These Teacher quotes will inspire you.
Below you will find a collection of motivating, knowledgeable, and encouraging teacher quotes, teacher sayings, and teacher proverbs.
Inspirational Teacher Quotes
- “Teachers, I believe, are the most responsible and important members of society because their professional efforts affect the fate of the earth.” ~ Helen Caldicott
- “A good teacher is like a candle – it consumes itself to light the way for others.” ~ Mustafa Kemal Ataturk
- “The dream begins with a teacher who believes in you, who tugs and pushes and leads you to the next plateau, sometimes poking you with a sharp stick called ‘truth’.” ~ Dan Rather
-
“A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.” ~ Henry Adams
- “The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.” ~ William Arthur Ward
- “I’m into books – I love literature, so I toyed with the idea of being an English teacher. I had a fantastic English teacher at school. I think great English teachers make the world go round.” ~ Taron Egerton
- “Nine-tenths of education is encouragement.” ~ Anatole France , Teacher quotes on encouragement
-
“It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.” ~ Albert Einstein
- “Warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.” ~ Carl Jung
- “To me, the sole hope of human salvation lies in teaching.” ~ George Bernard Shaw , Teacher quotes on teaching
- “In teaching, you cannot see the fruit of a day’s work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years.” ~ Jacques Barzun
-
“What the teacher is, is more important than what he teaches.” ~ Karl A. Menninger
- “One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.” ~ Carl Jung , Teacher quotes on grattitude
- “You never know what’s going to happen. My mother was an English teacher. If someone had told her that I was going to write a book, she would never have believed that. So you can never say never.” ~ Tony Dungy
- “A friend of mine said, no matter what I do I always look like an English teacher. She actually said, you still look like a Campbell’s Soup kid.” ~ Kate Clinton
-
“Ironically, for a few million people in the Far East, I did become an English teacher through my music.” ~ Pat Boone
- “I wanted to be an English teacher. I wanted to do it for the corduroy jackets with patches on the side. When I got to college, as I was walking across campus one day, I ripped off a little flyer for this sketch-comedy group. It ended up being one of the greatest things I’ve ever done.” ~ John Krasinski
- “I could never have pictured myself writing a book when I was 25 years old. My mom was an English teacher but I wasn’t that way growing up.” ~ Tony Dungy
- “Writing became an obsessive-compulsive habit but I had almost no money so I thought about being an urban firefighter and having lots of free time in which to write or becoming an English teacher and thinking about books and writers on a daily basis. That swayed me.” ~ David Guterson
-
“I like to say that I didn’t choose acting – acting chose me.” ~ Ving Rhames
- “The best teacher is the one who suggests rather than dogmatizes, and inspires his listener with the wish to teach himself.” ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton , You are the best teacher quotes
- “When you are live you never know what is going to happen.” ~ Michael Schenker
- “Matt Mason must be declared the poet laureate of the Midwest! No other native son celebrates the overlooked America, its unsung citizens (from the anonymous poets to the part-time English teachers), and its expansive indigenous landscape, as well as he does. Mason’s poetry is humorous when he wants to be quirky, heartbreaking when he wants to be eloquent, and though he moves effortlessly into other moods and geographies, he always returns to his first and most enduring love (and to what he knows best)-his homeland.” ~ Rigoberto Gonzalez
-
“Spoon feeding, in the long run, teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.” ~ E. M. Forster
- “The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn.” ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero , Teacher quotes on learning
- “I picked up one of the books and flipped through it. Don’t get me wrong, I like reading. But some books should come with warning labels: Caution: contains characters and plots guaranteed to induce sleepiness. Do not attempt to operate heavy machinery after ingesting more than one chapter. Has been known to cause blindness, seizures, and a terminal loathing of literature. Should only be taken under the supervision of a highly trained English teacher. Preferably one who grades on the curve.” ~ Laurie Halse Anderson
-
“You never know what’s going to happen with television these days.” ~ Patrick Warburton
- “I had a very good English teacher who said to me that she thought I ought to do it. She – I don’t know, she saw something thank goodness because I think if it hadn’t been encouraged by somebody that serious, I’m not sure what would’ve happened to me.” ~ Maggie Smith
- “The people who go the craziest when they hear the name ‘Hemingway’ are my English teachers!” ~ Dree Hemingway
- “Reading with an eye towards metaphor allows us to become the person we’re reading about while reading about them. That’s why there is symbols in books and why your English teacher deserves your attention. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if the author intended the symbol to be there because the job of reading is not to understand the author’s intent. The job of reading is to use stories as a way into seeing other people as a we ourselves.” ~ John Green
-
“My English teacher, he’s like, he’s like Mr. Bu-fu.” ~ Frank Zappa
- “Quite honestly I never had a desire to be an actor. I tell people, I did not choose acting; acting chose me. I never grew up wanting to be an actor. I wanted to play football. In about 9th grade an English teacher told me I had a talent to act. He said I should audition for a performing arts high school so I did on a whim. I got accepted.” ~ Ving Rhames
- “When I was about 13 or 14, I had an English teacher who made a deal with me that I could get out of doing all of the year’s regular work if I would write a short story a week and on Friday read it to the class.” ~ Victor Salva
- “My English teacher wanted to have sex with me in Junior High. The only problem was, my English teacher was a guy. I smacked him in his face with an eraser, chased him with a stapler and stapled his nuts to a stack of papers.” ~ Eminem
- “My grandmother was an English teacher for a while. And she stressed to me the importance of reading, being able to articulate well.” ~ Kevin Gates
-
“In school [I wanted] to be an English teacher.” ~ Nancy Grace
- “My favorite English teacher in high school showed me ‘Brazil’ when I was 15 and it blew my mind. It’s one of those movies that’s revealed itself in different ways as I’ve gone back to it over the years.” ~ Win Butler
- “According to the latest poll in the Washington Post, 63 percent of Americans said that so far they approve of President Bush. Not surprisingly, the other 37 percent are English teachers.” ~ Conan O’Brien
- “When I was 16 I started publishing all kinds of things in school magazines. My main feedback came from my English teacher, Miss Bessie B. Billings, who said, ‘I can’t understand this at all, dear, so it must be good.” ~ Margaret Atwood
- “I listen a lot to how people speak. I’ve read a great many good books in my life. I had some excellent English teachers. Surely, those things were helpful.” ~ Anthony Bourdain , Life is a teacher quotes
-
“The average teacher explains complexity; the gifted teacher reveals simplicity.” ~ Robert Breault
- “I am not in touch with other writers. I don’t have very much contact with other writers. I don’t get invited to these things or I don’t go to them. I hate panels. I speak to librarians and to conferences of English teachers. That’s what I do: teachers and librarians. And high school kids.” ~ Sandra Cisneros
- “My English teacher, Dr. John Lindstrom, taught me an appreciation for the written word. Until his class, I’d dabbled in journalism and essay writing. But when he selected one of my essays as the best in the class, it gave me the confidence to see myself as a writer.” ~ Kareem Abdul-Jabbar , Teacher quotes appreciation
- “Basically [I become a Republican], pretty early. I had an English teacher that got me to subscribe to the National Review.” ~ Jeff Sessions
-
“With me, you never know what is going to happen” ~ Goran Ivanisevic
- “I was also a good writer, by the way. My, you know, my English teacher and writing teacher loved my writing. You know, I wrote short stories and things like that. And they liked them very much.” ~ Robert Barry
- “I’ve always gotten good grades, you know, with my teachers and my English teachers, ’cause I was able to – they’d say, “What did you do for the summer?” I’m able to explain it to them in a written form. And my teachers always patted me on the back for that, being able to take what’s in my mind and put it on paper.” ~ Ice Cube
-
“I am especially indebted to a 10th grade English teacher who encouraged me to read great works of literature.” ~ Samuel Alito
- “My mom was my English teacher in high school. So to be able to bend the rules and be the class clown and get to take on my religion, my mom, and my town all at the same time was glorious. I think the desire to be funny was a mixture of wanting to be liked but also wanting to throw your elbows a bit. If you’re cracking a joke in school, it’s sort of anti-authority, but it’s in the nicest, “Please like me!” way.” ~ Paul Rust
- “When I was in school, in eighth grade, someone recognized something in me. She was an English teacher, and we read a play out loud in class, and she asked me to read one of the roles. I’d never done anything like that before, but something just lit up.” ~ David Morse
- “I’m too young and ridiculous a person to speak for my generation, but I’d be happy to talk about my own experiences as a generation Y writer. I was raised by a generation of hippies. Throughout my childhood, teachers urged me to fight the establishment. My English teacher assigned Ginsberg and Kerouac and declared Bob Dylan “a genius.” My science teacher told me that television was “the new opiate of the masses” and bragged about never having owned one. My drama teacher made us perform Beckett.” ~ Simon Rich
-
“I dropped out of high school when I was 16, after I had a huge argument with my English teacher over the meaning of the word ‘existentialism.'” ~ Craig Ferguson
- “The only reason I acted in school was because of the community. I was in the chorus of every play and was never the lead other than one time, but to me it was about the community. I was an English major and my whole goal was to be an English teacher and was lucky enough to get into the playwriting group. The whole experience I had at Brown was eye-opening and the most mind-bending experience.” ~ John Krasinski
- “If I said in one of my songs that my English teacher wanted to have sex with me in junior high, all I’m saying, is that I’m not gay, you know? People confuse the lyrics for me speaking my mind. I don’t agree with that lifestyle, but if that lifestyle is for you, then it’s your business.” ~ Eminem
- “It’s the first line in your book. I always thought there was a lot of truth in that. Or maybe that’s what my English teacher said. I can’t really remember. I read it last semester.” – Your parents must be so proud you can read.” – They are. They bought me a pony and everything when I did a book report on Cat in the Hat.” ~ Nicholas Sparks
- “The worst letters come from retired high school English teachers. They will literally take a book and pick it to pieces and send me 14 pages of notes.” ~ John Grisham
-
“I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.” ~ Confucius
- “I had my heart set on becoming an English teacher, but stumbled into acting after meeting a theatrical agent in my dad’s restaurant in San Diego.” ~ Charisma Carpenter
- “Probably my English teacher because she got me into writing instead of just answering the question. I used to hand in homework with 20 pages of nonsense and she’d still mark it. She was a really amazing teacher.” ~ Robert Pattinson
- “They were like English teachers who took the fun out of a perfectly good book by breaking it down into themes and sentence structures” ~ Tawni O’Dell
- “It’s like people believe all you need to do is like the same bands in order to be soulmates. Or book. Oh my god…you like The Outsiders too…it’s like we’re the same person! No, we’re not. It’s like we have the same English teacher. There’s a difference.” ~ John Green
-
“Teaching kids to count is fine, but teaching them what counts is best.” ~ Bob Talbert
- “My English teacher has no face. She has uncombed stringy hair that droops on her shoulders. The hair is black from her part to her ears and then neon orange to the frizzy ends. I can’t decide if she had pissed off her hairdresser or is morphing into a monarch butterfly. I call her Hairwoman.” ~ Laurie Halse Anderson
- “My modus operandi hasn’t really changed that much from when I was an English teacher. I wanted my students to leave my classroom loving reading and wanting to read more, and if they left my classroom thinking that reading is boring, then I haven’t done my job.” ~ Rick Riordan
- “The President publicly apologized today to all those offended by his brother’s remark, There’s more Arabs in this country than there is Jews! Those offended include Arabs, Jews, and English teachers.” ~ Jimmy Carter
Summary: A teacher (also called a schoolteacher or formally, an educator) is a person who helps students to acquire knowledge, competence, or virtue.
