A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V XYZ
Once Iwarrior World is established, these pages will solicit community input and include multimedia links. In the future a quotes manager/curator, will be in charge of expanding the collection.
Edward Abbey
Simplicity is always a virtue. One kid on a riverbank working out a Stephen Foster tune on his new harmonica heard from the correct esthetic distance projects more magic and power than the entire Vienna Philharmonic and Chorus laboring (once again) through the Mozart Requiem or Bach’s B Minor Mass.
Melinda Abitz Fifth Grade Teacher
The word accomplished is a relative term. We’re accomplished when the students and teacher both learn something. As teachers we can never achieve perfection, only strive to do our best and enjoy the journey. An accomplished teacher is someone who learns to eat their lunch in six minutes.
Philip C. Abrami Professor of Psychology
Computers may enhance student learning by increasing access to information, making learning more intrinsically interesting, and encourage the learner to become self-directed. But man is a social animal; learning is a social exercise as well as an individual, private event. Successful integration of computers into the classroom may be enhanced by active collaboration among learners and between students and teachers.
Marcel Achard
When I give a lecture, I accept that people look at their watches, but what I do not tolerate is when they look at it and raise it to their ear to find out if it stopped.
Chinua Achebe (b. 1930) Nigerian writer
Children are young, but they’re not naive. And they’re honest. They’re not going to keep wide awake if the story is boring. When they get excited you can see it in their eyes.
Abigail Adams
It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed . . . The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. All history will convince you of this, and that wisdom and penetration are the fruit of experience, not the lessons of retirement and leisure. Great necessities call out great virtues.
Cindy Adams
Success has made failures of many men.
Henry Adams (1838-1918) American historian
What you do speaks so loudly I can’t hear what you are saying. Your lack of planning does not constitute a crisis in my work plan. They know enough who know how to learn. The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught. A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops. Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.
John Adams Diary March 15, 1756
I sometimes in my sprightly moments consider myself, in my great chair at school, as some dictator at the head of a commonwealth. In this little state I can discover all the great geniuses, all the surprising actions and revolutions of the great world, in miniature. I have several renowned generals but three feet high, and several deep projecting politicians in petticoats. I have others catching and dissecting flies, accumulating remarkable pebbles, cockle shells, &c., with as ardent curiosity as any virtuoso in the Royal Society. Some rattle and thunder out A, B, C, with as much fire and impetuosity as Alexander fought, and very often sit down and cry as heartily upon being outspelt, as Caesar did, when at Alexander’s sepulchre he recollected that the Macedonian hero had conquered the world before his age. At one table sits Mr. Insipid, foppling and fluttering, spinning his whirligig , or playing with his fingers, as gaily and wittily as any Frenchified coxcomb brandishes his cane or rattles his snuff-box. At another, sits the polemical divine, plodding and wrangling in his mind about “Adams fall, in which we sinned all,” as his Primer has it. In short, my little school. . . . . ” “In short, my little school, like the great world, is made up of kings, politicians, divines, L. D’s[1], fops, buffoons, fiddlers, sycophants, fools, coxcombs, chimney sweepers, and every other character drawn in history, or seen in the world. Is it not, then, the highest pleasure, my friend, to preside in this little world, to bestow the proper applause upon virtuous and generous actions, to blame and punish every vicious and contracted trick, to wear out of the tender mind every thing that is mean and little, and fire the new-born soul with a noble ardour and emulation? The world affords no greater pleasure.
I must study politics and war, that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain. Letters to his Wife: Vol. II_Letter #78, 1780
Marilyn Jager Adams
North Americans believe they are married to education but it’s apparent that it’s not a loving marriage. Nobody brings flowers home anymore or is even on time for dinner. Until people believe in the romance of public education our schools will not come alive again.
Scott Adams
Accept that some days you’re the pigeon and some days you’re the statue.
Catherine Aird
If you can’t be a good example, then you’ll just have to be a horrible warning.
Johann Georg Albrechtsberger (teacher of Ludwig van Beethoven)
He has never learned anything, and he can do nothing in decent style.
A. Bronson Alcott (1799-1888)
The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence.
[The true teacher] inspires self-trust. He guides their eyes from himself to the spirit that quickens him. He will have no disciple.
Louisa May Alcott
A child her wayward pencil drew
On margins of her book;
Garlands of flower, dancing elves,
Bud, butterfly, and brook,
Lessons undone, and plum forgot,
Seeking with hand and heart
The teacher whom she learned to love
Before she knew t’was Art.
I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my own ship.
Brian Aldiss
When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults and they enter society, one of the politer names of hell. That is why we dread children, even if we love them. They show us the state of our decay.
Barbara J. Alexander
How can we hope to remain economically competitive in a world in which…90% of Dutch high-school students take advanced math courses and 100% of teachers in Germany have double majors, while the best we can say about our pocket of excellence is that 75% of [American] students have learned to critique tactfully?
Muhammad Ali
It’s lack of faith that makes people afraid of meeting challenges, and I believe in myself Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth The man who has no imagination has no wings. He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life. I always liked to chase the girls. Parkinson’s stops all that. Now I might have a chance to go to heaven. Muhammad Ali calling his Parkinson’s Disease a blessing I hated every minute of training, but I said, “Don’t quit.” Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.
Alice E. Allen
I’ve just found out –
Perhaps you knew it –
That work’s just play
When you love to do it.
Gracie Allen
When I was born, I was so surprised I couldn’t talk for a year and a half.
Smartness runs in my family. When I went to school I was so smart my teacher was in my class for five years.
James Allen
You are today where your thoughts have brought you. You will be tomorrow where your thoughts take you.
Woody Allen .
I had a terrible education. I attended a school for emotionally disturbed teachers. We live in a world with too many moving parts. And my parents finally realize that I’m kidnapped and they snap into action immediately: They rent out my room. Eighty percent of success is showing up. I took a speed reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It’s about Russia.
William Allin
Education is not the answer to the question. Education is the means to the answer to all questions.
Henri Frédéric Amiel
To do easily what is difficult for others is the mark of talent. To do what is impossible for talent is the mark of genius.
Morey Amsterdam
I am smart. I know a lot. I just can’t think of it.
Betty B. Anderson
When you are a teacher you are always in the right place at the right time. There is no wrong time for learning.
Christopher Andreae
Ignorance is a right! Education is eroding one of the few democratic freedoms remaining to us.
Julie Andrews
Some people regard discipline as a chore. For me, it is a kind of order that sets me free to fly.
Maya Angelou
The quality of strength lined with tenderness is an unbeatable combination, as are intelligence and necessity when unblunted by formal education.
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.
Anonymous/Unknown
Work! Thank God for the swing of it, for the clamoring, hammering ring of it. It makes me sad to see the disintegration of traditional support networks – the family, community and religion. We need a sense of our roots. We need a past so we can create a future. high school student.
Advise and counsel him; if he does not listen, let adversity teach him.
Formal education will earn you a living, self-education will make you a fortune.
People rowing a boat don’t have time to rock it. Do all your learning while you’re young, for when you get older nobody can tell you anything.
Steering committee: Four people trying to park a car.
Conference: Where people take of work to talk about working.
Committee Meeting: A get-together to homogenize thinking.
Music is what feelings sound like.
Philosopher: I blind man in a dark room looking for a black hat which is not there.
If you call a thing bad, you do little.
It you call a thing good, you do much.
Psychology: The science of predicting how people behave, and explaining why they don’t.
If a neurotic is a person who builds a castle in the air; and a psychotic is a person who lives in it. Then a psychologist is a person who collects the rent.
One of the advantages of teaching in an elementary school is that you can find a place to park.
The wise don’t expect to find life worth living; they make it that way.
The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work.
Good, better, best. Never let it rest, until your good is better and your best is best. Give the world the best that you have and the best will come back to you.
It is curious that the head only begins to swell when the mind stops growing.
No one is a tired as the person who does nothing.
The grammar has a rule absurd
Which I would call an outworn myth;
“A preposition is a word,
You mustn’t end a sentence with!”
We have 35 million laws trying to reinforce ten commandments.
Never wrestle a pig. You both get dirty and the pig enjoys it.
The one thing common to most success stories is the alarm clock.
Remember when you are not practicing and getting ready, somewhere someone is, and when you meet him, he will win.
Together
Everybody
Achieves
More
A winner goes through a problem; a loser goes around it and never past it.
A procrastinator’s work is never done.
Don’t count the days, make the days count.
Each day we are given a valuable gift, a ‘new day.’
What will we do with that gift? The choice is ours to make good use of it or squander it.
Those who watch the clock won’t need to worry about their future – they won’t have any.
Nowadays, kids have to go to college . . . in order to get a good high school education.
Education is: Learning what you didn’t know you didn’t know.
Education is: What you have left when you subtract what you have forgotten from what you have learned.
I always wanted to be a procrastinator, but I never got around to it.
Paralyze their resistance with your insistence.
A winner listens; a loser just waits until it is his turn to talk.
I have never heard of someone stumbling on something big while sitting down.
Be a self-starter. Create plans and set them in motion.
Be a dreamer and a doer.
Diplomacy is the art of letting someone else have it your way.
Failure isn’t fatal and success isn’t final.
Constructive criticism is like a soft kick in the rear.
Leaders are like eagles. They don’t flock – you find them one at a time.
The longest distance between two points is a short-cut.
Real leaders are ordinary people with extraordinary determination.
We see obstacles when we take our eyes off our goals.
The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge, others just gargle.
Be a champion in practice. That is where champions are made.
I believe in mountains; they are a practical reminder of how high I must reach.
If you don’t set goals for yourself, you are doomed to work to achieve the goals of someone else.
People don’t care about how much you know until they know how much you care.
What your mind can conceive and your heart can believe, your body can achieve.
Visualize yourself as the player you want to be.
Winners see what they want to happen. Losers see what they want to avoid.
Progress comes from the intelligent use of experience.
I never learned anything while I was talking.
Any fault recognized is half corrected.
The best way to save face is to keep the lower part shut.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
Create mental pictures of your goals, then work to make those pictures become realities.
The great challenge of life is to decide what’s important and to disregard all the rest.
When bad times come, you can let them make you bitter or better.
Most important things to know are difficult to learn.
The biggest mistake you can make is to believe that you are working for someone else.
I’ve learned that you never get rewarded for the things you intended to do.
Don’t wait for your ship to come in; swim out to it.
Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows that it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows that it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death. It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or gazelle – when the sun comes up you had better be running.
When success turns an athlete’s head, he faces failure.
The golden opportunity you are seeking is in yourself.
It is not in your environment, not in luck or chance, or the help of others; it is in yourself alone.
Winners do not count on breaks; they make breaks count.
Luck is when preparation meets opportunity.
True greatness consists in being great in little things.
An idea is only as good as its execution.
A lot of teachers love their jobs. It’s the work they hate.
Behold the turtle – he only makes progress when he sticks his neck out.
He didn’t know it couldn’t be done so he did it.
Even a mosquito doesn’t get a slap on the back until he starts to work.
The bigger a man’s head gets, the easier it is to fill his shoes.
Follow the three R’s:
Respect for self;
Respect for others; and
Responsibility for your actions.
It is not hard to make decisions when you know what your values are.
What really counts is not the number of hours you put in, but how much you put into the hours.
A diamond is a chunk of coal that made good under pressure.
Macho does not prove mucho.
Winners are people who have dedicated their lives to winning.
Following the path of least resistance is what makes rivers and men crooked.
When things go wrong, as sometimes they will
When the road you’re trudging seems all uphill;
When the funds are low and the debts are high,
And you want to smile but you have to sigh;
When life is pressing you down a bit
Rest if you must, but don’t you quit.
No horse gets anywhere till he is harnessed.
No stream ever drives anything until it is confined.
No life grows until it is focused, dedicated, and disciplined.
We accomplish in proportion to what we attempt.
Growl all day and you’ll be dog tired by night.
The reason some people do not succeed is because their wishbone is where their backbone ought to be.
Winners forget they are in a race: they just love to run.
The best angle from which to approach any problem is the try-angle.
Don’t be afraid to go out on a limb – that is where the fruit is.
People usually get at odds with each other when they try to get even.
The impossible is what nobody can do until somebody does it.
Not only do many people ‘want their cake and eat it too,’ they also want your cake.
The key to success is to climb the ladder instead of waiting for the elevator.
Your biggest task is not to get ahead of others, but to surpass yourself.
If everything is going your way, you are probably heading in the wrong direction.
Leadership is an attitude before it is an ability.
Enthusiasm is like a coat of fresh paint; it covers up a lot of rough spots.
A ship in a harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.
Its not the weight of the load that gets you down, it’s the way you carry it.
Experience is an expensive teacher. All others are underpaid.
The one who is too old to learn today was the child who was too young to learn yesterday.
Stop watching the clock; time will pass, will you?
If you promise not believe everything your child says happens at this school, I’ll promise not to believe everything he says happens at home.
Education is not received. It is achieved.
Memorization is what we resort to when what we are learning makes no sense.
Beethoven’s composition teacher pronounced him a hopeless dunce who couldn’t learn anything.
Knowledge is like money. If you keep quiet about it, people will think you’ve got more than you have.
The secret of teaching is to appear to have know all your life what you learned this afternoon.
It’s not the IQ but the I WILL that’s most important in education.
Puberty is the time when students stop asking questions and begin to question answers.
There’s nothing wrong with teenagers that reasoning with them won’t aggravate.
It’s not what you think you are –
But what you think, you are.
It takes a real storm in the average person’s life to make him realize how much worrying he has done over the squalls.
Don’t Tell Your Pupils Too Much
Don’t tell your pupils too much. Give them a chance to find out something for themselves. Let the mind have a chance to develop by doing such work. The muscles that are never exercised become inert. The mind that never has an opportunity to work will never grow. There is no doubt that many teachers explain too much. There is a difference between giving the child a helping hand over a hard place and picking him up bodily and carrying him over. The Normal Instructor, October 1895
A child reminds us that playtime is an essential part of our daily routine. All children are gifted. Some just open their presents later than others. It’s children that pull us toward love and everyday business that pushes us away.
…because they are children and for no other reason they have dignity and worth simply because they are … The more I encourage a child to think for himself, the more he will care what I think.
Parenthood: the art of bringing up children without putting them down.
Where teachers are building temples
With loving and infinite care,
Planning each arch with patience,
Laying each stone with prayer,
The temple the teacher is building
Will last while the ages roll;
For that beautiful unseen temple
Is a child’s immortal soul.
A baby is an angel whose wings decrease as his legs increase.
There may be some doubt as to who are the best people to have children, but there can be no doubt that parents are the worst.
The worst danger that confronts the younger generation is the example set by the older generation.
A mother takes twenty years to make a man of her boy, and another woman makes a fool of him in twenty minutes.
Children seldom misquote. In fact, they usually repeat word for word what you shouldn’t have said.
By the time a girl becomes a teenager, her parents are so old that she cannot do anything with them.
A teenager is always too tired to hold a dishcloth, but never too tired to hold a phone.
There’s nothing wrong with teenagers that trying to reason with them won’t aggravate.
On some days I feel like I’m dying in the classroom – on other days I know that I’m changing the world. Anon. Teacher
A wise man is one who finally realizes that there are some questions one can ask which may have no answers.
Learning makes a man fit company for himself.
An educational system isn’t worth a great deal if it teaches young people how to make a living but doesn’t teach them how to make a life.
A college education never hurt anybody who was willing to learn after he got it. –
Author Unknown
Education is not received. It is achieved. It is what we learn after we think we know it all, that counts. Shortchange your education now and you may be short of change the rest of your life. – Author Unknown
Television commercials are educational. They teach you how stupid advertisers think you are.
The truly educated man is that rare individual who can separate reality from illusion. – Author Unknown
Of course there’s a lot of knowledge in universities: the freshmen bring a little in; the seniors don’t take much away, so knowledge sort of accumulates…
Learn while you’re young and not while you’re old, that a good education is better than gold, for silver and gold will all melt away, but a good education will never decay.
The best way to learn is to become a teacher.
The only difference between a rut and a grave is the depth.
A wise man is one who finally realizes that there are some questions one can ask which may have no answers.
It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber.
If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.
Simply being different isn’t wrong.
Don’t try to be a duckling
if you’re born to be a swan.
Learning makes a man fit company for himself.
Your Education is worth what You are worth. It is what we learn after we think we know it all, that counts.
Learning is like rowing upstream. Advance or lose all.
We don’t stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing.
Nothing grieves a child more than to study the wrong lesson and learn something he wasn’t supposed to.
School and education should not be confused; it is only school that can be made easy.
The only thing that children wear out faster than shoes are parents and teachers.
Education can help you earn more. But not many schoolteachers can prove it.
Neither written word nor spoken plea
Can teach young ears
What men should be
Not all the books on the shelves
But what teachers are themselves.
(Note to student’s parents from an English schoolmaster)
If you promise not to believe everything your child says happens at this school, I’ll promise not to believe everything he says happens at home. The amount of education you have determines your loot in life. The accent may be on youth these days but the stress is still on the teacher.
It’s not the IQ but the I WILL that is most important in education.
Puberty is the period when students stop asking questions and begin to question answers.
An educational system isn’t worth a great deal if it teaches young people how to make a living but doesn’t teach them how to make a life.
If you plan for a decade, plant a tree. If you plan for a century, teach the children.
Hannah Arendt (German-born American political scientist, 1906-1975)
The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token to save it from that ruin, which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and the young, would be inevitable. An education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their choice of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.
Aristotle (Greek Philsopher 384 – 322 B.C.).
The statesman therefore must legislate with all these considerations in view, both in respect of the parts of the soul and of their activities, and aiming more particularly at the greater goods and the ends. And the same principle applies in regard to modes of life and choices of conduct: A man should be capable of engaging in business and war, but still more capable of living in peace and leisure; and he should do what is necessary and useful, but still more should he do what is noble. These then are the aims that ought to be kept in view in the education of the citizens both while still children and at the later ages that require education. One must learn by doing the thing, for though you think you know it, you have no certainty until you try. We cannot learn without pain. The one exclusive sign of a thorough knowledge is the power of teaching. What we have to learn to do, we have to learn by doing. All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth. Educated men are as much superior to uneducated men as the living are to the dead. The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead. Teaching is the highest form of understanding. Those who educate children well are more to be honored than even their parents, for these only give them life; those the art of living well. Education is the best provision for old age. I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who over comes his enemies. What we have to do, we learn by doing. The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
Harvey Armstrong psychiatrist
Jail doesn’t work, getting harsh doesn’t work, psychotherapy doesn’t work (for anti-social teenagers.) Kids need structure and support from adults who are significant in their lives.
Roger Ascham (1515-68)
There is no such whetstone, to sharpen a good wit and encourage a will to learning, as is praise.
Sylvia Ashton-Warner (New Zealand teacher 1908-1984).
The truth is that I am enslaved . . . in one vast love affair with 70 children. [Teaching] is a potent drunkenness, an exhilaration, and it is one that does not leave depression in its wake. Education, fundamentally, is the increase of the percentage of the conscious in relation to the unconscious. I see the mind of the five-year-old as a volcano with two vents: destructiveness and creativeness. When I teach people I marry them. Not just part of us becomes a teacher. It engages the whole self – the woman or man, wife or husband, mother or father, the lover, the scholar or artist in you as well as the teacher earning money.
Isaac Asimov
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ (I’ve found it!), but ‘That’s funny…’
Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what’s right.
The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.
Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.
Assyrian clay tablet 2800 B.C.
Our earth is degenerate in these latter days; bribery and corruption are common; children no longer obey their parents; and the end of the world is evidently approaching.
Fred Astaire
The hardest job kids face today is learning good manners without seeing any.
Old age is like everything else. To make a success of it, you’ve got to start young.
Mary Astor (American Film Actress)
Real education should educate us out of self into something far finer – into selflessness which links us to all humanity.
W. H. Auden (Anglo-American poet and teacher 1907–73)
Of course, Behaviorism “works.” So does torture. Give me a no-nonsense, down-to-earth behaviorist, a few drugs, and simple electrical appliances, and in six months I will have him reciting the Athanasian Creed in public. Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those with whom I love, I can: All of them make me laugh. Only those in the last stage of disease could believe that children are true judges of character. A professor is one who talks in someone else’s sleep.
Saint Augustine
Faith is to believe what you do not yet see; the reward for this faith is to see what you believe. Patience is the companion of wisdom.
Marcus Aurelius
Practice even the things which you despair of achieving. What pulls the strings is the force hidden within; there lies . . . the real man.
Oswald Theodore Avery
Whenever you fall, pick up something.
Once Iwarrior World is established, these pages will solicit community input and include multimedia links. In the future a quotes manager, will be in charge of expanding the collection I created years ago for teachon.com