Quotes on Teaching

When you learn about the teaching and the practice of another tradition, you always have a chance to understand your own teaching and practice.

Teaching has always been a very important part of my life. It is one of the ways I contribute to society. It is also a source of energy and insight.

What is a teacher? I'll tell you: it isn't someone who teaches something, but someone who inspires the student to give of her best in order to discover what she already knows.

If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement, and mystery of the world we live in.

Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced

I think the teaching profession contributes more to the future of our society than any other single profession.

If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it.

Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching.

Religion and ritual can be vehicles for entering stillness. It says in Psalm 46:10, 'Be still, and know that I am God.' But they are still just vehicles. The Buddha called his teaching a raft: You don't need to carry it around with you after you've crossed the river.

Some people awaken spiritually without ever coming into contact with any meditation technique or any spiritual teaching. They may awaken simply because they can't stand the suffering anymore.

In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few.

Miserable indeed is that religious teaching which calls itself Christian, and yet contains nothing of the cross.

I wanted to be a part of history and not just a recorder and teacher of history. So that kind of attitude towards history, history itself as a political act, has always informed my writing and my teaching.

We are apt to think that everything that happens to us is to be turned into useful teaching; it is to be turned into something better than teaching, into character. We shall find that the spheres God brings us into are not meant to teach us something but to make us something.

The point is not that Jesus was a good guy who accepted everybody, and thus we should do the same (though that would be good). Rather, his teachings and behaviour reflect an alternative social vision. Jesus was not talking about how to be good and how to behave within the framework of a domination system. He was a critic of the domination system itself.

There are few professing Christians, it may be feared, who strive to imitate Christ in the matter of private devotion. There is abundance of hearing, reading, talking, professing, visiting, contributing to the poor and teaching at schools. But is there, together with all this, a due proportion of private prayer? Are believing men and women sufficiently careful to be frequently alone with God?

Whoever teaches learns in the act of teaching, and whoever learns teaches in the act of learning.

You can get help from teachers, but you are going to have to learn a lot by yourself, sitting alone in a room.

Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.

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

The first principle of true teaching is that nothing can be taught.