Quotes

Just a few of my favorite quotes about learning and teaching.

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

William Butler Yeats

Poet

My job [is] to awaken possibility in other people. If their eyes are shining, you know you’re doing it. If they’re not shining you get to ask this question: “Who am I being that my children’s eyes are not shining?”

Benjamin Zander

Musical Director, Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestra

One of the most anxiety-​inducing side effects of the information era is the feeling that you have to know it all.

Richard Wurman

Architect & Designer

The greatest gift that we can give our children is to believe in the following: That the gifted child is average with gifts, not superior with faults.

Annmarie Roeper

Educator

Definition of a lecture: a means of transferring information from the notes of the lecturer to the notes of the student without passing through the minds of either.

Graffiti at Warwick University

Our job is to teach the students we have. Not the ones we would like to have. Not the ones we used to have. Those we have right now. All of them.

Dr. Kevin Maxwell

2014 Superintendent of the Year, Maryland

The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn and change.

Carl Rogers

Psychologist

It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.

John Wooden

Coach

It’s more exciting knowing that what I found isn’t the final answer. I know a lot more than anyone here ever asks me.

Seventh grade student

We can throw stones, complain about them, stumble on them, climb over them, or build with them.

William Arthur Ward

Inspirational Writer

Too often, we judge other groups by their worst examples while judging ourselves by our best intentions.

George W. Bush

Former President of the United States

School should not just be preparation for real life; rather, school can be real life.

Chris Lehmann

Founding Principal, Science Leadership Academy

If we had a world where everybody’s lens was shaped by openness and recognition of how much capacity we each have as human beings rather than a fear of one another and stereotypes of one another and expectations that we can only be this big, the world could be a totally different place.

Ali Michael

Educator

Who dares to teach must never cease to learn.

John Cotton Dana

Public Librarian

In education, parody is obsolete.

Alfie Kohn

Author

The smartest person in the room isn’t the person at the front of the room. It’s the room.

David Weinberger

Internet Philosopher

Reducing children to a test score is the worst form of identity theft we could commit in schools.

Stephen Covey

Author & Educator

It’s not that I’m so smart. But I stay with the questions much longer.

Albert Einstein

Theoretical Physicist and Philosopher

If kids can’t learn the way we teach, perhaps we should teach the way kids learn.

Ignacio Estrada

Nonprofit Administrator

Build a career. Plan to be better tomorrow than today, but don’t plan to be finished.

Carol Ann Tomlinson

Educator

How do teaching and learning improve? The answer is no mystery. It’s as simple as this: I cannot improve my craft in isolation from others.

Carl Glickman

Professor Emeritus of Education, University of Georgia

No matter what your ability is, effort is what ignites that ability and turns it into accomplishment.

Carol Dweck

Psychologist and Educator, Stanford University