100 Encouraging and Uplifting Quotes for Teachers

Teaching is hard! Along with the joys of influencing the next generation come lesson planning, grading papers, making copies, dealing with discipline issues, and so much more. Teachers love their jobs, but sometimes they need something uplifting to remind them why they do what they do. Here are 100 quotes to encourage educators and remind them of their incredible value and importance to the world.

1. “If you have to put someone on a pedestal, put teachers. They are society’s heroes.” – Guy Kawasaki
2. “Better than a thousand days of diligent study is one day with a great teacher.” – Japanese Proverb
3. “A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.” – Henry Brooks Adams
4. “I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist, and that teaching might even be the greatest of the arts, since the medium is the human mind and spirit.” – John Steinbeck
5. “Watch a teacher with a classroom full of students, and you’ll see what real love looks like.” – Teresa Kwant
6. “In learning you will teach, and in teaching you will learn.” – Phil Collins
7. “Teachers, I believe, are the most responsible and important members of society because their professional efforts affect the fate of the earth.” – Helen Caldicott
8. “Teachers can change lives with just the right mix of chalk and challenges.” – Joyce Meyer
9. “What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.” – Percicles
10. “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” – Nelson Mandela
11. “If some students are unresponsive maybe you can’t teach them yet, but you can love them. And if you love them today, maybe you can teach them tomorrow.” – Jeffrey R. Holland
12. “Our fingerprints don’t fade from the lives we touch.” – Judy Blume
13. “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” – William Butler Yeats
14. “Kids don’t remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are.” – Jim Henson
15. “Sometimes the greatest PD is the teacher down the hall.” – Brian Aspinall
16. “Teaching is the profession that teaches all the other professions.” – Unknown
17. “Teaching is the greatest act of optimism.” – Colleen Wilcox
18. “This is the point of being a teacher. A glimmer of hope where you thought it didn’t exist.” – Matt Haig
19. “Those who know, do. Those that understand, teach.” – Aristotle
20. “Teaching is not a job. It’s a lifestyle. It permeates your whole life.” – Jill Biden
21. “It is not what is poured into a student, but what is planted, that counts.” – E.P. Bertin
22. “The fact that you worry about being a good teacher means that you already are one.” – Jodi Picoult
23. “Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today.” – Malcolm X
24. “Students don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” – John C. Maxwell
25. “I like a teacher who gives you something to take home to think about besides homework.” – Lily Tomlin
26. “The duties of a teacher are neither few nor small, but they elevate the mind and give energy to the character.” – Dorothea Dix
27. “Not all superheroes wear capes – some have teaching degrees.” – Unknown
28. “I am not a teacher, but an awakener.” – Robert Frost
29. “Teach the children so it will not be necessary to teach the adults.” – Abraham Lincoln
30. “The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.” – C.S. Lewis
31. “Teachers have three loves: love of learning, love of learners, and the love of bringing the first two loves together.” – Scott Hayden
32. “Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.” – B.F. Skinner
33. “All kids need is a little help, a little hope, and somebody who believes in them.” – Magic Johnson
34. “To teach is to learn twice over.” – Joseph Joubert
35. “Our task, regarding creativity, is to help children climb their own mountains, as high as possible. No one can do more.” – Loris Malaguzzi
36. “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
37. “What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to a human soul.” – Joseph Addison
38. “Teaching should be such that what is offered is perceived as a valuable gift and not as a hard duty.” – Albert Einstein
39. “The greatest use of a life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.” – William James
40. “Teaching is the perpetual end and office of all things. Teaching, instruction is the main design that shines through the sky and earth.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
41. “One of the beauties of teaching is that there is no limit to one’s growth as a teacher, just as there is no knowing beforehand how much your students can learn.” – Herbert Kohl
42. “Any genuine teaching will result, if successful, in someone’s knowing how to bring about a better condition of things than existed earlier.” – John Dewey
43. “When the untapped potential of a student meets the liberating art of a teacher, a miracle unfolds.” – Mary Hatwood Futrell
44. “The work of a teacher – exhausting, complex, idiosyncratic, never twice the same – is at its heart an ethical enterprise. Teaching is the vocation of vocations.” – William Ayres
45. “I’m not sayin’ I’m gonna change the world, but I guarantee that I will spark the brain that will.” – Tupac Shakur
46. “The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future life.” – Plato
47. “It takes a big heart to shape little minds.” – Unknown
48. “You are bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.” – Khalil Gibran
49. “In a completely rational society, the best of us would be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for something less.” – Lee Iacocca
50. “Education breeds confidence. Confidence breeds hope. Hope breeds peace.” – Confucius
51. “The best teachers teach from the heart, not from the book.” – Unknown
52. “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” – Antoine de Saint-Exuper
53. “A master can tell you what he expects of you. A teacher, though, awakens your own expectations.” – Patricia Neal
54. “I am indebted to my father for living, but to my teacher for living well.” – Alexander the Great
55. “To the world you may be just a teacher, but to your students you are a hero.” – Unknown
56. “Your heart is slightly bigger than the average human heart, but that’s because you’re a teacher.” – Aaron Bacall
57. “He who opens a school door, closes a prison.” – Victor Hugo
58. “Often, when I am reading a good book, I stop and thank my teacher.” – Jack Handey
59. “Teaching is a calling, too. And I’ve always thought that teachers in their way are holy – angels leading their flocks out of darkness.” – Jeannette Walls
60. “It’s easy to make a buck. It’s a lot tougher to make a difference.” – Tom Brokaw
61. “The teacher is the heart of the educational system.” – Sidney Hook
62. “What greater or better gift can we offer the republic than to teach and instruct our youth.” – Marcus T. Cicero
63. “When we strive to become better teachers than we are, everyone in our classroom becomes better too.” – Robert John Meehan
64. “Be a wonderful role model because you will be the window through which many children will see their future.” – Thomas Mckinnon
65. “Anyone who does anything to help a child in his life is a hero to me.” – Fred Rogers
66. “Most of us end up with no more than five or six people who remember us. Teachers have thousands of people who remember them for the rest of their lives.” – Andy Rooney
67. “What a teacher writes on the blackboard of life can never be erased.” – Unknown
68. “To me the sole hope of human salvation lies in teaching.” – George Bernard Shaw
69. “At the desk where I sit, I have learned one great truth. The answer for all our national problems – the answer for all the problems of the world – comes to a single word. Education.” – Lyndon B. Johnson
70. “I think the teaching profession contributes more to the future of our society than any other single profession.” – John Wooden
71. “Teachers can make such a profound impact on our lives and should be honored as heroes, I believe. They’re working for so little money, under such difficult circumstances, usually for the love of the service to the children. Many of us owe who we are to certain teachers who appeared at just the right time, in the right place, and had just the right words to propel us on our journey.” – Rainn Wilson
72. “I urge you to be teachers so that you can join with children as the co-collaborators in a plot to build a little place of ecstasy and poetry and gentle joy.” – Jonathan Kozol
73. “The argument could be made that the word hero is overused. I do not think, however, that this is the case when referring to teachers.” – Steve Maraboli
74. “They inspire you, they entertain you, and you end up learning a ton even when you don’t know it.” -Nicholas Sparks
75. “You can’t stop a teacher when they want to do something. They just do it.” – J.D. Salinger
76. “A teacher is a compass that activates the magnets of curiosity, knowledge, and wisdom in the pupils.” – Ever Garrison
77. “The beautiful thing about learning is that no one can take it away from you.” – B.B. King
78. “A hundred years from now, it will not matter what kind of car I drove, what kind of house I lived in, how much money I had in the bank. But the world may be a better place because I made a difference in the life of a child.” – Forest Witcraft
79. “Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.” – Edward Everett
80. “The best teachers are those who show you where to look but don’t tell you what to see.” – Alexandra K. Trenfor
81. “A good criterion for measuring success in life is the number of people you have made happy.” – Robert Lumsden
82. “Without teachers, life would have no class.” – Unknown
83. “The one exclusive sign of thorough knowledge is the power of teaching.” – Aristotle
84. “What greater joy can a teacher feel than to witness a child’s success.” Michelle L. Graham
85. “When educating the minds of our youth, we must not forget to educate their hearts.” – Dalai Lama
86. “No one has yet fully realized the wealth of sympathy, kindness, and generosity hidden in the soul of a child. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure.” – Emma Goldman
87. “An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.” – Benjamin Franklin
88. “The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.” – Sydney J. Harris
89. “Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.” – Theodore Roosevelt
90. “Whoever first coined the phrase, ‘you’re the wind beneath my wings,’ most assuredly was reflecting on the sublime influence of a very special teacher.” – Frank Trujillo
91. “Ideal teachers are those who use themselves as bridges over which they invite their students to cross, then having facilitated their crossing, joyfully collapse, encouraging them to create bridges of their own.” – Nikos Kazantzakis
92. “I put the relation of a fine teacher to a student just below the relation of a mother to a son.” – Thomas Wolfe
93. “One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feeling.” – Carl Jung
94. “The great teacher is not the man who supplies the most facts, but the one in whose presence we become different people.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
95. “Teaching is not just a job. It is a human service, and it must be thought of as a mission.” – Dr. Ralph Tyler
96. “Technology is just a tool. In terms of getting the kids working together and motivating them, the teacher is the most important.” – Bill Gates
97. “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
98. “Free the child’s potential, and you will transform him into the world.” – Maria Montessori
99. “Make a difference, change the game for the better, leave a legacy, be a guide that someone else can follow and make better, and then someone else will follow that and make that better.” – Carlos Wallace
100. “A truly amazing teacher is hard to find, difficult to part with, and impossible to forget.” – Unknown

The next time you feel overwhelmed with everything you have to do and guilty about the things you never seem to get done, reread these uplifting quotes to remind yourself that you matter, you’re a great teacher, and your students are lucky to have you!