, the whole me-making-out-in-the-cellar-with-a-murderous-warlock-working-with-the-Eye-part. ~ Rachel Hawkins

If he was indeed an "autodidact," there's no doubt he had the world's shittiest teacher. ~ Paul Beatty

Ceony shut the book and glanced to her new teacher. "It's . . . amazing, but I admit it's also superficial. Aesthetic."
"But entertaining," he combated. "Never dismiss the value of entertainment, Ceony. Good-quality entertainment is never free, and it's something everyone wants. ~ Charlie N. Holmberg

Some teachers are very accessible. They advertise a great deal, they go out into the public. If they're advanced teachers, doubtlessly they are very inaccessible in terms of physical proximity. ~ Frederick Lenz

As a result of the prison study, I really became more aware of the central role of power in our lives. I became more aware of the power I have as a teacher. I started consciously doing things to minimize the negative use of power in the classroom. I encouraged students to challenge me. ~ Philip Zimbardo

In the eyes of her oldest friends and colleagues and extended family, she wasn't a painfully thin seventy-five-year-old gray haired woman dying of cancer- she was a grade school class president, the young friend you gossiped with, a date or double date, someone to share a tent with in Darfur, a fellow election monitor in Bosnia, a mentor, a teacher you'd laughed within a classroom or a faculty lounge, or the board member you'd groaned with after a contentious meeting ~ Will Schwalbe

I took Spanish in high school and I didn't do too well in it. My Spanish teacher told me not to go on with Spanish anymore, so I was discouraged a little bit. ~ Tyler Posey

The coercive effect of this policy is particularly pronounced in the school setting given the age and impressionability of schoolchildren, and their understanding that they are required to adhere to the norms set by their school, their teacher, and their fellow students. ~ Alfred Goodwin

I felt like I was a teacher. But nowadays, I am as much a student of his. He writes a lot of what we play. ~ Gary Burton

I've never had the patience of a teacher. ~ Josh Turner

I was a hyper kid in school and the teacher suggested to my mom she needed to do something with me. ~ Devon Sawa

Teachers say their schools of education did not adequately prepare them for the classroom. They would have welcomed more mentoring and feedback in their early years. ~ Arne Duncan

Unlike my brother, I had no respect for authority. Very early on, Uncle Georg had told me the truth about teachers: that they were moral cowards who took out on their pupils all the frustrations they could not take out on their wives. When I was very young Uncle Georg impressed upon me that among the educated classes teachers were the basest and most dangerous people, on a par with judges, who were the lowest form of human life. Teachers and judges, he said, are the meanest slaves of the state--remember that. He was right, as I have discovered not just hundreds but thousands of times. No teacher and no judge can be trusted as far as you can throw him. Without scruple or compunction they daily destroy many of the existences that are thrown upon their mercy, being motivated by base caprice and a desire to avenge themselves for their miserable, twisted lives--and they are actually paid for doing so. The supposed objectivity of teachers and judges is a piece of shabby mendacity, Uncle Georg said--and he was right. Talking to a teacher we soon discover that he is a destructive individual with whom no one and nothing is safe, and the same is true when we talk to a judge. ~ Thomas Bernhard

Teachers started recognizing me and praising me for being smart in science and that made me want to be even smarter in science! ~ Steve Wozniak

I was a mimic when I was a child. I mimicked the teacher and made friends that way, actually. That was a very subversive activity, because I was a goody-goody who never got in trouble. But if I went off in the corner and mimicked the teacher, people loved it. ~ Anna Deavere Smith

Earl rarely used the word, but his whole system of teaching and his whole way of living was built around the concept of honor. You honored God by using your time wisely, and you honored your fellow man by treating him with respect. You honored your teacher by calling him "sir," and he honored his students by challenging them to face pain and become stronger. Earl had come to associate charity with pain, and he believed that love did its deepest work when applied to a wound. ~ Eric Greitens

Parents make sure homework is returned without error, drill their kids on upcoming tests to the saturation point, and then complain if teachers do not give the grades they think their kids deserve. By that point, it's hard to tell whose grades they are. ~ John Rosemond

The teacher does best, not when he explains, but when he impels his pupils to seek themselves the explanation. ~ John Lancaster Spalding

You're either a rationalist, or you're not. And the good news is a recent poll found 20% of adults under 30 say they are rationalists, and have figured out that Santa Claus and Jesus are really the same guy. Now, 20% is hardly a majority. But it's a bigger minority than blacks, jews, homosexuals, NRA members, teachers, or seniors ... and it's certainly enough to stop being shy about expressing the opinion that we're not the crazy ones! ~ Bill Maher

Experience fails to teach where there is no desire to learn. ~ George Bernard Shaw

What attracted me to Zen was my first teacher, Tim McCarthy. He was extremely genuine. It wasn't even really a Zen thing, that sort of came along later. ~ Brad Warner

Mom: Why aren't you doing very well in history? Billy: Because the teacher keeps asking about things that happened before I was born! ~ Various

The story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 1o) can he interpreted mystically in such a way that the question of the knowledge of God becomes its focus. The priest and the Levite, who walk past the man who fell among robbers and was seriously hurt, are pious God-fearing persons. They "know" God and the law of God. They have God the same way that the one who knows has that which is known. They know what God wants them to be and do. They also know where God is to he found, in the scriptures and the cult of the temple. For them, God is mediated through the existing institutions. They have their God - one who is not to he found on the road between Jerusalem and Jericho.

What is wrong with this knowledge of God? The problem is not the knowledge of the Torah or the knowledge of the temple. (It is absurd to read an anti-Judaistic meaning into a story of the Jew Jesus, since it could just as well have come from Hillel or another Jewish teacher.) What is false is a knowledge of God that does not allow for any unknowing or any negative theology. Because both actors know that God is "this," they do not see "that." Hence the Good Samaritan is the anti-fundamentalist story par excellence.

"And so I ask God to rid me of God," Meister Eckhart says. The God who is known and familiar is too small for him. ~ Dorothee Solle

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

There is no better teacher than history in determining the future... There are answers worth billions of dollars in 30$ history book. ~ Charles T. Munger

In the classic Zen in the Art of Archery, Eugen Herrigel's teacher urged him always to take his next shot unburdened by previous failures to hit the target; as he improved, his teacher urged him not to be influenced by his successes either, to stay in the present moment. ~ Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

Anyone who teaches me deserves my respect, honoring and attention. ~ Sonia Rumzi

Do you have a passion for what you do and do you love what you do? If you don't, then it can be drudgery, it can be hard, it can be work. But when you find something that you enjoy a lot, then you're more willing to sacrifice a lot of things in order to be successful as a teacher. ~ Tubby Smith

I'd have to say I'm most proud of my mentoring camp that I do in Dallas every year for one hundred boys from single-parent homes. I was raised by a mother who was a Sunday school teacher and a father who worked hard. Together they taught me to give back. ~ Steve Harvey

The will to live that possesses us to create medicine, to become firefighters or teachers, is the same will to live that is woven into all living beings. ~ Ian Somerhalder

On Mondays and Fridays in early May, nearly 18,000 children-the equivalent of all the elementary students in suburban Glencoe, Wilmette, Glenview, Kenilworth, Winnetka, Deerfield, Highland Park and Evanston-are assigned to classes with no teacher. ~ Jonathan Kozol

Neurosexism promotes damaging, limiting, potentially self-fulfilling stereotypes. Three years ago, I discovered my son's kindergarten teacher reading a book that claimed that his brain was incapable of forging the connection between emotion and language. And so I decided to write this book. ~ Cordelia Fine

Failure is a great teacher, and I think when you make mistakes and you recover from them and you treat them as valuable learning experiences, then you've got something to share. ~ Steve Harvey

I wished that teachers were the highest paid people in Israel. ~ Arnon Milchan

Early in school, they called me 'the artist.' When teachers wanted things painted, they called upon me, they called upon 'the artist.' I am not saying that I learned my name, animals can learn their names, I am saying that they learned it. ~ Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

If you had to spend every second, of every day, of every year of your life with someone, would you do whatever it took to love that person? Would you be a best friend, a teacher, coach and mentor? Would you do whatever it takes to treat that person with respect? Well guess what? That someone is you! Who deserves the best more than you do? Think about it and have an outstanding day ... ! ~ James A. Murphy

The wise teacher knows that 55 minutes of work plus 5 minutes laughter are worth twice as much as 60 minutes of unvaried work. ~ Gilbert Highet

The best teachers are the best storytellers. ~ Frank Smith

When I was a child I used to read books by Gerald Durrell, who founded Jersey Zoo. He had a job collecting animals for zoos and for a long time that is what I wanted to do. Later when I was a teenager I had a fantastic English teacher called Mrs. Stafford. Her enthusiasm made me decide to be a writer. ~ Melvin Burgess

We teachers make the road, others will make the journey. ~ Victor Hugo

And I found out, the other part of it is that I found out and in my desire to life successfully, that baseball fit very well into my life. It's been a great teacher, trainer, mentor and you'll see what I mean in the next few minutes that I have to speak. ~ Dave Winfield

Would you rather have your child in a room with the best equipment in the world with an average teacher or an empty room with Socrates? ~ Rafe Esquith

Nathan Sutter," the teacher read. Here. My mother never calls me Nathan." Is it Nate?" She calls me Honeylips. ~ Brandon Mull

No person is so grand or wise or perfect as to be the master of another person. Teacher, perhaps. Setter of good example, perhaps. Genius, perhaps. But master, no. ~ Karl Hess

Here's one thing I CAN figure out and that's how much I don't know. How I don't know what you went through at school. With your teacher. I don't know about the extent of the Islamophobia you've faced. I don't know what it feel like to be you. But here's another thing: I DO want to know. ~ S.K. Ali

He, unfortunately for himself, had been beautifully brought up. His teacher had educated him as the child is educated in the womb, where it lives the history of man from fish to mammal
and, like the child in the womb, he had been protected with love meanwhile. The effect of such an education was that he had grown up without any of the useful accomplishments for living
without malice, vanity, suspicion, cruelty, and the commoner forms of selfishness. Jealousy seemed to him the most ignoble of vices. He was sadly unfitted for hating his best friend or torturing his wife. He had been given too much love and trust to be good at these things. ~ T.H. White

If you're brave enough to leave behind everything familiar and comforting, which can be anything from your house to bitter, old resentments, and set out on a truth-seeking journey, either externally or internally, and if you are truly willing to regard everything that happens to you on that journey as a clue and if you accept everyone you meet along the way as a teacher and if you are prepared, most of all, to face and forgive some very difficult realities about yourself, then the truth will not be withheld from you. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

My daughter became a teacher right out of college. ~ Al Franken

Everything that happens to you is your teacher. The secret is to learn to sit at the feet of your own life and be taught by it.
Polly B. Berends ~ Polly Berrien Berends

I knew I wanted to be a writer. Where I came from, no one was a writer. I came from Long Island, and everyone became a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer or a teacher or a businessman. I didn't know any writers. ~ Howard Gordon

If we do not plant knowledge when young, it will give us no shade when we are old. ~ Lord Chesterfield

In Indonesia, I had spent two years at a Muslim school, two years at a Catholic school. In the Muslim school, the teacher wrote to tell my mother that I made faces during Koranic studies. ~ Barack Obama

The iron rail proved a magicians' road. It virtually reduced England to a sixth of its size. It brought the country nearer to the town and the town to the country ... It energized punctuality, discipline, and attention; and proved a moral teacher by the influence of example. ~ Samuel Smiles

Sanskrit has different words to describe love for a brother or sister, love for a teacher, love for a partner, love for one's friends, love of nature, and so on. English has only one word, which leads to never-ending confusion. ~ Sharon Salzberg

What the world needs more than anything are Bodhisattvas of peace, lawyers, politicians, teachers working tirelessly for the enlightenment of themselves and others. ~ Sogyal Rinpoche

I judge myself by the shiny, pretty people I see at parent-teacher meetings, or on Facebook, or Pinterest, who seem to totally have their shit together and never have unwashed hair. They never wait until Thursday night to help their kid with the entire week's homework. They don't have piles of dusty boxes in corners waiting to be opened from the move before last. They have pretty, pastel lives, and they are happy, and they own picnic baskets and napkins and know how to recycle, and they never run out of toilet paper or get their electricity turned off. And it's not even that I want to be one of those people. I fucking hate picnics. If God wanted us to eat on the ground He wouldn't have invented couches. I just don't want to feel like a failure because my biggest accomplishment of the day was going to the bank. ~ Jenny Lawson

The teacher not only shapes the expectations and ambitions of her pupils, but she also influences their attitudes toward their future and themselves. If she is unskilled, she leaves scars on the lives of youth, cuts deeply into their self-esteem, and distorts their image of themselves as human beings. But if she loves her students and has high expectations of them, their self-confidence will grow, their capabilities will develop, and their future will be assured. ~ Thomas S. Monson

A teacher had two types of students. One type of student is a close student. The other is also a close student, but not in the sense of physical proximity. The close students rotate a lot. ~ Frederick Lenz

My singing technique is really strong and I have to thank my teachers for really instilling a sense of discipline about how to sing properly and how to maintain your voice in a run. ~ Lea Salonga

As a teacher with over thirty years of experience, I've found that students are hungry for material that goes beyond simply learning tune after tune. In fact, my students suggested a good portion of the material presented here. This lesson should be an indispensable aid to the aspiring bluegrass banjoist. ~ Tony Trischka

Repeating a mantra quiets the mind," Lester's mother had said. "And it provides comfort in trying times." Then she had reached her palms skyward and bent forward into an upside-down V. Lester's mother was a yoga teacher and spent a lot of time in strange and unusual positions. These were certainly trying times for Lester, who had moved from Denver to Cape Cod just after Easter and was going to start a new school in two days' time. "A mantra can even unlock great virtues within," Lester's mother had added. Lester liked the idea that there might be great virtues lurking within him waiting to be unleashed, and he wondered what those ~ Kate Banks

It has ever been my lot, though formally myself a teacher, to be taught surely by none. There are times when I have thought to read lessons in the sky, or in books, or from the behavior of my fellows, but in the end my perceptions have frequently been inadequate or betrayed. Nevertheless, I venture to say that of what man may be I have caught a fugitive glimpse, not among multitudes of men, but along an endless wave-beaten coast at dawn. As always, there is this apparent break, this rift in nature, before the insight comes. The terrible question has to translate itself into an even more terrifying freedom. ~ Loren Eiseley

I am the mild-mannered organic chemistry teacher at the University of Oklahoma. ~ Donna Nelson

The theater audience is the ultimate teacher, instructing the actor on the degree to which he has executed both the author's and the director's intent. ~ Joan Fontaine

Pain is a better teacher than pleasure.
Poverty is a better teacher than prosperity.
Failure is a better teacher than success.
Life is a better teacher than university. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

Teacher, teacher, I declare, I see your purple underwear. ~ Allan Sherman

The abuse of power manifests with phony spiritual teachers and phony gurus who tell you how to run your life and what to wear and what to eat, all that sort of stuff. They abuse. People don't realize that, listen to them and ruin their lives. ~ Frederick Lenz

When I first started teaching at Berkeley in 1958, I could not announce that I was gay to anybody, though probably quite a few of my fellow teachers knew. ~ Thom Gunn

I suspect that every teacher hears the same complaints, but that, being seldom a practicing author, he tends to dismiss them as out of his field, or to see in them evidence that the troubled student has not the true vocation. Yet it is these very pupils who are most obviously gifted who suffer from these disabilities, and the more sensitively organized they are the higher the hazard seems to them. Your embryo journalist or hack writer seldom asks for help of any sort; he is off after agents and editors while his more serious brother-in-arms is suffering the torments of the damned because of his insufficiencies. Yet instruction in writing is oftenest aimed at the oblivious tradesman of fiction, and the troubles of the artist are dismissed or overlooked. ~ Dorothea Brande

The dyed-in-the-wool teacher takes everything seriously only with respect to his students
himself included. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Gaining energy is accomplished by meditating, by right actions, right thoughts, right deeds, by studying with a real teacher or by just studying the teachings, by creating happiness in your life, and by never giving up. ~ Frederick Lenz

It's not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It's whether or not our work fulfills us. Being a teacher is meaningful. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

It was said that one of them, either the actor or the history teacher, was superfluous in this world, but you weren't, you weren't superfluous, there is no duplicate of you to come and replace you at your mother's side, you were unique, just as every ordinary person is unique, truly unique. ~ Jose Saramago

Once in a while an enlightened teacher goes out into the world and spreads the dharma. They attract some attention, and it is a great spectacle to see who and why and what is drawn. ~ Frederick Lenz

If you don't have a teacher you can't have a disciple. ~ Dallas Willard

Love is probably the most powerful force in the cosmos, capable of creating miracles. Love can manifest in so many ways - love between parent and child, husband and wife, partner and partner, teacher and student, service volunteer and recipient, God and one's spirit. The manifestations of love are innumerable. ~ Mike Love

A schoolteacher or professor cannot educate individuals, he educates only species. ~ Georg C. Lichtenberg

I am not and will never again be a young writer, a young homeowner, a young teacher. I was never a young wife. The only thing I could do now for which my youth would be a truly notable feature would be to die. If I died now, I'd die young. Everything else, I'm doing middle-aged. ~ Meghan Daum

I heard many discourses which were good for the soul, but I could not discover in the case of any one of the teachers that his life was worthy of his words. ~ Saint Basil

The one infallible sign that a spiritual teacher is a fraud is that he charges money for his instruction. ~ Alan Chadwick

Knowledge is not rooted in facts; it is rooted in curiosity. One inspired teacher can alter a student for life by instilling curiosity. ~ Deepak Chopra

In my school, people liked the gym teachers because they were the football or soccer coaches. But look, if they're cool, they get respect. ~ Danny McBride

A sage is a good teacher, but an even greater learner. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

There is apparently an easy test to distinguish good schoolteachers from poor ones; ask them what they teach. Poor ones reply, 'I teach French,' or 'I teach physics' or whatever their subject is. Good ones say, 'I teach children.' The teacher here would have fallen into the second group: he taught knowledge to people. Or better, he imparted knowledge, meaning he passed over so that the people who learned from him knew the lessons for themselves. ~ Chris Green

Every person I've known has had an effect on me, as have people whom I've not met in the physical in this life, but whom I've met inwardly, teachers from other eras - Sri Ramana Maharshi, Sri Ramakrishna and Lao Tse. ~ Frederick Lenz

America must be the teacher of democracy, not the advertiser of the consumer society. It is unrealistic for the rest of the world to reach the American living standard. ~ Mikhail Gorbachev

Rose's work of art took her all day, including two playtimes, story time, and most of lunch.
At the end of school it was stolen from her by the wicked teacher who had pretended to be so interested.
"Beautiful- what-is-it?" she asked as she pinned it high on the wall, where Rose could not reach.
"They take your pictures," said Indigo, ... when he finally made out what all the roaring and stamping was about. "They do take them ... Why do you want that picture so much?" he asked Rose.
"It was my best ever," said Rose furiously. "I hate school. I hate everyone in it. I will kill them all when I'm big enough."
"You can't just go round killing people," Indigo told her ... ~ Hilary McKay

Why did the 14-year old Mexican girl end up pregnant? Because her teacher told her to go do an essay. ~ Carlos Mencia

Teachers are our greatest public servants; they spend their lives educating our young people and shaping our Nation for tomorrow. ~ Solomon Ortiz