#Teaching Quotes

“I'll teach you differences.”

“And when I am forgotten, as I shall be, And asleep in dull cold marble, where no mention Of me must be heard of, say, I taught thee.”

“Those that do teach young babesDo it with gentle means and easy tasks.”

“I can easier teach twenty what were good to be done, than be one of the twenty to follow mine own teaching.”

“I do not presume to explain how to paint, but only how to get enjoyment.”

“Your magnificence has made me a wonder. Your charm has taught me the way of love.”

“What king has he not taught state, as Talma taught Napoleon? What maiden has not found him finer than her delicacy? What lover has he not outloved? What sage has he not outseen? What gentleman has he not instructed in the rudeness of his behavior?”

“Teaching is the perpetual end and office of all things. Teaching, instruction is the main design that shines through the sky and earth.”

“That which we are, we are all the while teaching, not voluntarily, but involuntarily.”

“I would have the studies elective. Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge. The wise instructor accomplishes this by opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for himself. The marking is a system for schools, not for the college; for boys, not for men; and it is an ungracious work to put on a professor.”

“Some of the greatest and most lasting effects of genuine oratory have gone forth from secluded lecture desks into the hearts of quiet groups of students.”

“When I became proficient as a salesman I was invited to teach new hires.”

“People who know how to act are never preachers.”

“I have long enjoyed the friendship and companionship of Republicans because I am by instinct a teacher, and I would like to teach them something.”

“Psychology ought certainly to give the teacher radical help.”

“The first lecture in psychology that I ever heard was the first I ever gave.”

“The exercise of voluntary attention in the schoolroom must therefore be counted one of the most important points of training that take place there; and the first-rate teacher, by the keenness of the remoter interests which he is able to awaken, will provide abundant opportunities for its occurrence.”

“Teaching is not filling up a pail, it is lighting a fire.”

“Your teacher might be a child who takes you by the hand and asks you a question that you hadn't considered before, and your answer to the child is your answer to yourself.”

“The difference between an interesting and a tedious teacher consists in little more than the inventiveness by which the one is able to mediate these associations and connections, and in the dullness in discovering such transitions which the other shows.”

“In all primary school work the principle of multiple impressions is well recognized.”

“The teacher's prime concern should be to ingrain into the pupil that assortment of habits that shall be most useful to him throughout life. Education is for behavior, and habits are the stuff of which behavior consists.”

“Education is not filling”

“Psychology is a science, and teaching is an art; and sciences never generate arts directly out of themselves.”

“The same is true of Love, and the instinctive desire to please those whom we love. The teacher who succeeds in getting herself loved by the pupils will obtain results which one of a more forbidding temperament finds it impossible to secure.”

“What a teacher needs to know about psychology "might almost be written on the palm of one's hand."”

“To know psychology, therefore, is absolutely no guarantee that we shall be good teacher.”

“The amount of psychology which is necessary to all teachers need not be very great.”

“Ingenuity in meeting and pursuing the pupil, that tact for the concrete situation, though they are the alpha and omega of the teacher's art, are things to which psychology cannot help us in the least.”

“In teaching, you must simply work your pupil into such a state of interest in what you are going to teach him that every other object of attention is banished from his mind; then reveal it to him so impressively that he will remember the occasion to his dying day; and finally fill him with devouring curiosity to know what the next steps in connection with the subject are.”

“If the topic be highly abstract, show its nature by concrete examples. If it be unfamiliar, trace some point of analogy in it with the known. If it be inhuman, make it figure as part of a story. If it be difficult, couple its acquisition with some prospect of personal gain. Above all things, make sure that it shall run through certain inner changes, since no unvarying object can possibly hold the mental field for long.”

“If, then, you wish to insure the interest of your pupils, there is only one way to do it; and that is to make certain that they have something in their minds to attend with, when you begin to talk. That something can consist in nothing but a previous lot of ideas already interesting in themselves, and of such a nature that the incoming novel objects which you present can dovetail into them and form with them some kind of a logically associated or systematic whole.”

“In all my lectures, I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man.”

“Why should I cumber myself with regrets that the receiver is not capacious? It never troubles the sun that some of his rays fall wide and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small part on the reflecting planet. Let your greatness educate the crude and cold companion.”

“I can't give other people what I've not experienced to some extent myself. It sharpens your game and also, like any athlete, you're more fit because you have to be. You're getting ready because you have a reason to.”

“No reception without reaction, no impression without correlative expression, -this is the great maxim which the teacher ought never to forget.”

“It is very important that teachers should realize the importance of habit.”

“It is only the fundamental conceptions of psychology which are of real value to a teacher.”

“The worst thing that can happen to a good teacher is to get a bad conscience about her profession because she feels herself hopeless as a psychologist.”

“The mind of your own enemy, the pupil, is working away from you, as keenly and eagerly as is the mind of the commander on the other side from the scientific general. Just what the respective enemies want and think, and what they know or do not know, are as hard things for the teachers as for the general to find out.”

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

“Education is not about filling a pail, it's about lighting a fire.”

“But when all is said and done, the fact remains that some teachers have a naturally inspiring presence and can make their exercises interesting, whilst others simply cannot. And psychology and general pedagogy here confess their failure, and hand things over to the deeper spring of human personality to conduct the task.”

“Don't preach too much to your pupils or abound in good talk in the abstract. Lie in wait rather for the practical opportunities, be prompt to seize those as they pass, and thus at one operation get your pupils both to think, to feel, and to do.”

“You perceive now, my friends, what your general or abstract duty is as teachers. Although you have to generate in your pupils a large stock of ideas, any one of which may be inhibitory, yet you must also see to it that no habitual hesitancy or paralysis of the will ensues, and that the pupil still retains his power of vigorous action.”

“My father was an angry and impatient teacher and flung the reading book at my head.”

“All that we need explicitly to note is that, the more the passive attention is relied on, by keeping the material interesting; and the less the kind of attention requiring effort is appealed to; the more smoothly and pleasantly the classroom work goes on.”

“You must never tell a thing. You must illustrate it. We learn throughthe eye and not the noggin.”

“There is no teaching until the pupil is brought into the same state or principle in which you are; a transfusion takes place; he is you, and you are he; then is a teaching; and by no unfriendly chance or bad company can he ever lose the benefit.”

“The way that I teach now is just by listening. I listen a lot.”