Teacher Quotations

High achievement always takes place in the framework of high expectation.

Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose.

Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.

Education is the key to unlock the golden door of freedom.

Experience is a good teacher, but she sends in terrific bills.

Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.

I am indebted to my father for living, but to my teacher for living well.

The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.

Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.

Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton was the one who asked why.

Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

If you take responsibility for yourself you will develop a hunger to accomplish your dreams.

Education is the key to success in life, and teachers make a lasting impact in the lives of their students.

Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.

What is a teacher? I'll tell you: it isn't someone who teaches something, but someone who inspires the student to give of her best in order to discover what she already knows.

As a former high school teacher, I know that investing in education is one of the most important things we can do, not only for our children, but for the benefit of our whole community.

A good teacher must be able to put himself in the place of those who find learning hard.

As a poet and a teacher, I read all the time. I know I read slowly. I like reading, but I don't read any more than I have to.

My father, Oliver Hynes, was an educator. He was originally just a teacher, a very good one, but then he was promoted to be in charge of education for the entire area. He was always an inspirational teacher. He was my big personal supporter, always coming here for the Tony Awards. My mother, Carmel, was a homemaker.

When I left Europe in 1987 I did so with the thought that my relevance as a composition teacher would benefit from a certain cool distance to certain tendencies I had been observing for several years with increasing disquiet.

Only one person in a million becomes enlightened without a teacher's help.

A good teacher can inspire hope, ignite the imagination, and instill a love of learning.

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change (as the poet said), windows on the world and lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.

A teacher told my mother that I would never become successful, which illustrates the difficulty of long-run forecasting on inadequate data.

I really did grow up in a world where we were taught that crime doesn't pay and we stood up when the teacher came into the room.

I eat tons, three full meals a day, and I never go to the gym. When I was a child, my geography teacher said, 'You may be slim now but if you carry on eating like that, you'll end up being really fat.' Fortunately, I really don't think I've changed much in the past two decades, so that teacher was an idiot.

Whether you're an obstetrician or a third-grade teacher or a real estate agent, you know when you're doing good work. You're passionate about it.

When I was 16, I played Macbeth at school and my English teacher said, 'I think you may have acting talent. Try to get into the National Youth Theatre of Great Britain and see where you get.' I wouldn't have thought of that at all. I wanted to be a surgeon, but I wasn't a clever man.

I love films that make me react emotionally and physically when you walk out of the cinema. Two of my favorite films however have got to be 'The Tree Of Life' and 'The Piano Teacher,' which also stars one of my favourite actresses Isabelle Huppert.

The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence. He inspires self-trust. He guides their eyes from himself to the spirit that quickens him. He will have no disciples.

I claim Dickens as a mentor. He's my teacher. He's one of my driving forces.

In preparing my thesis, I have had the pleasure of collecting testimonies from colleagues such as Placido Domingo but also from singing teachers and musicologists. The entire course of study has confirmed what I already thought, that the value and meaning of opera singing, at the beginning of the third millennium, remain intact.

When I was 14 or 15, our teacher introduced us to Dickens' 'A Tale of Two Cities.' It was just for entertainment - we read it aloud - and all of a sudden it became a treasure.

I don't find acting to be a particularly noble way to make a living. I'm not saving anybody's life, I'm not a teacher, I'm not working for UNICEF. I don't think I'm some big deal.

I am the mild-mannered organic chemistry teacher at the University of Oklahoma.

It's funny: I always, as a high school teacher and particularly as a high school yearbook teacher, because yearbook staffs are 90 percent female, I got to sit in and overhear teenage girl talk for many years. I like teenage girls; I like their drama, their foibles. And I think, 'I'll be good with a teenage daughter!'

The Sunday School teacher talked too much in the way our grade school teacher used to when she told us about George Washington. Pleasant, pretty stories, but not true.

I decided to take a stab at acting. I entered the American Academy of Dramatic Art, where one teacher told me I'd never make it - I was too tall.

My humanitarian work evolved from being with my family. My mom, my dad, they really set a great example for giving back. My mom was a nurse, my dad was a school teacher. But my mom did a lot of things for geriatrics and elderly people. She would do home visits for free.

When I had my first voice lesson I was 15 years old. And I had a really good teacher. This is what made all the difference. A good teacher will teach you the technique, but also how to listen to your voice.

Everything good that I know was taught to me by great teachers and I feel like giving back and sharing the technique is the thing to do.

There's this old saying that, if you aren't particularly gifted in natural sciences, if you don't want to become a teacher or pastor or doctor, and don't know what else to do, then you become a lawyer. But I've never regretted it.

It is commonly said that a teacher fails if he has not been surpassed by his students.

My father was my teacher. But most importantly he was a great dad.

There is no education system in the world - none at all - that's better than its average teacher.

In high school, a teacher's friend in the police department asked me to go into a bar and flash a fake ID saying I was 21 even though I wasn't. They were assuming the bar wasn't carding people. Anyway, she forgot to ask for it back. I used it all freshman year in college.

I still don't know what I'm going to be. I love acting. I would love to be an English teacher. I would love to be a housewife and have a chateau in the South of France, I would love to be a singer that travels to cafes around different towns.

When I was in school I used to prank my teachers all the time. But I was really, really nice. I love to make people laugh. And even in those pranks, the teachers would laugh most of the time.

Find a good teacher that will keep the game fun. Work hard and don't be afraid to have success or disappointment. That is what golf is all about.

One good teacher in a lifetime may sometimes change a delinquent into a solid citizen.

When I am able to resist the temptation to judge others, I can see them as teachers of forgiveness in my life, reminding me that I can only have peace of mind when I forgive rather than judge.

Having been an educator for so many years I know that all a good teacher can do is set a context, raise questions or enter into a kind of a dialogic relationship with their students.

Next in importance to freedom and justice is popular education, without which neither freedom nor justice can be permanently maintained.

I am a teacher born and bred, and I believe in the advocacy of teachers. It's a calling. We want our students to feel impassioned and empowered.

I've been acting my whole life. I have this huge imagination! I'm a dancer and my mom's a dance teacher, and I was always performing and entertaining people. I'd go to see live theatre or a movie, and I'd become the main character for a few days afterwards. I loved being somebody new for a temporary amount of time.

A good teacher who can take the zero pay and help kids develop physically, emotionally, socially, is literally an angel.

Writing is very cathartic for me. As a teacher, I hear many students say that writing can be painful and exhausting. It can be, but ultimately I believe that if you push through, the process is healing and exhilarating.

My sister is an ER doctor, and my brother is a teacher.

Learning, while at school, that the charge for the education of girls was the same as that for boys, and that, when they became teachers, women received only half as much as men for their services, the injustice of this distinction was so apparent.

I have always believed that 98% of a student's progress is due to his own efforts, and 2% to his teacher.

In the state of Wisconsin it's mandated that teachers in the social sciences and hard sciences have to start giving environmental education by the first grade, through high school

Every child should have a caring adult in their lives. And that's not always a biological parent or family member. It may be a friend or neighbor. Often times it is a teacher.

TV is bigger than any story it reports. It's the greatest teaching tool since the printing press.

A good teacher, like a good entertainer first must hold his audience's attention, then he can teach his lesson.

The thing I loved the most - and still love the most about teaching - is that you can connect with an individual or a group, and see that individual or group exceed their limits.

Mistakes are the best teachers. One does not learn from success. It is desirable to learn vicariously from other people's failures, but it gets much more firmly seared in when they are your own.

There is no teacher, living or past, who can give us the actual understanding of truth. A teacher can only put our feet upon the path and point the way. That is all. It is wholly dependent on the individual to make his way to truth.

Find a good teacher, as I found for my sons. I feel the worst thing you can do is to try and teach your own children yourself, because there is a natural rebellion that occurs.

Evil can be a teacher, if you look at the wisdom of its negative power.

During my eleven years as a New York City public school teacher, I saw firsthand the impact that poverty has on the classroom. In low-income neighborhoods like Sunset Park, where I taught, students as young as five years old enter school affected by the stresses often created by poverty: domestic violence, drug abuse, gang activity.

I had an inspirational teacher at my junior school: Peter Nixon. He was enthusiastic, knowledgeable and slightly scary - a good combination for a teacher.

My mother was a Sunday school teacher. So I am a byproduct of prayer. My mom just kept on praying for her son.

Every soul is a melody which needs renewing.

When I go to bed at night, I ask God to give me another day; I ask him to keep me strong and make me a good teacher and to keep spreading this right word.

It is a lonely existence to be a child with a disability which no-one can see or understand, you exasperate your teachers, you disappoint your parents, and worst of all you know that you are not just stupid.

Our best teachers do more than impart facts and figures - they inspire and encourage students and instill a true desire to learn. That's a fine art in itself.

Now all my teachers are dead except silence.

Our record number of teenagers must become our record number of high school and college graduates and our record number of teachers, scientists, doctors, lawyers, and skilled professionals.

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.

This is at the heart of all good education, where the teacher asks students to think and engages them in encouraging dialogues, constantly checking for understanding and growth.

Any knowledge that doesn't lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life.

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.

I truly believe that everything that we do and everyone that we meet is put in our path for a purpose. There are no accidents; we're all teachers - if we're willing to pay attention to the lessons we learn, trust our positive instincts and not be afraid to take risks or wait for some miracle to come knocking at our door.

From the time I was ten, I thought of myself as 'good with words,' thanks to a perceptive and supportive fifth grade teacher.

My own ideas on the mechanism of catalytic phenomena were very different from those at one time commonly held, ideas which I no doubt owed to the influence of the illustrious teacher who had guided my first steps in chemistry nearly twenty years before - I refer, of course, to Berthelot.

My high-school a cappella teacher would embarrass me in front of the choir. 'Mavis, you're in the basement. Mavis, you're singing with the boys.' I said, 'Mr. Finch, my voice isn't soprano. I can't sing up there with the girls.' So I just got out of the choir.

My first manager, Suzanne DeWalt, saw a play I was in. She was invited by the director Joan Scheckel, who was my first real acting teacher. Joan was also good friends with my friend Susie Landau Finch, who had first encouraged me to consider acting, so that's how I began studying.

I think good actors are born with a kind of native gift. When you study too much with an acting teacher, that gets taken away. You lose your sense of spontaneity.

I've had teachers that inspired me, yes. I think teachers play a really important role in people's lives. I had one teacher in particular who helped me through high school and really instilled a confidence in me by just holding me up to a standard I wasn't holding myself up to.

I was on a sitcom called 'Gary Unmarried' for 37 episodes, and then I was in 'Bad Teacher' with Cameron Diaz and Justin Timberlake.

You cannot teach a crab to walk straight.

I wrote about a bird that cleaned a crocodile's teeth. The story was so good that my teacher could not believe that a ten-year-old could write that well. I was even punished because my teacher thought I'd lied about writing it! I had always loved to write, but it was then that I realized that I had a talent for it.

For some students, school is the only place where they get a hot meal and a warm hug. Teachers are sometimes the only ones who tell our children they can go from an Indian reservation to the Ivy League, from the home of a struggling single mom to the White House.

What it takes is to actually write: not to think about it, not to imagine it, not to talk about it, but to actually want to sit down and write. I'm lucky I learned that habit a really long time ago. I credit my mother with that. She was an English teacher, but she was a writer.

A woman of faith is fearless. There is no ambiguity, no uncertain trump in her life. She can live a principled life because she studies the doctrine and teachings of a perfect teacher, the Master. She is a noble example to all who know her.

Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterward.

My mother was a teacher. She was grooming my brother and me to be successful, accomplished people.

I had one of those defining moments in the fourth grade when my teacher said the story I wrote was the best in the class, and therefore I would be going Young Authors Conference where I'd get to hang out with authors all day.

A wisely chosen illustration is almost essential to fasten the truth upon the ordinary mind, and no teacher can afford to neglect this part of his preparation.