201 Inspiring Education Quotes for Students and Teachers

Education opens up the mind, expands it and allows you to improve your life in so many ways.

So this week – as schools are starting again – I’d like to share 201 of the most motivating and inspiring quotes on education.

I hope you’ll find them helpful no matter if you’re a student that needs a boost of motivation or if you’re a teacher of any kind that wants to inspire and make a change in the lives of your students.

And if you want more inspiration check out this collection of quotes on moving forward and this one with growth mindset quotes.

Education Quotes to Motivate Students

1. “A man’s mind, stretched by new ideas, may never return to its original dimensions.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

2. “Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.”
Albert Einstein

3. “He who opens a school door, closes a prison.”
Victor Hugo

4. “Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.”
Mark Twain

5. “Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.”
Arthur Ashe

6. “Either you run the day or the day runs you.”
Jim Rohn

7. “Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today.”
Malcolm X

8. “Your attitude, not your aptitude, will determine your altitude.”
Zig Ziglar

9. “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”
Andy McIntyre

10. “The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn …and change.”
Carl Rogers

11. “The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.”
Mark Twain

12. “Have you ever been at sea in a dense fog, when it seemed as if a tangible white darkness shut you in and the great ship, tense and anxious, groped her way toward the shore with plummet and sounding-line, and you waited with beating heart for something to happen? I was like that ship before my education began, only I was without compass or sounding line, and no way of knowing how near the harbor was. “Light! Give me light!” was the wordless cry of my soul, and the light of love shone on me in that very hour.”
Helen Keller

13. “Aim for success, not perfection. Never give up your right to be wrong, because then you will lose the ability to learn new things and move forward with your life. Remember that fear always lurks behind perfectionism.”
David M. Burns

14. “Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.”
Will Durant

15. “Be miserable. Or motivate yourself. Whatever has to be done, it’s always your choice.”
Wayne Dyer

16. “The difference between school and life? In school, you’re taught a lesson and then given a test. In life, you’re given a test that teaches you a lesson.”
Tom Bodett

17. “We learn more by looking for the answer to a question and not finding it than we do from learning the answer itself.”
Lloyd Alexander

18. “Don’t let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.”
John R. Wooden

19. “You will either step forward into growth, or you will step backward into safety.”
Abraham Maslow

20. “If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.”
Ben Franklin

21. “If people did not do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein

22. “We can easily manage if we will only take, each day, the burden appointed to it. But the load will be too heavy for us if we carry yesterday’s burden over again today, and then add the burden of the morrow before we are required to bear it.”
John Newton 

23. “It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.”
Albert Einstein

24. “I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.”
Maya Angelou

25. “Who questions much, shall learn much, and retain much.”
Francis Bacon

26. “Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”
Mahatma Gandhi

27. “Real learning comes about when the competitive spirit has ceased.”
Jiddu Krishnamurti

28. “They cannot stop me. I will get my education, if it is in the home, school, or anyplace.”
Malala Yousafzai

29. “That is never too often repeated, which is never sufficiently learned.”
Seneca

30. “Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.”
Leonardo da Vinci

31. “Minds are like parachutes, they only function when they are open.”
James Dewar

32. “To accuse others for one’s own misfortunes is a sign of want of education. To accuse oneself shows that one’s education has begun. To accuse neither oneself nor others shows that one’s education is complete.”
Epictetus

33. “Learning is like rowing upstream: not to advance is to drop back.”
Chinese proverb

34. “Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don’t.”
Bill Nye

35. “The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.”
Dorothy Parker

36. “Success is a poor teacher.”
Robert Kiyosaki

37. “I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.”
Thomas Jefferson

38. “Time is the best teacher, but unfortunately, it kills all of its students.”
Robin Williams

39. “The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn.”
Cicero

40. “Apply yourself. Get all the education you can, but then, by God, do something. Don’t just stand there, make it happen.”
Lee Iacocca

41. “Despise school and remain a fool.”
German proverb

42. “Life itself is your teacher, and you are in a state of constant learning.”
Bruce Lee

43. “As long as you live, keep learning how to live.”
Seneca

44. “If you don’t go after what you want, you’ll never have it. If you don’t ask, the answer is always no. If you don’t step forward, you’re always in the same place.”
Nora Roberts

45. “The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.”
Baruch Spinoza

46. “The learned man knows that he is ignorant.”
Victor Hugo

47. “Experience, travel – these are an education in themselves.”
Euripides

48. “Always do your best. What you plant now, you will harvest later.”
Og Mandino

49. “Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it.”
Albert Einstein

50. “Do you know the difference between education and experience? Education is when you read the fine print; experience is what you get when you don’t. ”
Pete Seeger

51. “Teachers open the door, but you must enter by yourself.”
Chinese Proverb

52. “The ideal school would teach health, wealth, and happiness. It‘d be free, self-paced, and available to all. It‘d show opposing ideas and students would self-verify truth. No grades, no tests, no diplomas – just learning. Actually, you’re already here. Careful who you follow.”
Naval Ravikant

53. “Keep on going, and the chances are that you will stumble on something, perhaps when you are least expecting it. I never heard of anyone ever stumbling on something sitting down.”
Charles F. Kettering

54. “Remember that failure is an event, not a person.”
Zig Ziglar

55. “If you don’t design your own life plan, chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much.”
Jim Rohn

Education Quotes for Teachers

56. “You can teach a student a lesson for a day; but if you can teach him to learn by creating curiosity, he will continue the learning process as long as he lives.”
Clay P. Bedford

57. “A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.”
Henry B Adams

58. “Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants.”
John W. Gardner

59. “To teach is to learn twice.”
Joseph Joubert

60. “Do not confine your children to your own learning, for they were born in another time.”
Chinese proverb

61. “What we learn with pleasure we never forget.”
Alfred Mercier

62. “Why should society feel responsible only for the education of children, and not for the education of all adults of every age?”
Erich Fromm

63. “Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”
James Baldwin

64. “Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing.”
Albert Schweitzer

65. “Too often we give children answers to remember rather than problems to solve.”
Roger Lewin

66. “The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think — rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with thoughts of other men.”
Bill Beattie

67. “The best teachers are those who show you where to look but don’t tell you what to see.”
Alexandra K. Trenfor

68. “Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.”
G.K. Chesterton

69. “Children are apt to live up to what you believe of them.”
Lady Bird Johnson

70. “Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand.”
Chinese proverb

71. “Nine tenths of education is encouragement.”
Anatole France

72. “If someone is going down the wrong road, he doesn’t need motivation to speed him up. What he needs is education to turn him around.”
Jim Rohn

73. “The most beautiful things in the creating of the child are his “mistakes.” The more a child’s work is full of these individual mistakes the more wonderful it is. And the more a teacher removes them from the child’s work the duller, more desolate and impersonal it becomes.”
Franz Cizek

74. “Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them to become what they are capable of becoming.”
Goethe

75. “Education cost money, but then so does ignorance.”
Claus Moser

76. “I believe that education is all about being excited about something. Seeing passion and enthusiasm helps push an educational message.“
Steve Irwin

77. “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”
Nelson Mandela

78. “Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.”
Margaret Mead

79. “The person who asks questions is more helpful than the person who offers advice.”
James Clear

80. “Instruction does much, but encouragement everything.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

81. “The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future life.”
Plato

82. “Kids don’t remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are.”
Jim Henson

83. “Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.”
Aristotle

84. “I think the big mistake in schools is trying to teach children anything, and by using fear as the basic motivation. Fear of getting failing grades, fear of not staying with your class, etc. Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker.”
Stanley Kubrick

85. “The more you make it easy for your kids, the more you remove the struggle necessary for learning.”
Maxime Lagacé

86. “The highest result of education is tolerance.”
Hellen Keller

87. “All learning has an emotional base.”
Plato

88. “The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.”
C.S. Lewis

89. “If a seed of a lettuce will not grow, we do not blame the lettuce. Instead, the fault lies with us for not having nourished the seed properly.”
Buddhist proverb

90. “You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance.”
Franklin P. Jones

91. “Education is supposed to juice your curiosity, not diminish or sate it.”
Walter Isaacson

92. “The school is the last expenditure upon which America should be willing to economize.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt

93. “The foundation of every state is the education of its youth.”
Diogenes

94. “The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.”
Plutarch

95. “People learn more on their own rather than being force fed.”
Socrates

96. “By learning you will teach; by teaching you will understand.”
Latin proverb

97. “Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.”
William James

98. “Teaching kids to count is fine, but teaching them what counts is best.”
Bob Talber

99. “If you are planning for a year, sow rice; if you are planning for a decade, plant trees; if you are planning for a lifetime, educate people.”
Chinese proverb

100. “Do not train children to learning by force and harshness, but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.”
Plato

101. “Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.”
Maya Angelou

102. “The key to everything is patience. You get the chicken by hatching the egg — not by smashing it.”
Arnold Glasow

Quotes on the Power of Education

103. “It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.”
Epictetus

104. “If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.”
Abraham Maslow

105. “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”
Aristotle

106. “No man who worships education has got the best out of education…. Without a gentle contempt for education no man’s education is complete.”
G.K. Chesterton

107. “When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course.”
Peter Drucker

108. “The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn.”
Gloria Steinem

109. “If a man is a fool, you don’t train him out of being a fool by sending him to university. You merely turn him into a trained fool, ten times more dangerous.”
Desmond Bagley

110. “The modern world belongs to the half-educated, a rather difficult class, because they do not realize how little they know.”
William R. Inge

111. “People learn something every day, and a lot of times it’s that what they learned the day before was wrong.”
Bill Vaughan

112. “What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.”
Henry David Thoreau

113. “Change is the end result of all true learning.”
Leo Buscaglia

114. “Many highly intelligent people are poor thinkers. Many people of average intelligence are skilled thinkers. The power of the car is separate from the way the car is driven.”
Edward De Bono

115. “I’ve learned… that the best classroom in the world is at the feet of an elderly person.”
Andy Rooney

116. “The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.”
Sydney J. Harris

117. “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”
Mark Twain

118. “What sculpture is to a block of marble education is to the human soul.”
Joseph Addison

119. “Education makes a people easy to lead but difficult to drive: easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.”
Peter Brougham

120. “The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.”
Albert Einstein

121. “Education would be much more effective if its purpose was to ensure that by the time they leave school every boy and girl should know how much they do not know, and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know it.”
William Haley

122. “A well-educated mind will always have more questions than answers.”
Helen Keller

123. “It is a thousand times better to have common sense without education than to have education without common sense.”
Robert G. Ingersoll

124. “Upon the subject of education … I can only say that I view it as the most important subject which we as a people may be engaged in.”
Abraham Lincoln

125. “There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly.”
Buckminster Fuller

126. “Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced.”
John Keats

127. “Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune.“
Jim Rohn

128. “It is in fact a part of the function of education to help us escape, not from our own time – for we are bound by that – but from the intellectual and emotional limitations of our time.”
T.S. Eliot

129. “The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.”
Aristotle

130. “Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.”
Robert Frost

131. “Let us think of education as the means of developing our greatest abilities, because in each of us there is a private hope and dream which, fulfilled, can be translated into benefit for everyone and greater strength for our nation.”
John F. Kennedy

132. “Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young.”
Henry Ford

133.“You educate a man; you educate a man. You educate a woman; you educate a generation.”
Brigham Young

134. “The mind once enlightened cannot again become dark.”
Thomas Paine

135. “The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.”
Martin Luther King

136. “When you educate one person you can change a life, when you educate many you can change the world.”
Shai Reshef

137. “The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living differ from the dead.”
Aristotle

138. “The more I live, the more I learn. The more I learn, the more I realize, the less I know.”
Michel Legrand

139. “A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.”
George Santayana

140. “The beautiful thing about learning is that no one can take it away from you.”
B.B. King

Smart and Insightful Education Quotes

In this section I’d like to share recent findings that have helped me see things in a new way when it comes to education.

I hope that these timeless thoughts will help to open up new perspectives for you too.

141. “Everything is a learning process: Any time you fall over, it’s just teaching you to stand up the next time.”
Joel Edgerton

142. “That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you have understood all your life, but in a new way.”
Doris Lessing

143. “The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.”
Thomas Jefferson

144. “Education breeds confidence. Confidence breeds hope. Hope breeds peace.”
Confucius

145. “We now accept the fact that learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn.”
Peter Drucker

146. “Education is the best friend. An educated person is respected everywhere. Education beats the beauty and the youth.”
Chanakya

147. “A first class system of early childhood education is the hallmark of a caring and civilized society.”
Andy Hargreaves

148. “The more that you read, the more things you will know, the more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.”
Dr. Seuss

149. “The ability to read, write, and analyze; the confidence to stand up and demand justice and equality; the qualifications and connections to get your foot in the door and take your seat at the table — all of that starts with education.”
Michelle Obama

150. “Take the attitude of a student, never be too big to ask questions, never know too much to learn something new.”
Og Mandino

151. “Education is a continual process, it’s like a bicycle… If you don’t pedal you don’t go forward.”
George Weah

152. “A person who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t read.”
Mark Twain

153. “What makes a child gifted and talented may not always be good grades in school, but a different way of looking at the world and learning.”
Chuck Grassley

154. “Life is an open book test. Learning how to learn is your most valuable skill in the online world.”
Marc Cuban

155. “Let the improvement of yourself keep you so busy that you have no time to criticize others.”
Roy T. Bennett

156. “It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.”
Albert Einstein

157. “Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.”
John Dewey

158. “It is as impossible to withhold education from the receptive mind as it is impossible to force it upon the unreasoning.”
Agnes Repplierg

159. “You cannot dream of becoming something you do not know about. You have to learn to dream big. Education exposes you to what the world has to offer, to the possibilities open to you.”
Sonia Sotomayor

160. “Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation.”
Walter Cronkite

161. “Education is the power to think clearly, the power to act well in the world’s work, and the power to appreciate life.”
Brigham Young

162. “Man can learn nothing except by going from the known to the unknown.”
Claude Bernard

163. “The best education is not given to students; it is drawn out of them.”
Gerald Belcher

164. “Life long learners will always be ahead of the people standing still, the people who haven’t learned many new things in the past 10 years. So keep on learning because that makes it easier to advance in your career, remedy relationship issues and to grow older in a smart way. Plus, it most often makes life more exciting.”
Rip Miller

165. “Do not conform your children to your own learning for they were born in another time.”
Hebrew Proverb

166. “Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.”
Benjamin Franklin

167. “Knowledge is power. Information is liberating. Education is the premise of progress, in every society, in every family.”
Kofi Annan

168. “All of the top achievers I know are life-long learners. Looking for new skills, insights, and ideas. If they’re not learning, they’re not growing and not moving toward excellence.”
Denis Waitley

169. “In a global economy where the most valuable skill you can sell is your knowledge, a good education is no longer just a pathway to opportunity – it is a prerequisite.”
Barack Obama

170. “It is personal. That’s what an education does. It makes the world personal.”
Cormac McCarthy

171. “Learning is not the product of teaching. Learning is the product of the activity of learners.”
John Holt

172. “They know enough who know how to learn.”
Henry Adams

173. “You are told a lot about your education, but some beautiful, sacred memory, preserved since childhood, is perhaps the best education of all.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky

Short Quotes About Education

Finally, a few handfuls of short, sharp and punchy education quotes. The ones that cut right to the point.

I hope you’ll find something that refuels or relights your motivation here.

174. “Education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.“
Malcolm Forbes

175. “Educating all of our children must be one of our most urgent priorities.”
Nelson Mandela

176. “To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil’s soul.”
Muriel Spark

177. “Every student can learn, just not on the same day, or the same way.”
George Evans

178. “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”
William Butler Yeats

179. “Learning is not compulsory. Neither is survival.”
Dr. W. Edwards Deming

180. “By seeking and blundering we learn.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

181. “The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.”
Herbert Spencer

182. “Learning starts with failure; the first failure is the beginning of education.”
John Hersey

183. “Continuous learning is the minimum requirement for success in any field.”
Brian Tracy

184. “Education is the great engine to personal development.”
Nelson Mandela

185. “All real education is the architecture of the soul.”
William Bennett

186. “It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.”
Albert Einstein

187. “The main hope of a nation lies in the proper education of its youth”
Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus

188. “Education must not simply teach work, it must teach Life.”
W.E.B Du Bois

189. “I am indebted to my father for living, but to my teacher for living well.”
Alexander the Great

190. “All the world is a laboratory to the inquiring mind.”
Martin Fisher

191. “We all learn by experience, but some of us have to go to summer school.”
Peter De Vries

192. “I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.”
Steven Wright

193. “The aim of education is the knowledge, not of facts, but of values.”
William S. Burroughs

194. “Learning without thought is a labor lost, thought without learning is perilous.”
Confucius

195. “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.”
Socrates

196. “Let us remember: One book, one pen, one child, and one teacher can change the world.”
Malala Yousafzai

197. “Intellectual growth should commence at birth and cease only at death.“
Albert Einstein

198. “Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.”
Edward Everett

199. “Education is the key to unlock the golden door of freedom.”
George Washington Carver

200. “A good education is a foundation for a better future.”
Elizabeth Warren

201. “You are always a student, never a master. You have to keep moving forward.”
Conrad Hall