16 Great Teaching Quotes for Your Favorite Teacher

What better way to say thank you to a favorite teacher than with an inspirational teaching quote? Teachers and teaching have been the subject of many quotes, often by teachers and writers who have some insight about what it means to teach. Teaching has been described as both a science and an art, and great teaching quotes reflect on both of these perceptions.

Teachers come in all forms. Presenting a great teaching quote to a parent, friend, teacher, mentor, or wise professor is one way to show gratitude to those who have taught and inspired. Teachiing quotes can be inscribed on a keepsake memento, written in a thank you card, or scribed in detailed, calligraphy and framed. At the end of the school year, a great teacher quote is a nice way to tell your favorite teacher how much their work is appreciated.

1. "He who opens a school door, closes a prison."
--Victor Hugo

2. "Teaching is the greatest act of optimism."
--Colleen Wilcox

3. "A teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary."
--Thomas Carruthers

4. "The dream begins, most of the time, with a teacher who believes in you, who tugs and pushes, and leads you onto the next plateau, sometimes poking you with a sharp stick called truth."
--Dan Rather

5. "A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops."
--Henry Brooks Adams

6. "You teach best what you most need to learn."
--Richard David Bach

7. "When you teach your son, you teach your son's son."
--The Talmud

8. "A master can tell you what he expects of you. A teacher, though, awakens you own expectations."
--Patricia Neal

9. "Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one."
--Malcolm Forbes

10. "Teachers open the door. You enter by yourself."
--Chinese Proverb

11. "Education is not filling a pail, but the lighting of a fire."
--William Butler Yeats

12. "What you teach your children is what you really believe in."
--Cathy Warner Weatherford

13. "By learning you will teach; by teaching you will understand."
--Latin Proverb

14. "What nobler employment, or more valuable to the state than that of the man who instructs the rising generation."
--Marcus Tullius Cicero

15. "The most impportant thing is not so much that every child should be taught, as that every child should be given the wish to learn."
--John Lubbock

16. "I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist, and that there are as few as there are other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit."
--John Steinbeck