Educational Quotes

Educational Quotes

Many teachers have discovered the power of famous quotations. Such quotations can be used to develop students' writing and critical thinking skills.

1. There is no knowledge that is not power. --- Ralph Waldo Emerson
2. Whether one has natural talent or not, any learning period requires the willingness to suffer uncertainty and embarrassment. --- Gail Sheehy
3. Everybody is ignorant. Only on different subjects. --- Will Rogers
4. The price of ignorance is far greater than cost of an education. --- Anonymous
5. Often the search proves more profitable than the goal.---E.L. Konigsburg
6. The past is a ghost, the future a dream, and all we ever have is now.---Bill Cosby
7. You have greater impact on others by the way you listen than by the way you talk. ---James Fisher, Jr.
8. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit.---Aristotle
9. Integrity - When you do the right thing even though no one is watching.---Anonymous
10. The things you refuse to meet today always come back at you later on, usually under circumstances which make the decision twice as difficult as it originally was.---Eleanor Roosevelt

Character Quotes

I have the students learn one quote a week. We discuss the quote and I try to refer to it during the course of the school week.

Wise Sayings
Wise old sayings and famous quotes

Responsibility
1. The ability to accept responsibility is the measure of the man. ~Roy Hunt
2. We are accountable only to ourselves for what happens to us in our lives. ~ Mildred Newman
3. "You can’t escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today." — Abraham Lincoln, 19th-century American president
4. You must take personal responsibility. You cannot change the circumstances, the seasons, or the wind, but you can change yourself. That is something you have charge of. ~ Jim Rohn
5. They always say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself. ~ Andy Warhol
6. The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny. ~ Albert Ellis
7. Everyone is responsible and no one is to blame. ~ Will Schutz
8. The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs. ~Joan Didion
9. “Our duty is to be useful, not according to our desires, but according to our powers.'' — Henry F. Amiel
10. You will find men who want to be carried on the shoulders of others, who think that the world owes them a living. They don't seem to see that we must all lift together and pull together. ~Henry Ford II
11. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do. ~ Robert A. Heinlein (Stranger in a Strange Land) believe that we are solely responsible for our choices, and we have to accept the consequences of every deed, word, and thought throughout our lifetime. ~ Elizabeth Kubler-Ross
12. In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
13. It is easy to dodge our responsibilities, but we cannot dodge the consequences of dodging our responsibilities. ~ Josiah Stamp
14. Your failures won't hurt you until you start blaming them on others. ~ unknown

Respect
1. Respect commands itself and it can neither be given nor withheld when it is due. ~ Eldridge Cleaver
2. I must respect the opinions of others even if I disagree with them. ~ Herbert Henry Lehman
3. Every man is to be respected as an absolute end in himself; and it is a crime against the dignity that belongs to him as a human being, to use him as a mere means for some external purpose.” — Immanuel Kant, 18th century Prussian geographer and philosopher
4. “In his private heart no man much respects himself.” — Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), 19th-century American humorist, author and journalist
5. "The highest result of education is tolerance." — Helen Keller, 20th-century American Nobel Prize-winning social activist, public speaker and author
6. "The equal toleration of all religions . . . is the same thing as atheism." — Pope Leo XIII
7. "Perhaps the most important thing we can undertake toward the reduction of fear is make it easier for people to accept themselves, to like themselves." — Bonaro Overstreet
8. Civilizations should be measured by "the degree of diversity attained and the degree of unity retained." — W.H. Auden, 20th-century English poet
9. “Never look down on anybody unless you're helping him up.” — Jesse Jackson, 20th-century American political activist, preacher
10. “Animals don't hate, and we're supposed to be better than them.” — Elvis Presley, 20th-century American celebrity entertainer
11. “We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.” — Jonathan Swift, 17th/18th-century English satirist
12. “The true measure of an individual is how he treats a person who can do him absolutely no good.” — Ann Landers, 20th-century American newspaper “advice” columnist
13. “Prejudice is the child of ignorance.” — William Hazlitt, early 18th-century English essayist and literary critic
14. "We must seek, above all, a world of peace; a world in which peoples dwell together in mutual respect and work together in mutual regard." John F. Kennedy
15. No more duty can be urged upon those who are entering the great theater of life than simple loyalty to their best convictions. ~ Edwin Hubbel Chapin

Citizenship
1. "A nation, as a society, forms a moral person, and every member of it is personally responsible for his society." — Thomas Jefferson, 18th-century American Founding Father, early 19th century U.S. president
2. "Americanism is a question of principles, of idealism, of character: it is not a matter of birthplace or creed or line of descent." — Theodore Roosevelt, Nobel Prize-winning U.S. president
3. "Life is not so short but that there is always time enough for courtesy." — Ralph Waldo Emerson, 19th-century American essayist, public philosopher and poet
4. “Like the body that is made up of different limbs and organs, all moral creatures must depend on each other to exist.” — Hindu proverb
5. I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I do know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve. Albert Schweitzer
6. What concerns me most today is the way we have disconnected ideas from power in America, and created for ourselves thoughtful citizens who disdain politics and politicians, when more than ever we need to value politics and what politicians do... A. Bartlett Giamatti
7. “We are all angels with only one wing. We can only fly while embracing each other.” — Luciano De Crescenzo
8. "It is in the shelter of each other that people live." — Irish proverb

9. “Life is a place of service, and in that service one has to suffer a great deal that is hard to bear, but more often to experience a great deal of joy. But that joy can be real only if people look upon their lives as a service and have a definite object in life outside themselves and their personal happiness.” — Count Leo Tolstoy, 19th-century Nobel Prize-winning Russian novelist
10. The first requisite of a good citizen of this Republic of ours is that he shall be able and willing to pull his weight." Theodore Roosevelt
11. We're not passengers on Spaceship Earth; we're the crew. We're not residents; we're citizens. The difference, in both cases, is responsibility. Rusty Schweickart Apollo astronaut
12. Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. Margaret Mead
Anthropologist
13. Each of the great social achievements of recent decades has come about not because of government proclamations but because people organized, made demands and made it good politics to respond. It is the political will of the people that makes and sustains the political will of governments. James P. Grant
Former executive director, UNICEF
14. It is not the function of the government to keep the citizens from falling into error, it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error. ~ U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson.
15. Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote. George Jean Nathan

Trustworthiness
1. The only way to make a man trustworthy is to trust him. ~ unknown
2. "It is more shameful to distrust one’s friends than to be deceived by them." — François duc de la Rochefoucauld, 17th-century French memoirist and philosopher
3. "Nature never deceives us; it is always we who deceive ourselves." — Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 18th-century French philosopher
4. "How many times do you get to lie before you are a liar?” ~ Michael Josephson, 20th/21st-century American ethicist
5. Trust is the lubrication that makes it possible for organizations to work. ~ Warren Bennis
6. The man who trusts men will make fewer mistakes that he who distrusts them. ~ Camillo Benso Conte Di Cavour
7. Who would not rather trust and be deceived? ~ Eliza Cook
8. You may be deceived if you trust too much, but you will live in torment if you don't trust enough . ~ Frank Crane
9. No, I don't understand my husband's theory of relativity, but I know my husband, and I know he can be trusted. ~ Elsa Einstein
10. Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves great. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
11. Never trust the man who tells you all his troubles but keeps from you all his joys. ~ Jewish Proverb
12. She knew how to trust people... a rare quality, revealing a character far above average. ~ Cardinal Jean Francois de Retz
13. If you can't trust people, who can you trust? ~ Hohn Widdiconbe
14. My father used to say: "Never suspect people, It's better to be deceived or mistaken, which is only human, after all, than to be suspicious, which is common." ~ Stark Young
15. A man who doesn't trust himself can never really trust anyone else. ~ Cardinal De Retz

Fairness
1. There is no delight in owning anything unshared. ~ Seneca
2. I do the very best I know how – the very best I can; and I mean to keep on doing so until the end. ~ Abraham Lincoln
3. Justice is truth in action. ~ Joseph Joubert
4. If they are just, they are better than clever. ~ Sophocles
5. Fear always spring from ignorance. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
6. All virtue is summed up in dealing justly. ~ Aristotle
7. We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done. ~ Longfellow
8. Virtue is her own fairest reward. ~ Silus Italicus
9. Whether you think you can or can’t, you are right. ~ Henry Ford.
10. The person who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything. ~ Edward Phelps
11. The innocent love justice. Everyone also prefers mercy. ~ unknown
12. Charity isn’t a good substitute for justice.
13. Truth never damages a cause that is just. ~ Mahatma Gandhi
14. If they are just they are better than clever. ~ Sophocles
15. Non-judgementalness is often just an exchange of moral blank checks.

Caring
1. “Men are only great as they are kind.” — Elbert Hubbard, l9th/2Oth-century American entrepreneur and philosopher
2. ‘What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?” — Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 18th-century French philosopher
3. “A kind word is like a spring day.” — Russian proverb
4. “No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.” — Aesop, ancient Greek moralist
5. ‘What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?’ — Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 18th-century French philosopher
6. “If the world seems cold to you, kindle fires to warm it.” — Lucy Larcom
7. “There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.” — Edith Wharton, 19th-century American author
8. Real generosity is doing something nice for someone who will never find out. — Frank A. Clark
9. “We should give as we would receive, cheerfully, quickly, and without hesitation; for there is no grace in a benefit that sticks to the fingers.” — Seneca, Roman statesman and author
10. “The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.” — Mohandas Gandhi~ 20th-century, Nobel Prize-winning, Indian nonviolent civil rights leader
11. “One must care about a world one will never see.” — Bertrand Russell, 20th-century British mathematician and philosopher
12. “Unshared joy is an unlighted candle.” — Spanish proverb
13. The best place to find a helping hand is at the end of your own arm.” — Swedish proverb
14. You have not lived a perfect day, even though you have earned your money, unless you have done something for someone who cannot repay you.” — Ruth Smeltzer
15. “Compassion is the basis of morality.” — Arnold Schopenhauer, early 19th-century German philosopher

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