Human beings are curious by nature.
- Aristotle

Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence.
- Abigail Adams

Upon the subject of education ... I can only say that I view it as the most important subject which we as a people may be engaged in.
- Abraham Lincoln

You cannot build character and courage by taking away man's initiative and independence.
- Abraham Lincoln

I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays, and have things arranged for them, that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas.
- Agatha Christie

It is as impossible to withhold education from the receptive mind as it is impossible to force it upon the unreasoning.
- Agnes Repplierg

Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.
- Albert Einstein

Curiosity is a delicate little plant that, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom.
- Albert Einstein

Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.
- Albert Einstein

Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.
- Albert Einstein

Example isn't another way to teach, it is the only way to teach.
- Albert Einstein

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds
- Albert Einstein

I never teach my pupils. I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn.
- Albert Einstein

It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.
- Albert Einstein

It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.
- Albert Einstein

It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wrack and ruin without fail. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty.
- Albert Einstein

It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer.
- Albert Einstein

Teaching should be such that what is offered is perceived as a valuable gift and not as a hard duty.
- Albert Einstein

The important thing is not to stop questioning.
- Albert Einstein

The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.
- Albert Einstein

Play is the highest form of research.
- Albert Einstein

Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing.
- Albert Schweitzer

The best teachers are those that show you where to look but don't tell you what to see.
- Alexandra K. Trenfor

The best teachers are those who show you where to look, but don't tell you what to see.
- Alexandra K.Trenfor

The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence.
- Amos Bronson Alcott

The freedom to make mistakes provides the best environment for creativity. Education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don't.
- Anatole Franc

Nine tenths of education is encouragement.
- Anatole France

I've learned... that the best classroom in the world is at the feet of an elderly person.
- Andy Rooney

I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built upon the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think.
- Anne Sullivan

It's a great mistake, I think, to put children off with falsehoods and nonsense, when their growing powers of observation and discrimination excite in them a desire to know about things.
- Anne Sullivan

People seldom see the halting and painful steps at which the most insignificant success is achieved.
- Anne Sullivan

Learning is not a spectator sport.
- Anonymous

The uncreative mind can spot wrong answers, but it takes a very creative mind to spot wrong questions.
- Anthony Jay

If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.
- Antoine de St. Exupery

All men by nature desire to know.
- Aristotle

All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth.
- Aristotle

Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.
- Aristotle

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
- Aristotle

Teaching is the highest form of understanding.
- Aristotle

The key to everything is patience. You get the chicken by hatching the egg -- not by smashing it.
- Arnold Glasow

Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.
- Arthur Koestler

The beautiful thing about learning is that no one can take it away from you.
- B.B. King

Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality.
- Beatrix Potter

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

The greatest good you can do for another is not just to share your riches, but to reveal to him his own.
- Benjamin Disraeli

Games lubricate the body and the mind.
- Benjamin Franklin

The biggest atrocity of all is to indoctrinate our children into a system that does not value their creative expression, nor encourage their unique abilities.
- Benjamin Greene

To teach a man how he may learn to grow independently, and for himself, is perhaps the greatest service that one man can do another.
- Benjamin Jowett

Intelligence is not to make no mistakes, but quickly to see how to make them good.
- Bertolt Brecht

Almost all education has a political motive: it aims at strengthening some group, national or religious or even social, in the competition with other groups. It is this motive, in the main, which determines the subjects taught, the knowledge offered and the knowledge withheld, and also decides what mental habits the pupils are expected to acquire. Hardly anything is done to foster the inward growth of mind and spirit; in fact, those who have had the most education are very often atrophied in their mental and spiritual life.
- Bertrand Russell

Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.
- Bertrand Russell

The aim of education should be to teach us how to think, rather than what to think. To improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, rather than to load the memory with thoughts of other men.
- Bill Beattie

I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.
- Bill Cosby

The one real object of education is to have a man in the condition of continually asking questions.
- Bishop Mandell Creighton

Teaching kids to count is fine, but teaching them what counts is best.
- Bob Talbert

Few things help an individual more than to place responsibility upon him and let him know that you trust him.
- Booker T. Washington

If I ran a school, I'd give the average grade to the ones who gave me all the right answers, for being good parrots. I'd give the top grades to those who made a lot of mistakes and told me about them, and then told me what they learned from them.
- Buckminster Fuller

There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly.
- Buckminster Fuller

Teachers should guide without dictating, and participate without dominating.
- C. B. Neblette

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 a vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.
- Carl Jung

If we value independence, if we are disturbed by the growing conformity of knowledge, then we may wish to set up conditions of learning which make for uniqueness.
- Carl Rogers

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

When you make the finding yourself--even if you are the last person on Earth to see the light--you will never forget it.
- Carl Sagan

Children have more need of models than of critics.
- Carolyn Coats

A very little key will open a very heavy door.
- Charles Dickens

Of all the joyous motives of school life, the love of knowledge is the only abiding one; the only one which determines the scale, so to speak, upon which the person will hereafter live.
- Charlotte Mason

Self-education is the only possible education; the rest is mere veneer laid on the surface of a child's nature.
- Charlotte Mason

A child's life is like a piece of paper on which every person leaves a mark.
- Chinese Proverb

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

Learning is a treasure which accompanies its owner everywhere.
- Chinese Proverb

One must be a student before one can be a teacher.
- Chinese Proverb

Teachers open the door, but you must enter by yourself.
- Chinese Proverb

If you want happiness for a lifetime, help the next generation.
- Chinese saying

Rewards and punishments are the lowest form of education.
- Chuang-Tzu

It is what we think we know already that often prevents us from learning.
- Claude Bernard

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

Learning without thought is labor lost.
- Confucius

You cannot open a book without learning something.
- Confucius

Education is soul crafting.
- Cornel West

Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain -- and most fools do.
- Dale Carnegie

For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.
- Dorothy L. Sayers

The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.
- Dorothy Parker

Education is the ability to meet life's situations.
- Dr. John G. Hibben

Teaching is not just a job. It is a human service and it must be thought of as a mission.
- Dr. Ralph Tyler

Children want the same things we want. To laugh, to be challenged, to be entertained, and delighted.
- Dr. Seuss

Learning is not compulsory. Neither is survival.
- Dr. W. Edwards Deming

I like a teacher who gives you something to take home to think about besides homework.
- Edith Ann [Lily Tomlin]

It has always seemed strange to me that in our endless discussions about education so little stress is laid on the pleasure of becoming an educated person, the enormous interest it adds to life. To be able to be caught up into the world of thought--that is to be educated.
- Edith Hamilton

Many highly intelligent people are poor thinkers. Many people of average intelligence are skilled thinkers. The power of the car is separate from the way the car is driven.
- Edward De Bono

Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
- Edward Everett

Remember always that you have not only the right to be an individual; you have an obligation to be one. You cannot make any useful contribution in life unless you do this.
- Eleanor Roosevelt

In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.
- Eric Hoffer

Perhaps the greatest joy is learning how to motivate yourself.
- Floyd Maxwell

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

Because we cannot measure the things that have the most meaning, we give the most meaning to the things we can measure.
- Fred Hargadon

It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.
- Frederick Douglass

The surest way to corrupt a young man is to teach him to esteem more highly those who think alike than those who think differently.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.
- G.K. Chesterton

Education ... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.
- G.M. Trevelyan

You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him to find it within himself.
- Galileo

The more you use your mind, the more you'll have to use.
- George A. Dorsey

My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself.
- George Bernard Shaw

What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.
- George Bernard Shaw

Every student can learn. Just not on the same day or in the same way.
- George Evans

A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
- George Santayana

To encourage literature and the arts is a duty which every good citizen owes to his country.
- George Washington

Education is understanding relationships.
- George Washington Carver

I know of nothing more inspiring than that of making discoveries for ones self.
- George Washington Carver

Be aware that young people have to be able to make their own mistakes, and that times change.
- Gina Shapira

Children want to learn to the degree that they are unable to distinguish learning from fun. They keep this attitude until we adults convince them that learning is not fun.
- Glenn Doman

Correction does much, but encouragement does more.
- Goethe

One never learns to understand truly anything but what one loves.
- Goethe

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 is not a race, with winners and losers. It's not a commodity to be bought and sold.
- Grace Llewellyn & Amy Silver

The most important function of education at any level is to develop the personality of the individual and the significance of his life to himself and to others.
- Grayson Kirk

I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.
- Groucho Marx

The plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda - a deliberate scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas ready-made. The aim is to make 'good' citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive citizens.
- H. L. Mencken

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe...
- H.G. Wells

The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.
- H.L. Mencken

Children need love, especially when they do not deserve it.
- Harold S. Hulbert

In an effective classroom students should not only know what they are doing, they should also know why and how.
- Harry K. Wong

It is only as we develop others that we permanently succeed.
- Harvey S. Firestone

A well-educated mind will always have more questions than answers.
- Helen Keller

The best educated human being is the one who understands most about the life in which he is placed.
- Helen Keller

The highest result of education is tolerance.
- Helen Keller

To know how to suggest is the art of teaching.
- Henri Frederic Amiel

The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.
- Henri L. Bergson

A teacher affects eternity; no one can tell where his influence stops.
- Henry Adams

They know enough who know how to learn.
- Henry Adams

Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.
- Henry Brooks Adams

We should seek to be fellow students with the pupil, and should learn of, as well as with him, if we would be most helpful to him.
- Henry David Thoreau

What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.
- Henry David Thoreau

If you think you can do a thing, or think you can't do a thing; you're right.
- Henry Ford

Education makes people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.
- Henry Peter Brougham

A library is not a luxury but one of the necessities of life.
- Henry Ward Beecher

The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.
- Herbert Spencer

A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering on cold iron.
- Horace Mann

If a child can't learn the way we teach, maybe we should teach the way they learn.
- Ignacio Estrada

Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.
- Isaac Asimov

School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.
- Ivan Illich

The mind grows by what it feeds on.
- J.G. Holland

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 days work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years.
- Jacques Barzun

The test and the use of man's education is that he finds pleasure in the exercise of his mind.
- Jacques Barzun

Teaching is a strategic act of engagement.
- James Bellanca

There are obviously two educations. One should teach us how to make a living and the other how to live.
- James Truslow Adams

Every individual matters. Every individual has a role to play. Every individual makes a difference.
- Jane Goodall

Better than a thousand days of diligent study is one day with a great teacher.
- Japanese Proverb

The principle goal of education is to create men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done.
- Jean Piaget

The principle goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simple of repeating what other generations have done--men who are creative, inventive, and discoverers.
- Jean Piaget

Do I dare set forth here the most important, the most useful rule of all education? It is not to save time, but to squander it.
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau

True teaching is one that not teaches knowledge but stimulates children to gain it.
- Jill Eggleton

No matter how good teaching may be, each student must take the responsibility for his own education.
- John Carolus

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

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

Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.
- John Dewey

Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.
- John Dewey

All of us do not have equal talent, but all of us should have an equal opportunity to develop our talent.
- John F. Kennedy

Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.
- John F. Kennedy

All I am saying in this book can be summed up in two words: Trust Children. Nothing could be more simple, or more difficult. Difficult because to trust children we must first learn to trust ourselves, and most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted.
- John Holt

No use to shout at them to pay attention. If the situations, the materials, the problems before the child do not interest him, his attention will slip off to what does interest him, and no amount of exhortation of threats will bring it back.
- John Holt

Learning is not the product of teaching. Learning is the product of the activity of learners.
- John Holt

Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced.
- John Keats

Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some of us more than we can ever learn from books.
- John Lubbock

The important thing is not so much that every child should be taught, as that every child should be given the wish to learn.
- John Lubbock

A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the dominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body.
- John Stuart Mill

Genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us.
- John Taylor Gatto

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

“Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: 'You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.” 

― Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” 
― Augustine of Hippo

“The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.” 
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King