A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W XYZ
Charles Wadsworth
By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he’s wrong.
Waheenee (Hidatsa)
Sometimes in the evening I sit, looking out on the big Missouri. The sun sets, and dusk steals over the water. In the shadows I seem again to see our Indian village, with smoke curling upward from the earth lodges, and in the river’s roar I hear the yells of warriors, and the laughter of little children as of old. It is but an old woman’s dream. Then I see but shadows and hear only the roar of the river, and tears come into my eyes. Our Indian life, I know, is gone forever.
Mary Waldrip
It’s important that people know what you stand for – and what you won’t stand for.
Lou Ann Walker (American author and sign language interpreter, 1952- )
Theories and goals of education don’t mean a whit if you don’t consider your students to be human beings.
R.C. Wallace
A dull teacher, with no enthusiasm in his own subject, commits the unpardonable sin.
William Arthur Ward
The mediocre teacher tells.
The good teacher explains.
The superior teacher demonstrates.
The great teacher inspires.
Constance Warren
The trouble with most textbooks is that they take the sport out of learning. Their authors have had all the excitement of the chase.
Earl Warren
What we learn from history is that we do not learn from history.
Booker T. Washington
The majority of successful men are persons who have had difficulties to overcome, problems to master; and in overcoming those difficulties and mastering those problems, they have gained strength of mind and a clearness of vision that few people who have had a life of ease have been able to attain.
Few thing help an individual more than to place responsibility upon him, and to let him know that you trust him.
Any man’s life will be filled with constant and unexpected encouragement if he makes up his mind to do his level best each day.
Few things help an individual more than to place responsibility upon him, and to let him know that you trust him.
Denzel Washington
Acting is just a way of making a living, the family is life.
John Watson 1901
At present the position of the Public School and High School teacher is unfortunate. His services are undervalued; he is underpaid; his work is monotonous; and, if he is a man who has a high ideal of education, his heart is almost broken by the unpromising material with which has often to deal, and the vexatious opposition he meets with from the low aims of his pupils, the irrational prejudices of their parents, and the often unwise interferences of the Board of which he is the servant.
Bill Watterson Calvin and Hobbes
People who get nostalgic about childhood were obviously never children.
Alan Watts
Zen . . . does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while on is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.
Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966)
Anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison.
Assistant masters came and went . . . Some liked little boys too little and some too much.
I expect you’ll be becoming a schoolmaster, sir. That’s what most of the gentlemen does, sir, that gets sent down for indecent behavior.’ Decline and Fall
Joseph Wax (adapted)
One must marvel at the intellectual quality of a teacher who can’t understand why children assault one another in the hallway, playground, and city street, when in the classroom the highest accolades are reserved for those who have beaten their peers. In many subtle and some not so subtle ways, teachers demonstrate that what children learn means much less than that they triumph over their classmates. Is this not assault? Classroom defeat is only the pebble that creates widening ripples of hostility. It is self-perpetuating. It is reinforced by peer censure, parental disapproval, and loss of self-concept. If the classroom is a model, and if that classroom models competition, assault in the hallways should surprise no one.
John Wayne
True grit is making a decision and standing by it, doing what must be done – for no moral man can have peace of mind if he leaves undone what he knows he should have done.
Alan Webber founding editor of Fast Company
Education is to the digital age what the factory was to the industrial age.
Claire Weeks
If our education had included training to bear unpleasantness and to let the first shock pass until we could think more calmly, many an unbearable situation would become manageable, and many a nervous illness avoided. There is proverb expressing this. It says, trouble is a tunnel thorough which we pass and not a brick wall against which we must break our head.
Terry Weeks teacher
Good teachers possess common traits. They have a constant hunger for knowledge and a genuine desire to share that which they have learned. Bringing to the classroom an unlimited supply of energy and enthusiasm, their very presence invites students to follow them on a journey to discover things new and exciting. As if by magic, their enthusiasm becomes contagious.
Simone Weil
The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running. Where it is lacking there are no real students, but only poor caricatures of apprentices who, at the end of their apprenticeship, will not even have a trade.
Two forces rule the universe: light and gravity.
The intelligence can only be led by desire. For there to be desire, there must be pleasure and joy in the work. The intelligence only grows and bears fruit in joy.
The most important part of teaching is to teach what it is to know.
Karl Weierstrass
A mathematician who is not also something of a poet will never be a complete mathematician.
Fay Weldon
One can go on learning until the day one is cut off.
H.G. Wells
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
Eudora Welty (b. 1909 American writer)
Learning stamps you with its moments. Childhood’s learning is made of moments. It isn’t steady. It’s a pulse.
Jessamyn West (The Life I Really Lived 1979)
A rattlesnake that doesn’t bite teaches you nothing.
We love those we feed, not vice versa; in caring for others we nourish our own self esteem. Children are dependent on adults. It’s a craven role for a child. It’s very natural to bite the hand that feeds you.
John Wesley
Catch on fire with enthusiasm and people will come for miles to watch you burn.
Mae West
Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.
When women go wrong, men go right after them.
Phillis Wheatley
Imagination! who can sing thy force?
Or who describe the swiftness of thy course?
Huw Wheldon
The crime is not to avoid failure. The crime is not to give triumph a chance.
E.B. White
“Do you think you can maintain discipline?” asked the Superintendent. “Of course I can,” replied Stuart. “I’ll make the work interesting and the discipline will take care of itself.” Stuart Little
J. Gustov White
Our language is funny; a fat chance and a slim chance mean the same thing.
Barbara Dafoe Whitehead
There is little evidence that measures such as curricular reform, school-based management, and school choice will address, let alone solve, the biggest problem schools face: the rising number of children who come from disrupted families.
Alfred North Whitehead (Mathematician and philosopher, 1861 – 1947)
Your learning is useless to you till you have lost your text-books, burnt your lecture notes, and forgotten the minutiae which you learnt by heart for the examination.
…. above all things we must be aware of what I will call inert ‘ideas’ _ that is to say, ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilized, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations.
The result of teaching small parts of a large number of subjects is the passive reception of disconnected ideas, not illumed with any spark of vitality.
From the very beginning of his education, the child should experience the joy of discovery.
Knowledge does not keep any better than fish.
Students are alive, and the purpose of education is to stimulate and guide their self-development. It follow as a corollary from this premise that teachers should also be alive with living thoughts.
There is only one subject matter for education, and that is life in all of its manifestations.
Culture is activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it. A merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on God’s earth. What we should aim at producing is men who possess both culture and expert knowledge in some special direction. Their expert knowledge will give them the ground to start from, and their culture will lead them as deep as philosophy and as high as art. We have to remember that the valuable intellectual development is self development, and that it mostly takes place between the ages of sixteen and thirty. As to training, the most important part is given by mothers before the age of twelve. A saying due to Archbishop Temple illustrates my meaning. Surprise was expressed at the success in after-life of a man, who as a boy at Rugby had been somewhat undistinguished. He answered, “It is not what they are at eighteen, it is what they become afterwards that matters.”
In training a child to activity of thought, above all things we must beware of what I will call “inert ideas” — that is to say, ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilized, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations.
Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct from ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.
Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure.
Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.
Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.
No period of history has ever been great or ever can be that does not act on some sort of high, idealistic motives, and idealism in our time has been shoved aside, and we are paying the penalty for it.
Without adventure civilization is in full decay.
The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.
Katherine Whitehorn
The best careers advice given to the young is “Find out what you like doing best and get someone to pay you for doing it.”
Anthony P Whitman
Children spell “love,” T-I-M-E.”
As parents we never stand so tall as when we stoop to help our children.
Walt Whitman
There is that indescribable freshness and unconsciousness about an illiterate person that humbles and mocks the power of the noblest expressive genius.
There was a child went forth everyday, And the first object he looked upon and received with wonder or pity or dread, that object he became, And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day… or for many years or stretching cycles of years… There Was a Child Went Forth, in Leaves of Grass
John Greenleaf Whittier
For all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are those “It might have been.”
Still sits the school-house by the road,
A ragged beggar sleeping;
Around it still the sumachs grow
And blackberry-vines are creeping. In School-Days
Oscar Wilde
The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produce no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square.
Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone. The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever.
I may have said the same thing before… But my explanation, I am sure, will always be different.
The best way to make children good is to make them happy.
Children begin by loving their parents. After a time, they judge them. Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.
Few parents nowadays, pay any regard to what their children say to them. The old fashioned respect for the young is fast dying out.
A school should be the most beautiful place in every town and village – so beautiful that the punishment for undutiful children should be that they should be debarred from going to school the following day.
A person who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure.
Ted Williams
I’d rather swing a bat than do anything else in the world.
Tennessee Williams 1911 – 1983
A high station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace.
A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with.
Don’t look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you’ll know you’re dead.
Everyone says he’s sincere, but everyone isn’t sincere. If everyone was sincere who says he’s sincere there wouldn’t be half so many insincere ones in the world and there would be lots, lots, lots more really sincere ones!
For time is the longest distance between two places.
Hell is yourself and the only redemption is when a person puts himself aside to feel deeply for another person.
I can’t stand a naked light bulb, any more than I can a rude remark or a vulgar action.
I have always been pushed by the negative. The apparent failure of a play sends me back to my typewriter that very night, before the reviews are out. I am more compelled to get back to work than if I had a success.
I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.
I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person. But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people really.
If I am no longer disturbed myself, I will deal less with disturbed people, but I don’t regret having concerned myself with them because I think most of us are disturbed.
If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it.
In memory everything seems to happen to music.
It is almost as if you were frantically constructing another world while the world that you live in dissolves beneath your feet, and that your survival depends on completing this construction at least one second before the old habitation collapses.
Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going.
Luck is believing you’re lucky.
Luxury is the wolf at the door and its fangs are the vanities and conceits germinated by success. When an artist learns this, he knows where the danger is.
Make voyages! Attempt them… there’s nothing else.
Mendacity is a system that we live in. Liquor is one way out an death’s the other.
Most of the confidence which I appear to feel, especially when influenced by noon wine, is only a pretense.
Oh, you weak, beautiful people who give up with such grace. What you need is someone to take hold of you – gently, with love, and hand your life back to you.
Once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle, you are equipped with the basic means of salvation.
Some mystery should be left in the revelation of character in a play, just as a great deal of mystery is always left in the revelation of character in life, even in one’s own character to himself.
Success and failure are equally disastrous.
Success is blocked by concentrating on it and planning for it… Success is shy – it won’t come out while you’re watching.
The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that’s also a hypocrite!
The strongest influences in my life and my work are always whomever I love. Whomever I love and am with most of the time, or whomever I remember most vividly. I think that’s true of everyone, don’t you?
The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.
There is a time for departure even when there’s no certain place to go.
This country of endured but unendurable pain.
Time is the longest distance between two places.
Time rushes towards us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation.
To be free is to have achieved your life.
We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it.
We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.
We have to distrust each other. It is our only defense against betrayal.
We’re all of us guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.
We’re all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life!
What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it’s curved like a road through mountains.
When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I’m only really alive when I’m writing.
When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.
You can be young without money but you can’t be old without it.
You’ve got many refinements. I don’t think you need to worry about your failure at long division. I mean, after all, you got through short division, and short division is all that a lady ought to be called on to cope with.
Susan Laurson Willig
Limited expectations yield only limited results.
Edmund Wilson
Good science consists largely of play disguised as serious work.
Mary J. Wilson (Schoolteacher quoted in Newsweek)
I’m never going to be a movie star. But then, in all probability, Liz Taylor is never going to teach first and second grade.
Woodrow Wilson U.S. PresidentWe have to teach the children we have
Not the children we used to have
Not the children we want to have
Not the children we dream to have.
Barbara W. Winder
Education, we see, is not merely gaining knowledge or skills helpful toward productive work, though certainly that is a part of it. Rather it is a replenishment and an expansion of the natural thirst of the mind and soul. Learning is a gradual process of growth, each step building upon the other. It is a process whereby the learner organizes and integrates not only facts but attitudes and values. The Lord has told us that we must open our minds and our hearts to learn. There is a Chinese proverb: Wisdom is as the moon rises, perceptible not in progress but in result. As our knowledge is converted to wisdom, the door to opportunity is unlocked.
Oprah Winfrey
I don’t believe in failure. It is not failure if you enjoyed the process.
We can’t become what we need to be by remaining what we are.
Only surround yourself with people who will lift you higher.
Always continue the climb. It is possible for you to do whatever you want if you first get to know who you are and are willing to work with a power that is greater than ourselves to do it.
Forest Witcraft
A hundred years from now it will not matter what my bank account was, the sort of house I lived in, or the kind of car I drove. But the world may be different because I was important in the life of a child.
Mary Wollstonecraft
Men and women must be educated, in a great degree, by the opinions and manners of the society they live in. In every age there has been a stream of popular opinion that has carried all before it, and given a family character, as it were, to the century. It may then fairly be inferred, that, till society be differently constituted, much cannot be expected from education.
Sidney Wood
An educated person is one who can entertain a new idea, entertain another person and entertain himself.
John Wooden
Things turn out best for the people who make the best of the way things turn out.
Over the years, I have become convinced that every detail is important and that success usually accompanies attention to little details. It is this, in my judgment, that makes for the difference between champion and near champion.
Talent is God-given.
Be humble.
Fame is man-given.
Be grateful.
Conceit is self-given.
Be careful.
Lisa Woods teacher
Mine is not the most quiet and controlled classroom in the world. There is a lot of learning noise. There is a difference between noise and learning noise.
Carter G. Woodson (English novelist, 1759-1797)
The mere imparting of information is not education. Above all things, the effort must result in making a man think and do for himself.
What we need is not a history of selected races or nations, but the history of the world void of national bias, race hate, and religious prejudice.
The so-called modern education, with all its defects, however, does others so much more good than it does the Negro because it has been worked out in conformity to the needs of those who have enslaved and oppressed weaker peoples.
For me, education means to inspire people to live more abundantly, to learn to begin with life as they find it and make it better.
Do you lead your students to the water and make them drink or do you try harder to make them thirsty?
Virginia Woolf
If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.
When the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards – their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble – the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when he sees us coming with our books under our arms, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.”
This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us.
William Wordsworth
The child is father of the man.
That best portion of a man’s life: his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love.
Frances Wosmek
Education strays from reality when it divides its knowledge into separate compartments without due regard to the connection between them.
Frank Lloyd Wright
To know what to leave out and what to put in; just where and just how, ah, THAT is to have be educated in the knowledge of simplicity.
I believe in God, only I call it nature.
Steven Wright
Babies don’t need a vacation, but I still see them at the beach… it pisses me off! I’ll go over to a little baby and say “What are you doing here? You haven’t worked a day in your life!
My friend has a baby. I’m writing down all the noises the baby makes so later I can ask him what he meant.
I was cesarean born. You can’t really tell, although whenever I leave a house, I go out through a window.
Marian Wright Edelman
We are willing to spend the least amount of money to keep a kid at home, more to put him in a foster home and the most to institutionalize him.