101 Motivational Quotes for Students and Teachers
Education can open our eyes and expand our minds like nothing else. It allows us to constantly reshape the way we see the world, leading to a better and more balanced life. So this week, as classes continue, we’d like to share 101 of the most motivating and inspiring quotes about education. We hope you find it helpful, whether you’re a student who needs a boost of motivation or a teacher of any kind who wants to inspire and make a difference in the lives of their students.
101 Motivational Quotes for Students and Teachers
- “A man’s mind, stretched by new ideas, may never return to its original dimensions.” Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
- “Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.” Albert Einstein
- “He who opens a school door, closes a prison.” Victor Hugo
- “Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.” Mark Twain
- “Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.” Arthur Ashe
- “Either you run the day or the day runs you.” Jim Rohn
- “Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today.” Malcolm X
- “Your attitude, not your aptitude, will determine your altitude.” Zig Ziglar
- “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.” Andy McIntyre
- “The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn …and change.” Carl Rogers
- “The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.” Mark Twain
- “Have you ever been at sea in a dense fog, when it seemed as if a tangible white darkness shut you in and the great ship, tense and anxious, groped her way toward the shore with plummet and sounding-line, and you waited with beating heart for something to happen? I was like that ship before my education began, only I was without compass or sounding line, and no way of knowing how near the harbor was. “Light! Give me light!” was the wordless cry of my soul, and the light of love shone on me in that very hour.” Helen Keller
- “Aim for success, not perfection. Never give up your right to be wrong, because then you will lose the ability to learn new things and move forward with your life. Remember that fear always lurks behind perfectionism.” David M. Burns
- “Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.” Will Durant
- “Be miserable. Or motivate yourself. Whatever has to be done, it’s always your choice.” Wayne Dyer
- “The difference between school and life? In school, you’re taught a lesson and then given a test. In life, you’re given a test that teaches you a lesson.” Tom Bodett
- “We learn more by looking for the answer to a question and not finding it than we do from learning the answer itself.” Lloyd Alexander
- “Don’t let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.” John R. Wooden
- “You will either step forward into growth, or you will step backward into safety.” Abraham Maslow
- “If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him.
- An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.” Ben Franklin
- “If people did not do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.” Ludwig Wittgenstein
- “We can easily manage if we will only take, each day, the burden appointed to it. But the load will be too heavy for us if we carry yesterday’s burden over again today, and then add the burden of the morrow before we are required to bear it.” John Newton
- “It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.” Albert Einstein
- “I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.” Maya Angelou
- “Who questions much, shall learn much, and retain much.” Francis Bacon
- “Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.” Mahatma Gandhi
- “Real learning comes about when the competitive spirit has ceased.” Jiddu Krishnamurti
- “They cannot stop me. I will get my education, if it is in the home, school, or anyplace.” Malala Yousafzai
- “That is never too often repeated, which is never sufficiently learned.” Seneca
- “Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.” Leonardo da Vinci
- “Minds are like parachutes, they only function when they are open.” James Dewar
- “To accuse others for one’s own misfortunes is a sign of want of education. To accuse oneself shows that one’s education has begun. To accuse neither oneself nor others shows that one’s education is complete.” Epictetus
- “Learning is like rowing upstream: not to advance is to drop back.” Chinese proverb
- “Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don’t.” Bill Nye
- “The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.” Dorothy Parker
- “Success is a poor teacher.” Robert Kiyosaki
- “I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.” Thomas Jefferson
- “Time is the best teacher, but unfortunately, it kills all of its students.” Robin Williams
- “The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn.” Cicero
- “Apply yourself. Get all the education you can, but then, by God, do something. Don’t just stand there, make it happen.” Lee Iacocca
- “Despise school and remain a fool.” German proverb
- “Life itself is your teacher, and you are in a state of constant learning.” Bruce Lee
- “As long as you live, keep learning how to live.” Seneca
- “If you don’t go after what you want, you’ll never have it. If you don’t ask, the answer is always no. If you don’t step forward, you’re always in the same place.” Nora Roberts
- “The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.” Baruch Spinoza
- “The learned man knows that he is ignorant.” Victor Hugo
- “Experience, travel – these are an education in themselves.” Euripides
- “Always do your best. What you plant now, you will harvest later.” Og Mandino
- “Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it.” Albert Einstein
- “Do you know the difference between education and experience? Education is when you read the fine print; experience is what you get when you don’t. ” Pete Seeger
- “Teachers open the door, but you must enter by yourself.” Chinese Proverb
- “The ideal school would teach health, wealth, and happiness. It‘d be free, self-paced, and available to all. It‘d show opposing ideas and students would self-verify truth. No grades, no tests, no diplomas – just learning. Actually, you’re already here. Careful who you follow.” Naval Ravikant
- “Keep on going, and the chances are that you will stumble on something, perhaps when you are least expecting it. I never heard of anyone ever stumbling on something sitting down.” Charles F. Kettering
- “Remember that failure is an event, not a person.” Zig Ziglar
- “If you don’t design your own life plan, chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much.” Jim Rohn
- “You can teach a student a lesson for a day; but if you can teach him to learn by creating curiosity, he will continue the learning process as long as he lives.” Clay P. Bedford
- “A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.” Henry B Adams
- “Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants.” John W. Gardner
- “To teach is to learn twice.” Joseph Joubert
- “Do not confine your children to your own learning, for they were born in another time.” Chinese proverb
- “What we learn with pleasure we never forget.” Alfred Mercier
- “Why should society feel responsible only for the education of children, and not for the education of all adults of every age?” Erich Fromm
- “Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.” James Baldwin
- “Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing.”
- Albert Schweitzer
- “Too often we give children answers to remember rather than problems to solve.” Roger Lewin
- “The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think — rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with thoughts of other men.” Bill Beattie
- “The best teachers are those who show you where to look but don’t tell you what to see.” Alexandra K. Trenfor
- “Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.” G.K. Chesterton
- “Children are apt to live up to what you believe of them.” Lady Bird Johnson
- “Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand.” Chinese proverb
- “Nine tenths of education is encouragement.” Anatole France
- “If someone is going down the wrong road, he doesn’t need motivation to speed him up. What he needs is education to turn him around.” Jim Rohn
- “The most beautiful things in the creating of the child are his “mistakes.” The more a child’s work is full of these individual mistakes the more wonderful it is. And the more a teacher removes them from the child’s work the duller, more desolate and impersonal it becomes.” Franz Cizek
- “Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them to become what they are capable of becoming.” Goethe
- “Education cost money, but then so does ignorance.” Claus Moser
- “I believe that education is all about being excited about something. Seeing passion and enthusiasm helps push an educational message.“ Steve Irwin
- “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” Nelson Mandela
- “Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.” Margaret Mead
- “The person who asks questions is more helpful than the person who offers advice.” James Clear
- “Instruction does much, but encouragement everything.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- “The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future life.” Plato
- “Kids don’t remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are.” Jim Henson
- “Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.” Aristotle
- “I think the big mistake in schools is trying to teach children anything, and by using fear as the basic motivation. Fear of getting failing grades, fear of not staying with your class, etc. Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker.” Stanley Kubrick
- “The more you make it easy for your kids, the more you remove the struggle necessary for learning.” Maxime Lagacé
- “The highest result of education is tolerance.” Hellen Keller
- “All learning has an emotional base.” Plato
- “The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.” C.S. Lewis
- “If a seed of a lettuce will not grow, we do not blame the lettuce. Instead, the fault lies with us for not having nourished the seed properly.” Buddhist proverb
- “You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance.” Franklin P. Jones
- “Education is supposed to juice your curiosity, not diminish or sate it.” Walter Isaacson
- “The school is the last expenditure upon which America should be willing to economize.” Franklin D. Roosevelt
- “The foundation of every state is the education of its youth.” Diogenes
- “The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.” Plutarch
- “People learn more on their own rather than being force fed.” Socrates
- “By learning you will teach; by teaching you will understand.” Latin proverb
- “Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.” William James
- “Teaching kids to count is fine, but teaching them what counts is best.” Bob Talber
- “If you are planning for a year, sow rice; if you are planning for a decade, plant trees; if you are planning for a lifetime, educate people.” Chinese proverb