155 Teaching Quotes

The best book on programming for the layman is 'Alice in Wonderland'; but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman.

All I did was sit on the riverbank handing out river water. After I'm gone, I trust you will notice the river.

An instructor should exemplify the things he seeks to teach. It will be of great advantage if you yourself can do all you ask of your students and more.

The people of your world became so stupid and rude that my companions and I no longer enjoyed teaching them. You must surely have heard of us: we were called oracles, nymphs, spirits, fairies, household gods, lemures, larvas, lamias, sprites, water-nymphs, incubi, shades, spirits of the dead, specters and ghosts.

It is the malady of our age that the young are so busy teaching us that they have no time left to learn.

The central task of education is to implant a will and facility for learning; it should produce not learned but learning people. The truly human society is a learning society, where grandparents, parents, and children are students together.

The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.

I thought it would be lovely to use [pet bulldog] Noelle as an example to teach the importance of being who you are. For me it's important to inspire children in a positive way, and at times they understand more messages through entertainment than when one is talking to them directly.

Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.

The truth is, when all is said and done, one does not teach a subject, one teaches a student how to learn it.

The ideal college is Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other.

I have come to believe ... that the stage may do more than teach, that much of our current moral instruction will not endure the test of being cast into a lifelike mold, and when presented in dramatic form will reveal itself as platitudinous and effete. That which may have sounded like righteous teaching when it was remote and wordy, will be challenged afresh when it is obliged to simulate life itself.

Since I was 18 years old, I have taught the Bible. For the last fifteen or twenty years, I have taught every Sunday when I was home or near my own house, so that would be 35 or 40 times per year. Half of those Sundays, the text comes from the Hebrew Bible. I have had a deep personal interest in the Holy Land and in the teachings of the Hebrew people. God has a special position for the Jewish people, the Hebrews, or whatever. I know the difference between ancient Israel and Judaea, and I know the history. I don't have any problem with the Jewish people.

Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality. I have been for many years a teacher of languages. It is an occupation which at length becomes fatal to whatever share of imagination, observation, and insight an ordinary person may be heir to. To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.

To teach is to learn twice.

If I don't have wisdom, I can teach you only ignorance.

I like a teacher who gives you something to take home to think about besides homework.

Man's most human characteristic is not his ability to learn, which he shares with many other species, but his ability to teach and store what others have developed and taught him.

It's really important for me to get across to our fans that whenever I put myself in different circumstances. It is to learn from it so I can relay it to others.

The Socratic manner is not a game at which two can play.

Example is always more efficacious than precept.

I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think.

Our school systems teach our children that they are nothing but glorified apes who have evolutionized out of some primordial soup of mud, by teaching evolution as fact.

Teachers who offer you the ultimate answers do not possess the ultimate answers, for if they did, they would know that the ultimate answers cannot be given, they can only be received.

A schoolmaster should have an atmosphere of awe, and walk wonderingly, as if he was amazed at being himself.

The teachers are everywhere. What is wanted is a learner.

A teacher's major contribution may pop out anonymously in the life of some ex-student's grandchild. A teacher, finally, has nothing to go on but faith, a student nothing to offer in return but testimony.

Only the stupid and the phlegmatic should teach.

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.

Housework is a breeze. Cooking is a pleasant diversion. Putting up a retaining wall is a lark. But teaching is like climbing a mountain.

The great moral teachers of humanity were, in a way, artistic geniuses in the art of living.

You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.

If you can't explain something to a first year student, then you haven't really understood it.

There were 183 of us freshmen, and a bowling ball hanging from the three-story ceiling to just above the floor. Feynman walked in and, without a word, grabbed the ball and backed against the wall with the ball touching his nose. He let go, and the ball swung slowly 60 feet across the room and back - stopping naturally just short of crushing his face. Then he took the ball again, stepped forward, and said: 'I wanted to show you that I believe in what I'm going to teach you over the next two years.'

What we normally do in the structure of a message is that we do interpretation and then application of a point, then the next interpretation and the next application, the next interpretation and the next application. I am suggesting that if you want to reach the unchurched, you just reverse that procedure. You still get both - it's just the way you do it.

It is not enough for us to simply proclaim that 'Christ is the answer,' we must show the unchurched how Christ is the answer. Sermons that exhort people to change without sharing the practical steps of how to do it end up just producing more guilt and frustration.

When I was younger I took jazz, but the teacher yelled at me and I never went back, ever again!

Paulus: Tillich As Spiritual Teacher (1973)

Paulus: The Dimensions of a Teacher (1988)

Islam has said everything, but the difficulty rests with the Muslims.

Really, Ischomachus, I am disposed to ask: 'Does teaching consist in putting questions?' Indeed, the secret of your system has just this instant dawned upon me. I seem to see the principle in which you put your questions. You lead me through the field of my own knowledge, and then by pointing out analogies to what I know, persuade me that I really know some things which hitherto, as I believed, I had no knowledge of.

We live in a capitalist economy, and I have no particular objection to honorable self-interest. We cannot hope to make the needed, drastic improvement in primary and secondary education without a dramatic restructuring of salaries. In my opinion, you cannot pay a good teacher enough money to recompense the value of talent applied to the education of young children. I teach an hour or two a day to tolerably well-behaved near-adults-and I come home exhausted. By what possible argument are my services worth more in salary than those of a secondary-school teacher with six classes a day, little prestige, less support, massive problems of discipline, and a fundamental role in shaping minds. (In comparison, I only tinker with intellects already largely formed.)

We are the mimics. Clouds are pedagogues.

The medium of animated film is perhaps the most flexible, versatile, and stimulating of all teaching faculties.

His misfortune was that he loved youth - he was weak to it, it kindled him. If there was one eager eye, one doubting, critical mind, one lively curiosity in a whole lecture-room full of commonplace boys and girls, he was its servant. That ardour could command him. It hadn't worn out with years, this responsiveness, any more than the magnetic currents wear out; it had nothing to do with Time.

I will go about, from kingdom to kingdom,

Unlike you, Wiggin, I do give the other guy a chance to learn what he's doing before I insist on perfection

I've been wounded and you're using the bloody place to teach me, and if that's what gods are supposed to do, then I wish there were no gods at all

In all my years of teaching with Steve, I have never seen him flustered or at a loss for words-except once. In our course entitled 'Thinking About Thinking,' he had been presenting a lecture on the randomness of nature and referred to Einstein's famous dictum 'I shall never believe that God plays dice with the world.' I responded by walking up to the blackboard and writing, 'Gould or God?' I then argued that if God does not play dice with the universe, as Einstein said, and if the universe is as random as the throws of honest dice, as Gould says, then there could not be a God. Hence, Gould or God? (Or at the very least, Gould or Einstein?) Then I sat down, leaving it to Steve to answer the challenge. He stood up and looked at the words on the blackboard. He hesitated, gathered his thoughts, and then launched into a defense of God so brilliant that even William Jennings Bryan would have been proud. It was then that I realized what a great lawyer Gould would make. As for God... ?

But the greatest of all the reformers of the depraved religion of his own country, was Jesus of Nazareth. Abstracting what is really his from the rubbish in which it is buried, easily distinguished by its lustre from the dross of his biographers, and as separable from that as the diamond from the dunghill[.] : The establishment of the innocent and genuine character of this benevolent moralist, and the rescuing it from the imputation of imposture, which has resulted from artificial systems,[footnote: e.g. The immaculate conception of Jesus, his deification, the creation of the world by him, his miraculous powers, his resurrection and visible ascension, his corporeal presence in the Eucharist, the Trinity; original sin, atonement, regeneration, election, orders of Hierarchy, etc. -T.J.] invented by ultra-Christian sects, unauthorized by a single word ever uttered by him, is a most desirable object, and one to which Priestley has successfully devoted his labors and learning. It would in time, it is to be hoped, effect a quiet euthanasia of the heresies of bigotry and fanaticism which have so long triumphed over human reason, and so generally and deeply afflicted mankind; but this work is to be begun by winnowing the grain from the chaff of the historians of his life.

Einstein explained his theory to me every day, and on my arrival I was fully convinced that he understood it.

For successful education there must always be a certain freshness in the knowledge dealt with. It must be either new in itself or invested with some novelty of application to the new world of new times. Knowledge does not keep any better than fish. You may be dealing with knowledge of the old species, with some old truth; but somehow it must come to the students, as it were, just drawn out of the sea and with the freshness of its immediate importance.

There is no real teacher who in practise does not believe in the existence of the soul, or in a magic that acts on it through speech.

Any teacher that can be replaced by a machine should be!

'Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.'

A word as to the education of the heart. We don't believe that this can be imparted through books; it can only be imparted through the loving touch of the teacher.

You cannot teach a man anything, you can only help him to find it for himself.

You've got to save your own soul first, and then the souls of your neighbors if they will let you; and for that reason you must cultivate, not a spirit of criticism, but the talents that attract people to the hearing of the Word.

Education is what remains when we have forgotten all that we have been taught.

The sight of a drunkard is a better sermon against that vice than the best that was ever preached on that subject.

The vanity of teaching doth oft tempt a man to forget that he is a blockhead.

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.

It is a trite but true observation, that examples work more forcibly on the mind than precepts.

First, I tell them what I am going to tell them, then I tell them, then I tell them what I told them.

A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering cold iron.

Teachers teach because they care. Teaching young people is what they do best. It requires long hours, patience, and care.

Teaching isn't one-tenth as effective as training.

I taught them everything they know, but not everything I know.

You can't teach others if you are living the same way.

Of right and wrong he taught Truths as refined as ever Athens heard; And (strange to tell!) he practised what he preached.

Nature's lay idiot, I taught thee to love.

Education: the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent.

A good guide will take you through the more important streets more often than he takes you down side streets; a bad guide will do the opposite. In philosophy I'm a rather bad guide.

310. A pupil and a teacher. The pupil will not let anything be explained to him, for he continually interrupts with doubts, for instance as to the existence of things, the meaning for words, etc. The teacher says 'Stop interrupting me and do as I tell you. So far your doubts don't make sense at all.'

A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.

'Late Shri. Cakyar, was not just a skilled exponent and a capable teacher of Kutiyattam, his wisdom and depth of knowledge made him worthy of the title 'Acharya' ' - Dr. Prem Lata Sharma (noted Hindi writer and scholar of Indian arts and literature)[15]

No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.

Teaching is for teachers, not students... and if you'd known that when you were at school, all of your suffering would have been at least explicable.

Film composing is a splendid discipline, and I recommend a course of it to all composition teachers whose pupils are apt to be dawdling in their ideas, or whose every bar is sacred and must not be cut or altered.

I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn.

We can only instill principles, put the student in the right path, give him method, teach him how to study, and early to discern between essentials and non-essentials.

The hidden significance of these fables which is sometimes thought to have been detected, the ethics running parallel to the poetry and history, are not so remarkable as the readiness with which they may be made to express a variety of truths. As if they were the skeletons of still older and more universal truths than any whose flesh and blood they are for the time made to wear. It is like striving to make the sun, or the wind, or the sea symbols to signify exclusively the particular thoughts of our day. But what signifies it? In the mythus a superhuman intelligence uses the unconscious thoughts and dreams of men as its hieroglyphics to address men unborn. In the history of the human mind, these glowing and ruddy fables precede the noonday thoughts of men, as Aurora the sun's rays. The matutine intellect of the poet, keeping in advance of the glare of philosophy, always dwells in this auroral atmosphere.