Inspirational quotations for teachers

Teachers in Malaysia "have been accused of committing serious crimes against the government!" "All tuition centres must me monitored!" "Teachers who give tuition must have their salaries cut!" These are glaring headlines in the papers in July 2007. And I felt a deep pain in my soul.

In order to regain my own perspective of my own worth, although I have never operated a tuition centre myself, I decided to collect inspiring quotations for teachers, and I would add to them, from time to time.....

Sibu has become a very interesting and successful town because when it was first started by Wong Nai Siong and Rev.Hoover, the most important aspect of town building in their minds was a school. They could not have been more right.


Teachers who educated children deserved more honour than parents who merely gave them birth; for bare life is furnished by the one, the other ensures a good life.
Attributed to Aristotle

To teach is to learn.
Chinese proverb

The first step in the acquisition of wisdom is silence, the second listening, the third memory, the fourth practice,
the fifth teaching others.
Solomon Ibn Gabriol


I'm not a teacher, but an awakener.
Robert Frost



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



A master can tell you what he expects of you.
A teacher, though, awakens your own expectations.
Patricia Neal



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





The aim of education should be teaching us how to think,
rather than what to think.
James Beatti

It is by teaching that we teach ourselves, by relating that we observe, by affirming that we examine, by showing that we look, by writing that we think, by pumping that we draw water into the well.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel



My love is thine to teach; teach it but how,
And thou shalt see how apt it is to learn
Any hard lesson that may do thee good.
William Shakespeare



I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.
Chinese Proverb



The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery.
Mark Van Doren



What nobler employment, or more valuable to the state,
than that of the man who instructs the rising generation?
Cicero



The successful teacher is no longer on a height, pumping knowledge at high pressure into passive receptacles....He is a senior student anxious to help his juniors.
William Osler



The object of teaching a child is to enable him to get along without a teacher.
Elbert Hubbard



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



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



If a man keeps cherishing his old knowledge, so as continually be acquiring new, he may be a teacher of others.
Confucius



My joy in learning is partly that it enable me to teach.
Seneca



Teachers believe they have a gift for giving; it drives them with the same irrepressible drive that drives others to create a work of art or a market or a building.
A Bartlett Giamatt