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Education Quotes

Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom. -- Albert Einstein

Nine tenths of education is encouragement. -- Anatole France

The function of education is to help you from childhood not to imitate anybody, but be yourself all the time. -- Jiddu Krishnamurti

Education is what survives when what has been learnt has been forgotten. -- B. F. Skinner

Curiosity is one of the most permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous mind. -- Samuel Johnson

It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question. -- Eugene Ionesco Decouvertes

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

Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance. -- Will Durant

Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival. -- W. Edwards Deming

Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts. -- Henry Brooks Adams

Poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master. -- Leonardo da Vinci

Do not train children to learning by force and 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

The highest result of education is tolerance. -- Helen Keller

My heart is singing for joy this morning. A miracle has happened! The light of understanding has shone upon my little pupil's mind, and behold, all things are changed. -- Anne Sullivan

To be conscious that you are ignorant is a great step to knowledge. -- Benjamin Disraeli (1804 - 1881)

The most extraordinary thing about a really good teacher is that he or she transcends accepted educational methods. Such methods are designed to help average teachers approximate the performance of good teachers. -- Margaret Mead

Creativity is more than just being different. Anybody can play weird--that's easy. What's hard is to be as simple as Bach. Making the simple complicated is commonplace--making the complicated simple, awesomely simple--that's creativity. -- Charles Mingus (late American jazz composer and pianist)

Many things can wait. Children cannot. Today their bones are being formed, their blood is being made, their senses are being developed. To them we cannot say "tomorrow." Their name is today. -- Gabriela Mistral (Chilean teacher 1899 - 1957)

In teaching it is the method and not the content that is the message. -- Ashley Montague (b. 1905) (American anthropologist)

Learning is not attained by chance. It must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence. -- Abigail Adams

The road to wisdom? Well, it's plain and simple to express: Err and err and err again but less and less and less. -- Piet Hein

All learning begins with the simple phrase, "I don't know." -- I don't know.

To waken interest and kindle enthusiasm is the sure way to teach easily and successfully. -- Tyron Edwards

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

Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results. -- John Dewey

A teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary. -- Thomas Carruthers

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. -- Aristotle

Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., American jurist

Merely to stuff the child with a lot of information, making him pass examinations, is the most unintelligent form of education. -- Jiddu Krishnamurti

Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon. -- The Observer, 'Sayings of the Week,' October 7, 1951

We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought. -- Bertrand A. Russell (1872-1970) English philosopher, mathematician, and writer

Books fall open, you fall in, delighted where you've never been; hear voices not once heard before, reach world on world through door on door; find unexpected keys to things locked up beyond imaginings. What might you be, perhaps become, because one book is somewhere? Some wise delver into wisdom, wit, and wherewithal has written it. True books will venture, dare you out, whisper secrets, maybe shout across the gloom to you in need, who hanker for a book to read. -- David McCord

We are tied down, all our days for the greater part of our days, to the commonplace. That is where with great thinkers, great literature helps. In their company we are still in the ordinary world, but it is the ordinary world transfigured and seen through the eyes of wisdom and genius. And some of their vision becomes our own." -- Sir Richard Livingstone

When you appeal to the highest level of thinking, you get the highest level of performance. -- Jack Stack

Great minds discuss ideas, mediocre minds discuss events, small minds discuss personalities. -- Eleanor Roosevelt

Strength of mind is exercise, not rest. -- Alexander Pope

They may forget what you said but they will never forget how you made them feel. -- Anonymous

Good schools, like good societies and good families, celebrate and cherish diversity. -- Deborah Meier

The books that help you the most are those which make you think the most. -- Theodore Parker

The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them. -- Mark Twain

That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way. -- Doris Lessing

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

Good timber does not grow with ease; the stronger the wind, the stronger the trees -- J. Willard Marriott

I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand. -- Confucius

When Alexander the Great visited Diogenes and asked whether he could do anything for the famed teacher, Diogenes replied: 'Only stand out of my light.' Perhaps some day we shall know how to heighten creativity. Until then, one of the best things we can do for creative men and women is to stand out of their light. -- John W. Gardner

Education would be much more effective if its purpose was to ensure that by the time they leave school every boy and girl should know how much they do not know, and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know it. -- William Haley

The successful teacher is no longer on a height, pumping knowledge at high pressure into passive receptacles... -- Sir William Osler

The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think - rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with thoughts of other men. -- Bill Beattie

Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants. -- John W. Gardner

Too often we give children answers to remember rather than problems to solve. -- Roger Lewin

The secret of education is respecting the pupil. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn... and change. -- Carl R. Rogers

They say that we are better educated than our parents' generation. What they mean is that we go to school longer. It is not the same thing. -- Richard Yates

The one real object of education is to have a man in the condition of continually asking questions. -- Bishop Mandell Creighton

An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don't. -- Anatole France

If I ran a school, I'd give the average grade to the ones who gave me all the right answers, for being good parrots. I'd give the top grades to those who made a lot of mistakes and told me about them, and then told me what they learned from them. -- R. Buckminster Fuller

No man who worships education has got the best out of education... Without a gentle contempt for education no man's education is complete. -- Gilbert K. Chesterton

I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious. -- Albert Einstein

Great minds have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. -- Albert Einstein

When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him -- Jonathan Swift

Hide not your talents, they for use were made. What's a Sun-dial in the shade? -- Benjamin Franklin

To avoid criticism, say nothing, do nothing, be nothing. -- Albert Einstein

What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to the soul. -- Joseph Addison (1672-1719)

Education is the best provision for old age. -- Aristotle (384-322 BC)

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

An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don't. -- Malcolm S. Forbes

Education is not something which the teacher does ... it is a natural process which develops spontaneously in the human being. -- Maria Montessori

Of all the civil rights for which the world has struggled and fought for 5,000 years, the right to learn is undoubtedly the most fundamental... The freedom to learn... has been bought by bitter sacrifice. And whatever we may think of the curtailment of other civil rights, we should fight to the last ditch to keep open the right to learn, the right to have examined in our schools not only what we believe, but what we do not believe; not only what our leaders say, but what the leaders of other groups and nations, and the leaders of other centuries have said. We must insist upon this to give our children the fairness of a start which will equip them with such an array of facts and such an attitude toward truth that they can have a real chance to judge what the world is and what its greater minds have thought it might be. -- W.E.B. DuBois

You know the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. They don't alter their views to fit the facts. They alter the facts to fit the views. Which can be uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that need altering. -- The Doctor - Doctor Who: The Face of Evil

One can succeed at almost anything for which he has enthusiasm. -- Charles Schwab

Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius... -- Arthur Conan Doyle, "The Valley of Fear"

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds. -- John Maynard Keynes

If there is anything more dangerous to the life of the mind than having no independent commitment to ideas, it is having an excess of commitment to some special and constricting idea. -- Richard Hofstadter

Do not judge my intelligence by the answers I give, but instead by the questions I ask. -- Mark McGranaghan

He who opens a school door, closes a prison. -- Victor Hugo (1802-1885)

As we read the school reports on our children, we realize a sense of relief that can rise to delight that-thank Heaven-nobody is reporting in this fashion on us. -- J(ohn) B(oynton) Priestley (1894-1984)

Grade school is the snooze button on the clock-radio of life. -- John Rogers

The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn. -- Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC)

Who dares to teach must never cease to learn. -- John Cotton Dana

My grandmother wanted me to have an education, so she kept me out of school. -- Margaret Mead

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. -- William Butler Yeats

Only the educated are free. -- Epictetus

Schooling, instead of encouraging the asking of questions, too often discourages it. -- Madeleine L'Engle

There are two kinds of teachers: the kind that fill you with so much quail shot that you can't move, and the kind that just gives you a little prod behind and you jump to the skies. -- Robert Frost

Any place that anyone young can learn something useful from someone with experience is an educational institution. -- Al Capp

The shrewd guess, the fertile hypothesis, the courageous leap to a tentative conclusion - these are the most valuable coin of the thinker at work. But in most schools guessing is heavily penalized and is associated somehow with laziness. -- Jerome S. Bruner

The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. -- John Updike

School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you. -- John Updike

In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made School Boards. -- Mark Twain

Showing up at school already able to read is like showing up at the undertaker's already embalmed: people start worrying about being put out of their jobs. -- Florence King

The one real goal of education is to leave a person asking questions. -- Max Beerhohm

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

Expecting all children the same age to learn from the same materials is like expecting all children the same age to wear the same size clothing. -- Madeline Hunter

Education is the process of driving a set of prejudices down your throat. -- Martin H. Fischer

In a completely rational society, the best of us would aspire to 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

The basic principle of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be "undemocratic." These differences between the pupils - for they are obviously and nakedly individual differences - must be disguised. This can be done on various levels. At universities, examinations must be framed so that nearly all the students get good marks. Entrance examinations must be framed so that all, or nearly all, citizens can go to universities, whether they have any power (or wish) to profit by higher education or not. At schools, the children who are too stupid or lazy to learn languages and mathematics and elementary science can be set to doing the things that children used to do in their spare time. Let them, for example, make mud pies and call it modelling. But all the time there must be no faintest hint that they are inferior to the children who are at work. Whatever nonsense they are engaged in must have - I believe the English already use the phrase - "parity of esteem." An even more drastic scheme is not impossible. Children who are fit to proceed to a higher class may be artificially kept back, because the others would get a trauma - Beelzebub, what a useful word! - by being left behind. The bright pupil thus remains democratically fettered to his own age group throughout his school career, and a boy who would be capable of tackling Aeschylus or Dante sits listening to his coeval's attempts to spell out A CAT SAT ON A MAT. -- C.S. Lewis, from "Screwtape Proposes a Toast," 1959

The quality of strength lined with tenderness is an unbeatable combination, as are intelligence and necessity when unblunted by formal education. -- Maya Angelou

When you sell a man a book you don't sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue--you sell him a whole new life. -- Christopher Darlington Morley [Parnassus on Wheels, 1917]

The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance -- it is the illusion of knowledge. -- Daniel Boorstin

Man's mind stretched to a new idea never goes back to its original dimensions. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes

Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won't work. -- Thomas Edison

A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor. -- Victor Hugo

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I've found it!), but 'That's funny...' -- Isaac Asimov

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. -- Mark Twain

It is easier to buy books than to read them, and easier to read them than to absorb them. -William Osler, Canadian-born British physician

A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep. (unknown)

One is always a long way from solving a problem until one actually has the answer. -- Stephen Hawking

It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question. -- Decouvertes

I have one request: may I never use my reason against truth. -- Elie Wiesel

The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterward. -- Arthur Koestler

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart. -- Helen Keller

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great. -- Mark Twain

The most dangerous of all falsehoods is a slightly distorted truth. -- G.C. Lichtenberg

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts. -- Bertrand Russell

Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority. -- Thomas Huxley

It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind. -- James Baldwin

It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wrack and ruin without fail. It is a grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty. -- Albert Einstein

The secret in education lies in respecting the student. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

From your parents you learn love and laughter and how to put one foot before the other. But when books are opened you discover you have wings. -- Helen Hayes

The best educated human being is the one who understands most about the life in which he is placed. -- Helen Keller

The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives. -- Robert Maynard Hutchins

I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built up on the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think. -- Anne Sullivan

Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know. -- Gilbert K. Chesterton

States and Provinces and curricula around the world track students by age. This practice is so common that we do not think of it as tracking. With few exceptions, a six year old must go into first grade even if that six year old is not ready or was ready for the grade one year earlier -- Usiskin, 1998

Since the literature demonstrates the value of grouping students by ability, while few if any studies support restricting grouping to common ages, it is ironic that so many schools are moving from the former to the latter. -- Mike Robison, 2000

Education is too important to be left solely to the educators. -- Francis Keppel

Resisting conformity and developing some small eccentricities are among the steps to independence and self-confidence. -- A. L. McGinnis

Humans are allergic to change. They love to say, 'We've always done it this way.' I try to fight that. That's why I have a clock on my wall that runs counter-clockwise. -- Rear Admiral Grace Hopper

Our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in education. -- John F. Kennedy

Those who trust us educate us. -- George Eliot

One good schoolmaster is worth a thousand priests. -- Robert Green Ingersoll

The teacher is one who makes two ideas grow where only one grew before. -- Elbert Hubbard

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

A child miseducated is a child lost. -- John F. Kennedy

I appreciate you are all looking for the life vests and rafts to save my child, meanwhile he's drowning in the deep end and I've got to drain the pool! -- the parent of a gifted child

The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think. - James Beattie

Upon the education of the people of this country the fate of this country depends. -- Benjamin Disraeli

Who dares to teach must never cease to learn. -- John Cotton Dana

The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards; and curiosity itself can be vivid and wholesome only in proportion as the mind is contented and happy. -- Anatole France

"Do you think you can maintain discipline?" asked the Superintendent. "Of course I can," replied Stuart. "I'll make the work interesting and the discipline will take care of itself." -- E.B. White, Stuart Little

Children are unpredictable. You never know what inconsistency they're going to catch you in next. -- Franklin P. Jones

A poor surgeon hurts one person at a time. A poor teacher hurts 130. -- Ernest Boyer

The pupil who is never required to do what he cannot do, never does what he can do. -- John Stuart Mill

Teaching was the hardest work I had ever done, and it remains the hardest work I have done to date. -- Ann Richards

Great teachers empathize with kids, respect them, and believe that each one has something special that can be built upon. -- Ann Lieberman

The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. -- Paul Karl Feyerabend

What usually happens in the educational process is that the faculties are dulled, overloaded, stuffed and paralyzed so that by the time most people are mature they have lost their innate capabilities. -- R. Buckminster Fuller

I am entirely certain that twenty years from now we will look back at education as it is practiced in most schools today and wonder that we could have tolerated anything so primitive. -- John W. Gardner

They teach in academies far too many things, and far too much that is useless. -- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Since every effort in our educational life seems to be directed toward making of the child a being foreign to itself, it must of necessity produce individuals foreign to one another, and in everlasting antagonism with each other. -- Emma Goldman

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

Knowledge is a comfortable and necessary retreat and shelter for us in an advanced age; and if we do not plant it while young, it will give us no shade when we grow old. -- Lord Chesterfield

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed individuals can change the world; indeed it's the only thing that ever has. -- Margaret Meade

That's why it comes back to math. Math has no bias. It doesn't come from TV. It doesn't know what you're wearing. Math treats all people equally. Especially when you're in a hard class with all boys, when nobody's cheering you on from the sidelines, when it's not "cool" to be smart, math is a nice thing to have. When nothing else makes sense, math reaches an answer. -- Rebecca L. Eisenberg, in Girls Need Math, in the Examiner.

It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber. -- (unknown)

If you think education is expensive, try ignorance. -- (unknown)

Simply being different isn't wrong. Don't try to be a duckling if you're born to be a swan. -- (unknown)

People should be free to find or make for themselves the kinds of educational experience they want their children to have. -- John Holt

It is because the body is a machine that education is possible. Education is the formation of habits, a superinducing of an artificial organization upon the natural organization of the body. -- Thomas H. Huxley

Let us think of education as the means of developing our greatest abilities, because in each of us there is a private hope and dream which, fulfilled, can be translated into benefit for everyone and greater strength for our nation. -- John F. Kennedy

It is among the commonplaces of education that we often first cut off the living root and then try to replace its natural functions by artificial means. Thus we suppress the child's curiosity and then when he lacks a natural interest in learning he is offered special coaching for his scholastic difficulties. -- Alice Duer Miller

In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad. -- Friedrich Nietzsche

The principle goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done -- men who are creative, inventive and discoverers. -- Jean Piaget

Cultivate the habit of attention and try to gain opportunities to hear wise men and women talk. Indifference and inattention are the two most dangerous monsters that you ever meet. Interest and attention will insure to you an education. -- Robert A. Millikan

Education is the instruction of the intellect in the laws of Nature. -- Thomas Henry Huxley

The education of a man is never completed until he dies. -- Robert E. Lee

Intellect distinguishes between the possible and the impossible; reason distinguishes between the sensible and the senseless. Even the possible can be senseless. -- Max Born

There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened. -- Douglas Adams, from his book: "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

Inner city education must change. Our responsibility is not merely to provide access to knowledge; we must produce educated people. -- James Farmer

There are young people out there cutting raw cocaine with chemicals from the local hardware store. They are manufacturing new highs and new products buy soaking marijuana in ever changing agents, and each of these new drugs is more addictive, more deadly and less costly than the last. How is it that we have failed to tap that ingenuity, that sense of experimentation? How is it that these kids who can measure grams and kilos and can figure out complex monetary transactions cannot pass a simple math or chemistry test? -- Senator Kohl, from the U.S. Senate Hearing: "Crisis in Math and Science Education."

If ever there can be a cause worthy to be upheld by all toil or sacrifice that the human heart can endure, it is the cause of education. -- Horace Mann, quoted in The Horace Mann Centennial, issued by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Department of Education in 1937.

Teachers should be able to teach subjects, not manuals merely. -- Horace Mann, from The Republic and the School, edited by Lawrence A. Cremin.

Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today.
-- Malcolm X

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

A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
-- James Baldwin

Theories and goals of education don't matter a whit if you do not consider your students to be human beings.
-- Lou Ann Walker

It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
-- James Baldwin

We are commanded to love God with all our minds, as well as with all our hearts, and we commit a great sin if we forbid or prevent that cultivation of the mind in others which would enable them to perform this duty.
-- Angelina Grimke

Let us think of education as the means of developing our greatest abilities, because in each of us there is a private hope and dream which, fulfilled, can be translated into benefit for everyone and greater strength for our nation.
-- John F. Kennedy

The most damaging phrase in the language is: `It's always been done that way.'
-- Rear Admiral Grace Hopper


collected by Carolyn K. webmistress, Hoagies' Gifted Education Page

posted by ramakrishnan @ 9:42 AM