Good news! The new fourth edition of Janice Campbell's award-winning Excellence in Literature curriculum is complete, and available in both print and ebook format, as well as the five-year binder. You'll also find special discounts for the print and ebook bundles on many of the books we publish. We are shipping daily, though some areas may experience slight delays due to weather-related events.

Education Quotes

I've been collecting education quotes in my commonplace books for nearly a lifetime. I enjoy using them for penmanship practice as well as for simply pondering. 

Don't miss our collection of Albert Einstein quotes, too.

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

Only the educated are free. 
 — Epictetus 

Few have been taught to any purpose who have not been their own teachers. 
— Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792) 

Education makes people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave. 
— Henry Peter Broughan 

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

Learning without thought is labor lost. 
— Confucius 

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education. 
— Mark Twain 

Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school. 
— Albert Einstein 

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. 
— Alvin Toffler 

She knows what is the best purpose of education: not to be frightened by the best but to treat it as part of daily life. 
— John Mason Brown 

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

Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions. 
— Oliver Wendell Holmes 

Who dares to teach must never cease to learn. 
— John Cotton Dana  

The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue. 
— Antisthenes 

Get over the idea that only children should spend their time in study.  Be a student so long as you still have something to learn, and this will mean all your life. 
— Henry L. Doherty 

What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child. 
— George Bernard Shaw 

In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad. 
— Friedrich Nietzsche 

Education would be so much more effective if its purpose were to ensure that by the time they leave school every boy and girl should know how much they don't know, and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know it. 
— Sir William Haley 

I find four great classes of students: The dumb who stay dumb. The dumb who become wise. The wise who go dumb. The wise who remain wise. 
— Martin H. Fischer 

A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students. 
— John Ciardi 

Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance. 
— Will Durant 

Education ... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading. 
— G. M. Trevelyan 

A well-informed mind is the best security against the contagion of folly and of vice. The vacant mind is ever on the watch for relief, and ready to plunge into error, to escape from the languor of idleness. 
— Ann Radcliffe 

Who dares to teach must never cease to learn. 
 — John Cotton Dana 

Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. 
— Henry Ford 

Good teachers are those who know how little they know. Bad teachers are those who think they know more than they don't know. 
— R. Verdi 

I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built up on the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think. 
— Anne Sullivan 

The best of my education has come from the public library... my tuition fee is a bus fare and once in a while, five cents a day for an overdue book.  You don't need to know very much to start with, if you know the way to the public library. 
— Lesley Conger 

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

It is possible to store the mind with a million facts and still be entirely uneducated. 
— Alec Bourne 

Education is that which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding. 
— Ambrose Bierce 

Getting things done is not always what is most important. There is value in allowing others to learn, even if the task is not accomplished as quickly, efficiently or effectively. 
— R.D. Clyde 

Education costs money, but then so does ignorance. 
— Sir Claus Moser 

An educational system isn't worth a great deal if it teaches young people how to make a living but doesn't teach them how to make a life. 
— Source Unknown 

It is possible to store the mind with a million facts and still be entirely uneducated. 
— Alec Bourne, A Doctor's Creed 

The best teacher is the one who suggests rather than dogmatizes, and inspires his listener with the wish to teach himself. 
 — Edward Bulwer-Lytton

An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don't. 
 — Anatole France

Learning is a treasure that will follow its owner everywhere. 
 — Chinese Proverb

The pupil can only educate himself. Teachers are the custodians of apparatus upon which he himself must turn and twist to acquire the excellencies that distinguish the better from the poorer of God's vessels. 
 — Martin H. Fischer

Learning is like rowing upstream: not to advance is to drop back .
vChinese Proverb

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

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