Quotes on Teaching

There are very few real teachers. Teaching is not a job; it is a vocation. To be a great one many qualities must be combined: love of truth, knowledge, reverence, loving concern for one's students, clarity and patience.

If a soul is not clothed with the teachings of the Church he cannot merit to have Jesus seated in him.

Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.

When someone is taught the joy of learning, it becomes a life-long process that never stops, a process that creates a logical individual. That is the challenge and joy of teaching.

I didn't write because I had anything to say, but in order to find out what there was to say.

Words are not truth. Truth is like the moon, and words are like my finger. I can point to the moon with my finger, but my finger is not the moon. Do you need my finger to see the moon?

We should not be speaking to, but with. That is second nature to any good teacher.

Too rarely is the individual teacher so free from the dictation of authoritative supervisor, textbook on methods, prescribed course of study, etc., that he can let his mind come to close quarters with the pupil's mind and the subject matter.

There should not be any particular teaching. Teaching is in each moment.

The saying "He who teaches others, teaches himself" is very true, not only because constant repetition impresses a fact indelibly on the mind, but because the process of teaching itself gives deeper insight into the subject taught.

The key to teaching anything is to remember what it was like not to understand that thing. That's a very hard thing to do. Every time you come to understand something you didn't understand before, you are transformed. You become a different person from who you were before. The key to teaching someone else to understand that same thing is to remember your former, untransformed self. If you can do that, I think you can teach anything, even physics.

The teacher, whether mother, priest, or schoolmaster, is the real maker of history.

The best method for a given teacher is the one which is most familiar to the teacher.

The mind does not take its complexion from the skin.

Teach your children well...and feed them on your dreams...Don't ever ask them why. If they told you you would cry. So just look at them and sigh and know they love you.

Pay attention to the young, and make them just as good as possible.

No writer or teacher or artist can escape the responsibility of influencing others whether he intends to or not, whether he is conscious of it or not.

Let such teach others who themselves excel, And censure freely who have written well.

Let those who will write the nation's laws, if I can write its textbooks.

It is not so much the content of what one says as the way in which one says it. However important the thing you say, what's the good of it if not heard or, being heard, not felt?

I shall be an autocrat: that's my trade. And the good Lord will forgive me: that's his.