50 Of The Best Quotes About Teaching (2024)

by TeachThought Staff

Teaching is both an art and science.

Teaching is conceptual and intellectual, abstract and concrete, creative, and sequential. It’s about people but framed through ideas. It’s about content, hearts, minds, the past, the future–whatever we can imagine, teaching and learning are both causes and effects.

With that in mind, we’ve collected some of the more famous quotes about teaching, doing our best to include a wide range of perspectives, cultures, nationalities, races, spiritualities–many of the things that make ‘us’ different, we tried to somehow use to curate the quotes. In that way, some will be familiar, some way will be about formal education, some will be sourced from old proverbs, etc.

We’ve shared our favorite quotes about learning so for this post, the premise is simple enough and the format explains itself: 50 of the best quotes about teaching.

50 Of The Best Quotes About Teaching

1. ‘Education is not the filling of a pot but the lighting of a fire.’ –W.B. Yeats

2. ‘Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.’ –Jacques Barzun

3. ‘A teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary.’ –Thomas Carruthers

4. ‘I am not a teacher, but an awakener.’ –Robert Frost

5. ‘I never teach my pupils; I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn.’ –Albert Einstein

6. ‘Teaching is the highest form of understanding.’ –Aristotle

7. ‘When one teaches, two learn.’ –Robert Heinlein

See also Inspirational Quotes About Life

8. ‘A teacher affects eternity: he can never tell where his influence stops.’ –Henry Adams

9. ‘I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think.’ –Socrates

10. ‘Those who know, do. Those that understand, teach.’ –Aristotle

11. ‘Teachers teach someone something, in that order.’ –Samuel Natale

12. ‘I cannot be a teacher without exposing who I am.’ –Paulo Freire

13. ‘Your work is not to drag the world kicking and screaming into a new awareness. Your job is to simply do your work… sacredly, secretly, silently … and those with “eyes to see and ears to hear’ willrespond.’ –The Arturians

14. ‘The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence.’ –Amos Bronson Alcott

15. ‘In a completely rational society, the best of us would be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for something else.’ –Lee Iacocca

See also52 Of Our Favorite Inspirational Quotes About Teaching

16. ‘The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.’ ―William Arthur Ward

17. ‘The best teachers are the ones that change their minds.’ –Terry Heick

18. ‘I am not a teacher, but an awakener.’ –Robert Frost

19. ‘A good teacher is like a candle – it consumes itself to light the way for others.’ –Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

20. ‘Proper teaching is recognized with ease. You can know it without fail because it awakens within you that sensation which tells you this is something you have always known.’ –Frank Herbet

21. ‘A great teacher can teach Calculus with a paper clip and literature in an empty field. Technology is just another tool, not a destination.’ –Unknown

22. ‘You cannot teach a crab to walk straight.’ –Aristophenes

23. ‘Teaching is the one profession that creates all other professions.’—Unknown

24. ‘A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering on cold iron.’ –Horace Mann

25. ‘Good teaching is 1/4 preparation and 3/4 theatre.’ –Gail Goldwin

26. ‘Your worst enemy is your best teacher.’ –Buddha

27. ‘The job of an educator is to teach students to see vitality in themselves.’ –Joseph Campbell

28. ‘All teachings are mere references. The true experience is living your own life.’ –Ming-Dao Deng

29. ‘The word ‘education’ comes from the root e from ex, out, and duco, I lead. It means a leading out. To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil’s soul.’ –Muriel Spark

30. ‘To know how to suggest is the art of teaching.’ –Henri-Frédéric Amiel

31. ‘Teaching is only demonstrating that it is possible. Learning is making it possible for yourself.’ –Paulo Coelho

32. ‘I would teach how science works as much as I would teach what science knows.’ –Neil deGrasse Tyson

33.‘Teachers have three loves: love of learning, love of learners, and the love of bringing the first two loves together.’–Scott Hayden

34. ‘You can teach a person all you know, but only experience will convince him that what you say is true.’ –Richelle E. Goodrich

35. ‘There is no failure. Only feedback.’–Robert Allen

36. ‘The greatest sign of success for ateacheris to be able to say, ‘The children are now working as if I did not exist.’ –Maria Montessori

37. Ask ‘How will they learn best?’ not ‘Can they learn?’–Jaime Escalante (here’s a quick bio on Escalante if you’re not familiar with the movie based on his life, ‘Stand and Deliver’)

38. ‘It is essential to understand that battles are primarily won in the heart…(people) respond to leadership in a most remarkable way and once you have won (their) heart, (they) will follow you anywhere.’ –Vince Lombardi

39.‘It takes a big heart to help shape little minds.’–Unknown

40.‘A good teacher is like a candle – it consumes itself to light the way for others.’ —Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

41. ‘Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.’ —Theodore Roosevelt

42. ‘It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.’ –Albert Einstein

43. ‘Teaching is the profession that teaches all the other professions.’ –Unknown

44. ‘The best teachers are those who show you where to look but don’t tell you what to see.’ –Alexandra K. Trenfor

45. ‘A good teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary.’ –Thomas Carruthers

46. ‘Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.’ –William Butler Yeats

47. ‘Study without reflectionis a waste of time;reflection without studyisdangerous.’ –Chinese Proverb

48. ‘If a child can’t learn the way we teach, maybe we should teach the way they learn.’–Ignacio ‘Nacho’ Estrada

49. ‘The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.’ –Pablo Picasso

50.‘Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.’ –John Steinbeck

Other Quotes About Teaching

‘Listening is the most difficult skill to learn and the most important to have.’ –African Proverb

‘If you have to put someone on a pedestal, put teachers. They are society’s heroes.’ –Guy Kawasaki

‘[My teacher] basically bribed me back into learning with candy and money and what was really remarkable was before very long I had such a respect for her that it sort of re-ignited my desire to learn.’ –Steve Jobs

‘Everyone, in some respect, is a teacher; some just work harder to do it better.’ –Terry Heick

‘Teach the way you’d want to be taught.’ –Unknown

“So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute…Give your approval to all you cannot understand…Ask the questions that have no answers. Put your faith in two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years…Laugh. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts….Practice resurrection.”–Wendell Berry