61 Teacher Appreciation Quotes

Teachers play a vital role in developing each one of us in and outside of the traditional classroom. We have all been shaped and molded by the help of a “teacher” at some point in our lives. We gathered some quotes for you to use during Teacher Appreciation Week and encourage you to write that special teacher (or help your child write their teachers) a note of gratitude and encouragement. And if you are a teacher, thank you, from our family to yours, for all that you do! Feel free to utilize one of these quotes: “Our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in education. The human mind is our fundamental resource.” John F. Kennedy “Let us think of education as the means of developing our greatest abilities, because in each of us there is a private hope and dream which, fulfilled, can be translated into benefit for everyone and greater strength for our nation.” John F. Kennedy “The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind.” Khalil Gibran “Education is the best provision for the journey to old age.” Aristotle “Teach the children so that it will not be necessary to teach the adults.” Abraham Lincoln “The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future life.” Plato “The very spring and root of honesty and virtue lie in good education.” Plutarch “I am indebted to my father for living, but to my teacher for living well” Alexander the Great “A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.” Henry Adams “Teacher appreciation makes the world of education go around.” Helen Peters “What the teacher is, is more important than what he teaches.” Soren Kierkegaard “The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives.” Robert M. Hutchins “The best teacher is the one who suggests rather than dogmatizes, and inspires his listener with the wish to teach himself.” Edward Bulwer-Lytton “Without teacher appreciation there can’t be any student progress.” Theresa Grimm “The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.” William A. Ward “Education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.” Malcolm Forbes “Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths pure theatre.” Gail Godwin “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 “Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.” Jacques Barzun “In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day’s work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years.” Jacques Barzun “Teachers appreciate being appreciated, for teacher appreciation is their highest award.” William Prince “A master can tell you what he expects of you. A teacher, though awakens your own expectations.” Patricia Neal “The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery.” Mark van Doren “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 “Teachers are expected to reach unattainable goals with inadequate tools. The miracle is that at times they accomplish this impossible task.” Haim Ginott “None of us got where we are solely by pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. We got here because somebody (a parent, a teacher, an Ivy League crony or a few nuns) bent down and helped us pick up our boots.” Thurgood Marshall “The good teacher makes the poor student good and the good student superior.” Marva Collins “Who dares to teach must never cease to learn.” John C. Dana “When you teach your son, you teach your son’s son.” The Talmud “A good teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary.” Thomas Carruthers “Teachers open the door. You enter by yourself.” Chinese proverb “There are three good reasons to be a teacher: June, July, and August.” Anonymous ”Often, when I am reading a good book, I stop and thank my teacher.” Anonymous “The best teachers teach from the heart, not from the book.” Anonymous “Teaching is the profession that teaches all the other professions.” Anonymous “A good teacher is like a candle: it consumes itself to light the way for others.” Anonymous “A teacher’s purpose is not to create students in his own image, but to develop students who can create their own image.” Anonymous “By viewing the old we learn the new” Chinese Proverb “A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops. ” Henry Adams “Good teaching is more a giving of right questions than a giving of right answers.” Josef Albers “The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influences…” Amos Alcott “We think of the effective teachers we have had over the years with a sense of recognition, but those who have touched our humanity we remember with a deep sense of gratitude.” Anonymous student “The job of an educator is to teach students to see the vitality in themselves.” Joseph Campbell “To teach is to learn twice.” Joseph Joubert “When asked what learning was the most necessary, he said, ‘Not to unlearn what you have learned!'” Diogenes Laertius “Education…beyond all other devices of human origin, is a great equalizer of conditions of men –the balance wheel of the social machinery…It does better than to disarm the poor of their hostility toward the rich; it prevents being poor.” Horace Mann “The critical factor is not class size but rather the nature of the teaching as it affects learning.” C.B. Neblette “The task of the excellent teacher is to stimulate ‘apparently ordinary’ people to unusual effort. The tough problem is not in identifying winners: it is in making winners out of ordinary people.” K. Patricia Cross “A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.” Henry Adams “I like a teacher who gives you something to take home to think about besides homework. ” Lily Tomlin as “Edith Ann” “The best teachers teach from the heart, not from the book. ” Author Unknown “He who opens a school door, closes a prison. ” Victor Hugo “What the teacher is, is more important than what he teaches. ” Karl Menninger “If a doctor, lawyer, or dentist had 40 people in his office at one time, all of whom had different needs, and some of whom didn’t want to be there and were causing trouble, and the doctor, lawyer, or dentist, without assistance, had to treat them all with professional excellence for nine months, then he might have some conception of the classroom teacher’s job. ” Donald D. Quinn “There are three good reasons to be a teacher – June, July, and August. ” Author Unknown “Often, when I am reading a good book, I stop and thank my teacher. That is, I used to, until she got an unlisted number. ” Author Unknown “Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths pure theatre.” Gail Godwin “A good teacher is a good student first. By repeating his lessons, he acquires excellence.” M. K. Soni “Good teaching is more a giving of right questions than a giving of right answers.” Josef Albers “Teaching is the greatest act of optimism.” Colleen Wilcox “A professor can never better distinguish himself in his work than by encouraging a clever pupil, for the true discoverers are among them, as comets amongst the stars.” Carl Von Linne