• "The length of your education is less important than its breadth, and the length of your life is less important than its depth." -- Marilyn vos Savant

  • "A mind is a fire to be kindled, not a vessel to be filled." -- Plutarch

  • "In a completely rational society, the best of us would be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for something less, because passing civilization along from one generation to the next ought to be the highest honor and the highest responsibility anyone could have." -- Lee Iacocca

  • "I was fortunate enough to receive an excellent mathematical foundation as a member of the class of 196.5 Billion Years ago at Pleasantville High School, where I studied math under Mr. Solin, who, in my senior year, attempted to teach us calculus (from the Greek words 'calc," meaning 'the study of,' and 'ulus," meaning something that only Mr. Solin could understand)." -- Dave Barry

  • "The second most important job in the world, second only to being a good parent, is being a good teacher." -- S.G. Ellis

  • "I do not teach, I relate." -- Montaigne

  • "The more you know, the less sure you are." -- Voltaire

  • "Cogito, Ergo Sum. I think, therefore I am." -- Descartes

  • "I think, therefore I laugh." -- John Allen Poulos

  • "I do not think -- therefore I am not."

  • "The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest people of past centuries." -- Descartes

  • "Teaching high school, in addition to knowing one's subject matter thoroughly and being able to convey it to others, requires the grit of a long-distance runner, the stamina of a boxer going 15 rounds, the temperament of a juggler and the street smarts of a three-card monte dealer." -- Professor Larry Cuban

  • "If a doctor, lawyer, or dentist had 25 people in his office at one time, all of whom had different needs, and some of whom didn't want to be there and were causing trouble, and the doctor, lawyer, or dentist, without assistance, had to treat them all with professional excellence for nine months, then he might have some conception of the classroom teacher's job." -- Colman McCarthy in The Washington Post

  • "Old principals never die, they just lose their faculties."

  • "How you teach is more important than what you teach."

  • "I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand." -- Chinese Proverb.

  • "Any teacher that can be replaced by a computer should be replaced by a computer."

  • "The only time a question should be asked is when all other possibilities of finding the answer for yourself have been eliminated." -- Ben Franklin

  • "A great memory does not make a mind, any more than a dictionary is a piece of literature." -- John H. Newman

  • "Knowledge exists to be imparted." -- Emerson

  • "An educational system isn't worth a great deal if it teaches young people how to make a living and doesn't teach them how to live." -- Charles Snitow.

  • "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime."

  • "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you will realize why some people think golf is exciting."

  • "If you go fishing you may not catch any fish. If you don’t go fishing, you’ll never catch any fish." -- Alex F. Osborn

  • "An educated mind is, as it were, composed of all the minds of preceding ages." -- de Fontenelle

  • "Imagination is more important than knowledge." -- Albert Einstein

  • "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes." -- Marcel Proust

  • "The best teacher is not the one who knows most, but the one who is most capable of reducing knowledge to that simple compound of the obvious and wonderful ..." -- H.L. Mencken

  • "It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well." -- Descartes

  • "Teaching is the royal road to learning." -- Jassamyn West

  • "We only think when confronted with a problem." -- John Dewey

  • "One's work may be finished some day, but one's education never." -- Alexandre Dumas

  • "A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops." -- Henry Brooks Adams

  • "I am not a teacher, I am an awakener." -- Robert Frost

  • "It is the duty of all teachers, and of teachers of mathematics in particular, to expose their students to problems much more than to facts." -- Paul Halmos

  • "Tell me and I'll forget. Show me and I may not remember. Involve me, and I'll understand." -- Native American saying

  • "Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten." -- B. F. Skinner

  • "From the very beginning of his education, the child should experience the joy of discovery." -- Alfred North Whitehead

  • "Our greatest natural resource is the minds of our children." -- Walt Disney

  • "We are all concerned about the future of American education. But as I tell my students, you do not enter the future -- you create the future. The future is created through hard work." -- Jaime Escalante

  • "Getting the degree meant more to me than an NCAA title, being named All-American or winning an Olympic gold medal." -- Patrick Ewing

  • "The title which I most covet is that of teacher. The writing of a research paper and the teaching of freshman calculus, and everything in between, falls under this rubric. Happy is the person who comes to understand something and then gets to explain it." -- Marshall Cohen

  • "Discovery lessons, students writing to learn mathematics, the teaching of so-called general problem solving concepts, field trips, math lab lessons, alternate assessments, collaborative partner tests, student presentations, and open-ended problems should all be used sparingly. I use some of them, but they have limited value. Pencil-and-paper analytic solutions are the heart of mathematics education." --Michael Stueben in Twenty Years Before the Blackboard

  • "The heart of education is education of the heart."

  • "Education is worth little if it teaches only how to make a living rather than how to make a life." -- Mary Hatwood Futrell

  • "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." -- Mark Twain

  • "Education is what you get from reading the small print. Experience is what you get from not reading it!"

  • "Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one." -- Malcolm S. Forbes

  • "A GREAT discovery solves a great problem but there is a grain of discovery in any problem." -- George Polya

  • "There are many questions which fools can ask that wise men cannot answer." -- George Polya

  • "The first rule of discovery is to have brains and good luck. The second rule of discovery is to sit tight and wait till you get a bright idea." -- George Polya

  • "Inspiration is the impact of a fact on a well-prepared mind." -- Louis Pasteur

  • "New facts often trigger new ideas." -- Osborn

  • "Questions are creative acts of intelligence." -- Frank Kingdon

  • "A learned man is an idler who kills time by study." -- George Bernard Shaw

  • "Our minds are finite, and even in these circumstances of finitude we are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite; and the purpose of human life is to grasp as much as we can out of that infinitude." -- Alfred North Whitehead

  • "The work of a teacher -- exhausting, complex, idiosyncratic, never twice the same -- is at its heart, an intellectual and ethical enterprise. Teaching is the vocation of vocations..." -- William Ayres

  • "We think it's about little techniques and tricks, but techniques only take you so far. We need teachers who care about kids, who care about what they teach, and who can communicate with kids." -- Parker I. Palmer, The Courage to Teach

  • "Ganas is all you need." [Ganas is Spanish for passion, guts, determination, desire] -- Jaime Escalante

  • "I do not believe in the gifted. If [the students] have ganas [Spanish for desire], I can make them do it." -- Jaime Escalante

  • "To teach is to learn."

  • "To learn, you must want to be taught." -- Proverbs 12:1

  • "Education is the key to unlock the golden door of freedom." -- George Washington Carver

  • "Education is learning more than it is being taught. It's the chemistry of curiosity exposed to information. In that sense all of life is potentially school. And even I can pass that." -- Bob Guiccione, Jr.

  • "Education is indoctrination if you're white; subjugation if you're black." -- James Baldwin

  • "The purpose of education...is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions." -- James Baldwin

  • "No set of principles can guarantee a recipe for good practice (in teaching)." -- D. Ball and T. Schroeder

  • "The schools are a great theater in which we play out the conflicts in the culture." -- David Cohen and Barbara Neufeld

  • "Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous." -- Confucius

  • "Education is not a preparation for life, education is life itself." -- John Dewey

  • "If there's no struggle, there's no progress." -- Frederick Douglass

  • "Education must not simply teach work - it must teach life." -- W.E.B. DuBois

  • "How is it that little children are so intelligent and men so stupid? It must be education that does it." -- Alexandre Dumas

  • "It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge." -- Albert Einstein

  • "The value of an education ... is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks." -- Albert Einstein

  • "The journey for an education starts with a childhood question." -- David L. Finn

  • "The most important outcome of education is to help students to become independent of formal education." -- Paul E. Gray

  • "A good stack of examples, as large as possible, is indispensable for a thorough understanding of any concept, and when I want to learn something new, I make it my first job to build one." -- Paul Halmos

  • "The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers!" -- R. W. Hamming

  • "The struggle to become a better teacher begins all over again with the advent of each new class." -- Martin Henley

  • "The greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorance unfolds." -- John F. Kennedy

  • "...it is the greatest achievement of a teacher to enable his students to surpass him." -- John Kemeny

  • "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.

  • "The teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil to learn is hammering on cold iron." -- Horace Mann

  • "There is a difference between not knowing and not knowing yet." -- Shelia Tobias

  • "Out of the public schools comes the greatness of the nation." -- Mark Twain

  • "High achievement always takes place in the framework of high expectation." -- Jack Kinder

  • "He who asks a question is a fool for five minutes; he who does not ask a question remains a fool forever." -- Confucius

  • "Students learn more when they complete homework that is graded, commented upon, and discussed by their teachers. The teacher's feedback -- reinforcing what has been done correctly and re-teaching what has not -- is key." -- Nancy Protheroe

  • "The pursuit of learning is not a piece of content that can be taught. It is a value that teachers model. Only teachers who are avid, internally motivated learners can truly teach their students the joy of learning." -- Martin Haberman

  • "It isn't enough just to learn -- one must learn how to learn, how to learn without classrooms, without teachers, without textbooks. Learn, in short, how to think and analyze and decide and discover and create." -- Michael Bassis

  • "Share knowledge, not answers."

  • "Any fool can know. The point is to understand." -- Albert Einstein

  • "It has been said that Newton was born in the same year that Galileo died because God wanted someone of that caliber on Earth at all times."

  • "Do not then train boys to learning by force and hardness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds." -- Plato

  • "I can teach you anything, once I have your undivided attention."

  • "You can and will learn if you come to my class."

  • "Students don't care how much you know until they know how much you care." -- Mrs. Theiler

  • "Too many students give up upon encountering difficulties in math, when just trying a few strategies could mean the difference between succeeding and failing." -- Arthur E. Schwartz

  • "Those who don't read good books have no advantage over those who can't read them."

  • "The mind can absorb no more than what the seat can endure."

  • "Those who can do, teach. Those who don't teach, do something less significant."

  • "A good teacher has been defined as one who makes himself progressively unnecessary." -- Thomas J. Caruthers

  • "More important than what you know is how you learned it." -- Kiplinger's Changing Times

  • "A college education never hurts anybody as long as he's learning something in the meantime." -- Max Hess

  • "You cannot teach a man anything; you can only teach him to find it within himself." -- Galileo

  • "A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering on cold iron." -- Horace Mann

  • "In the old days, if a kid was in the principal's office it meant the kid was in trouble.
    Now it means the principal is in trouble." -- Leo Aikman in the Atlanta Constitution

  • "If I had to give up preaching and my other duties, there is no office I would rather have than that of school teacher for I know that next to the ministry it is the most useful, greatest, and best; and I am not sure which of the two is preferred." -- Martin Luther

  • "Trying to teach mathematics too early is like trying to teach a pig to sing -- It doesn't work very well and it only irritates the pig."

  • "At my school, they treat us teachers like mushrooms.
    They keep you in the dark.
    They cover you with manure.
    Then, if you rise above it, they can you."

  • "Concerning a teacher's influence: I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element in the classroom.   It's my personal approach that creates the climate.   It's my daily mood that makes the weather.   As a teacher, I possess a tremendous power to make a child's life miserable or joyous.   I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration.   It is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated, and a child humanized or dehumanized." -- Hiram Ginott, author and teacher

  • "Not everything that counts can be counted.   Not everything that can be counted counts." -- Albert Einstein

  • " What the teacher is, is more important than what he teaches ..." -- Karl Menninger

  • "Teachers who have plugged away at their jobs for twenty, thirty, and forty years are heroes.   I suspect that they know in their hearts that they've done a good thing, too, and are more satisfied with themselves than most people are.

    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." -- Andrew A. Rooney

  • "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance." -- Derek Bok