Quotes about teaching
page 15

Ovadia Yosef photo
Muhammad Iqbál photo
John Stuart Mill photo
Yusuf Qaradawi photo
Matthew Stover photo
George W. Bush photo
Horatius Bonar photo
Theodor Reuss photo
Chris Hedges photo
Pope Benedict XVI photo

“While they are growing up, the young need adults who can suggest principles and values to them. They feel in need of people who can teach by their example, more than by their words, to expend themselves for high ideals.”

Pope Benedict XVI (1927) 265th Pope of the Catholic Church

Homily on the fourth anniversary of the death of John Paul II http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/homilies/2009/documents/hf_ben-xvi_hom_20090402_anniv-morte-gpii_en.html (2 April 2009)
2009

Leon R. Kass photo
Lois McMaster Bujold photo

“Adversity does teach who your real friends are.”

Vorkosigan Saga, A Civil Campaign (1999)

William Burges photo

“Allowing, therefore, the great usefulness of the Government Schools, the Exhibitions, and the Museums both public and private, the question now arises as to what are the impediments to our future progress. The principal ones appear to me to be three.
# A want of a distinctive architecture, which is fatal to art generally.
# The want of a good costume, which is fatal to colour; and
# The want of a sufficient teaching of the figure, which is fatal to art in detail.
It will perhaps be as well to take these one by one.
The most fatal impediment of the three is undeniably the want of a distinctive architecture in the nineteenth century. Architecture is commonly called the mother of all the other arts, and these latter are all more or less affected by it in their details. In almost every age of the world except our own only one style of architecture has been in use, and consequently only one set of details. The designer had accordingly to master, 1. the figure, and the great principles of ornament; 2. those details of the architecture then practised which were necessary to his trade; and 3. the technical processes. Now what is the case in the present day? If we take a walk in the streets of London we may see at least half-a-dozen sorts of architecture, all with different details; and if we go to a museum we shall find specimens of the furniture, jewellery, &c., of these said different styles all beautifully classed and labelled. The student, instead of confining himself to one style as in former times, is expected to be master of all these said half-dozen, which is just as reasonable as asking him to write half-a-dozen poems in half-a-dozen languages, carefully preserving the idiomatic peculiarities of each. This we all know to be an impossibility, and the end is that our student, instead of thoroughly applying the principles of ornament to one style, is so bewildered by having the half-dozen on his hands, that he ends by knowing none of them as he ought to do. This is the case in almost every trade; and until the question of style gets gets settled, it is utterly hopeless to think about any great improvement in modern art.”

William Burges (1827–1881) English architect

Source: Art applied to industry: a series of lectures, 1865, p. 8-9; Partly cited in: Journal of the Royal Society of Arts. Vol. 99. 1951. p. 520

Michelle Obama photo
Edsger W. Dijkstra photo

“The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.”

Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) Dutch computer scientist

1970s, How do we tell truths that might hurt? (1975)

“In our online descriptions and program literature we describe the cloisters as a public sphere for networked interaction, the gathering place for students, professors, and librarians engaged in planning, evaluating, or reviewing the efforts of research and study utilizing the whole range of technologies of literacy. We go further and describe the task of the cloisters as to "channel flows of research, learning and teaching between the increasingly networked world of the library and the intimacy and engagement of our classrooms and other campus spaces". There we continue to explore the "collectible object", which I tentatively described in Othermindedness in terms of maintaining an archive of "the successive choices, the errors and losses, of our own human community" and suggesting that what constitutes the collectible object is the value which suffuses our choices. It seemed to me then that electronic media are especially suited to tracking such "changing change".
I think it still seems so to me now but I do fear we have lost track of the beauty and nimbleness of new media in representing and preserving the meaning-making quotidian, the ordinary mindfulness which makes human life possible and valuable.
It is interesting, I think, that recounting and rehearsing this notion leaves this interview layered and speckled with (self) quotations, documentations, implicit genealogies, images, and traditions of continuity, change, and difference. Perhaps the most quoted line of afternoon over the years has been the sentence "There is no simple way to say this."”

Michael Joyce (1945) American academic and writer

The same is true of any attempt to describe the way in which the collectible object participates in (I use this word as a felicitous shorthand for the complex of ideas involved in what I called "representing and preserving the meaning-making quotidian" above) the library as living archive.
An interview with Michael Joyce and review of Liam’s Going at Trace Online Writing Centre Archive (2 December 2002) http://tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk/review/index.cfm?article=33

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël photo
Jerry Pournelle photo
Marie of Edinburgh, Queen of Romania photo
Ursula K. Le Guin photo
Joaquin Miller photo
Tomáš Baťa photo

“The purpose of the Business Colleges is to teach their students to create values by honest work.”

Tomáš Baťa (1876–1932) Czech businessman

Tomas Bata (1924), cited in: Tribus, Mirón, and C. A. Hayward. Total Quality in Schools of Bisiness and of Engineering. Exergy, Inc. Hayward (1993).

Ken Ham photo
Jerome David Salinger photo
Paul Graham photo

“Jessica and I have always worked hard to teach our kids not to be mean. We tolerate noise and mess and junk food, but not meanness.”

Paul Graham (1964) English programmer, venture capitalist, and essayist

"Mean People Fail", November 2014

Ernst Gombrich photo
Eric Maisel photo
Lyman Hakes Howe photo

“To the World, the World we show
We make the World to laugh
And teach each Hemisphere to know
How lives the Other Half.”

Lyman Hakes Howe (1856–1923) American entertainer and filmmaker

Said in 1909, as quoted in Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture http://books.google.com/books?id=2NKmvLXbZesC&pg=PA171&dq=%22To+the+World,+the+World+we+show%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=xsDvUsX4F-nNsQTInIHQDQ&ved=0CCsQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22To%20the%20World%2C%20the%20World%20we%20show%22&f=false.

Joseph Smith, Jr. photo

“I teach the people correct principles and they govern themselves.”

Joseph Smith, Jr. (1805–1844) American religious leader and the founder of the Latter Day Saint movement

Quoted by John Taylor, Journal of Discourses, 10:57-58 (18 May 1862)
When asked how he governed his followers in Nauvoo, Illinois.
Attributed to Joseph Smith, Jr.

John Howard Yoder photo
Wassily Leontief photo
Koichi Tohei photo
Rick Perry photo
Stephen L. Carter photo
Dana Gioia photo

“Teach us the names of what we have destroyed.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

"A California Requiem"
Poetry, Interrogations at Noon (2001)

John Bright photo
Phillip Abbott Luce photo
Eric Hoffer photo

“It is the malady of our age that the young are so busy teaching us that they have no time left to learn.”

Eric Hoffer (1898–1983) American philosopher

Section 33
Reflections on the Human Condition (1973)

Christa McAuliffe photo

“No teacher has ever been better prepared to teach a lesson.”

Christa McAuliffe (1948–1986) American educator and astronaut

As quoted in American Heroes of Exploration and Flight (1996) by Anne E. Schraff, p. 102

Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar photo
Robert M. Pirsig photo
Louis Sullivan photo
Jean-François Millet photo

“What do I care? 'I don't come here to please anybody. I come because there are antiques and models to teach me, that is all. Do I object to your figures, made of butter and honey [to Alfred Boisseau]?”

Jean-François Millet (1814–1875) French painter

Quote of Millet, c. 1839; as cited by biographer , in Jean-Francois Millet – Peasant and Painter, transl. Helena de Kay; publ. Macmillan and Co., London, 1881, p. 54
Boisseau criticized Millet on making his own plan; he was one of the master's pets of art-teacher Paul Delaroche in Paris, that time
1835 - 1850

Richard Feynman photo

“While in Kyoto I tried to learn Japanese with a vengeance. I worked much harder at it, and got to a point where I could go around in taxis and do things. I took lessons from a Japanese man every day for an hour.
One day he was teaching me the word for "see." "All right," he said. "You want to say, 'May I see your garden?' What do you say?"
I made up a sentence with the word that I had just learned.
"No, no!" he said. "When you say to someone, 'Would you like to see my garden?' you use the first 'see.' But when you want to see someone else's garden, you must use another 'see,' which is more polite."
"Would you like to glance at my lousy garden?" is essentially what you're saying in the first case, but when you want to look at the other fella's garden, you have to say something like, "May I observe your gorgeous garden?" So there's two different words you have to use.
Then he gave me another one: "You go to a temple, and you want to look at the gardens…"
I made up a sentence, this time with the polite "see."
"No, no!" he said. "In the temple, the gardens are much more elegant. So you have to say something that would be equivalent to 'May I hang my eyes on your most exquisite gardens?"
Three or four different words for one idea, because when I'm doing it, it's miserable; when you're doing it, it's elegant.
I was learning Japanese mainly for technical things, so I decided to check if this same problem existed among the scientists.
At the institute the next day, I said to the guys in the office, "How would I say in Japanese, 'I solve the Dirac Equation'?"
They said such-and-so.
"OK. Now I want to say, 'Would you solve the Dirac Equation?'”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

how do I say that?"
"Well, you have to use a different word for 'solve,' " they say.
"Why?" I protested. "When I solve it, I do the same damn thing as when you solve it!"
"Well, yes, but it's a different word — it's more polite."
I gave up. I decided that wasn't the language for me, and stopped learning Japanese.
Part 5: "The World of One Physicist", "Would <U>You</U> Solve the Dirac Equation?", p. 245-246
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (1985)

Bill Bryson photo
Robert G. Ingersoll photo
Arun Shourie photo
Adyashanti photo
Ernesto Che Guevara photo
Pope Benedict XVI photo
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow photo
River Phoenix photo

“I can't on my own change the regime in South Africa or teach the Palestinians to live with the Israelis, but I can start with me.”

River Phoenix (1970–1993) American actor, musician, and activist

Sky Magazine (1988)

Isocrates photo

“Democracy destroys itself because it abuses its right to freedom and equality. Because it teaches its citizens to consider audacity as a right, lawlessness as a freedom, abrasive speech as equality, and anarchy as progress.”

Isocrates (-436–-338 BC) ancient greek rhetorician

A falsified quote invented during the 2010 financial crisis. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Isoc.+7+20&fromdoc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0144 Isocrates' actual, more nuanced, quote runs as follows:
Those who directed the state in the time of Solon and Cleisthenes did not establish a polity which … trained the citizens in such fashion that they looked upon insolence as democracy, lawlessness as liberty, impudence of speech as equality, and licence to do what they pleased as happiness, but rather a polity which detested and punished such men and by so doing made all the citizens better and wiser.
Areopagiticus, 7.20 (Norlin)
Misattributed

Ernest Barnes photo
Byron Katie photo

“Arguing with reality is like trying to teach a cat to bark—hopeless.”

Byron Katie (1942) American spiritual writer

Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life (2002)

Leo Tolstoy photo
Siméon Denis Poisson photo

“The only two good things in life are doing mathematics and teaching it.”

Siméon Denis Poisson (1781–1840) French mathematician, mechanician and physicist

La vie n'est bonne qu'à deux choses : à faire des mathématiques et à les professer.
quoted by François Arago in Notices biographiques, Volume 2 http://books.google.fr/books?pg=PA662&id=ZzNLAAAAYAAJ#v=onepage&q&f=false, 1854, p. 662.

Adi Da Samraj photo
Stanley Baldwin photo
Louis Brandeis photo
Thomas Gray photo

“And many a holy text around she strews,
That teach the rustic moralist to die.”

Thomas Gray (1716–1771) English poet, historian

St. 21
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard http://www.thomasgray.org/cgi-bin/display.cgi?text=elcc (written 1750, publ. 1751)

Gottfried von Straßburg photo

“Love is so blissful a thing, so blessed an endeavour, that apart from its teaching none attains worth or reputation.”

Liebe ist ein also saelic dinc,
ein also saeleclich gerinc,
daz nieman ane ir lere
noch tugende hat noch ere.
Source: Tristan, Line 187

Avital Ronell photo
Georges Duhamel photo

“What a teacher imparts by word of mouth is nothing in comparison with what he teaches us to get for ourselves from books.”

Georges Duhamel (1884–1966) French writer

Source: Défense des Lettres [In Defense of Letters] (1937), p. 43

Ray Comfort photo
Tigran Sargsyan photo

“With globalization mounting, the rules teaching us to live globally other than nationally are increasingly becoming meaningful.”

Tigran Sargsyan (1960) Economist, politician

The End of State http://www.gov.am/files/docs/217.pdf
2008

“…for the teaching of this kind I will devote myself to translating what is said more fully by many authors, and especially those whom mother Greece educated, whilst the Latins were oppressed by lack,... of knowledge.”
...ad doctrinam huiusmodi copiosius a perpluribus dicta auctoribus, et praecipue ab his quos mater educavit Graecia, Latinorum cogente penuria, . . . transferenda conferam

Alfano I, Archbishop of Salerno (1015–1085) Archbishop of Salerno

From the preface to his translation http://www.sal.tohoku.ac.jp/phil/DIDASCALIA/2CHBURNE.PDF of the Premnon phisicon of Nemesius.

Patrick Pearse photo

“To his teaching we owe it there is such a thing as Irish Nationalism and to the memory of the deed he nerved his generation to do, to the memory of ‘98, we owe it that there is any manhood left in Ireland.”

Patrick Pearse (1879–1916) Irish revolutionary, shot by the British Army in 1916

Address delivered at the Grave of Wolfe Tone in Bodenstown Churchyard, Co. Kildare, 22 June 1913

Gautama Buddha photo
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn photo
Sinclair Lewis photo
Wladyslaw Sikorski photo

“One experienced minute sometimes teaches us more than a lifetime.”

Wladyslaw Sikorski (1881–1943) Polish military and political leader

in Szkoła Podstawowa im. gen. Władysława Sikorskiego w Kostrzycy. Witaj na stronie głównej http://www.kostrzyca.edu.pl/, World of Tanks: 4TP Polish Squad http://worldoftanks.eu/community/clans/500004184--4TP-/ and Cytatybaza: Władysław Sikorski http://cytatybaza.pl/autorzy/wladyslaw-sikorski.html
Original: Jedna przeżyta chwila czasami uczy nas więcej, aniżeli całe życie.

Jacques Barzun photo

“The truth is, when all is said and done, one does not teach a subject, one teaches a student how to learn it.”

Jacques Barzun (1907–2012) Historian

"Reasons to De-Test the Schools," New York Times (1988-10-11), later published in Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning (1991)

Ken Ham photo
Antonin Artaud photo
Grace Slick photo
Aron Ra photo
Robert Jordan photo

“Teach him how you will, a pig will never play the flute.”

Robert Jordan (1948–2007) American writer

Thom Merrilin
(15 January 1990)

Bill Maher photo

“Government — they used to teach it in college. It's actually something you should study and learn and know how to do. The Republicans always run on the idea that government isn't very effective. Well, not the way you do it. But it can be effective.”

Bill Maher (1956) American stand-up comedian

As quoted in "Real talk with Bill Maher" by Joan Walsh at Salon.com (16 February 2007) http://www.salon.com/ent/tv/int/2007/02/16/maher/index2.html

Hermann Hesse photo
George Long photo

“I think it is a truth, and an important truth, that the fundamentals of all school teaching ought to be the same.”

George Long (1800–1879) English classical scholar

An Old Man's Thoughts on Many Things, Of Education I

Ken Ham photo
Margaret Mead photo
Menno Simons photo
Marcellin Berthelot photo

“Science is the real moral school; she teaches man the love and respect for the truth, without which all hope is chimerical.”

Marcellin Berthelot (1827–1907) French chemist and politician

Proverbia http://www.proverbia.net/citasautor.asp?autor=93

Fausto Cercignani photo

“Perhaps it is true that the trials of life always teach us something, but it is undeniable that we are not always so eager to learn.”

Fausto Cercignani (1941) Italian scholar, essayist and poet

Examples of self-translation (c. 2004), Quotes - Zitate - Citations - Citazioni

Dolores O'Riordan photo
Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke photo

“I have read somewhere or other, — in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, I think, — that history is philosophy teaching by examples.”

Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke (1678–1751) English politician and Viscount

On the Study and Use of History, letter 2; in fact this relates to a third-century CE treatise on rhetoric, wrongly attributed to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, which says (xi. 2): "The contact with manners then is education; and this Thucydides appears to assert when he says history is philosophy learned from examples". The line is not found in Thucydides.

Prem Rawat photo
Kent Hovind photo
Ulysses S. Grant photo
Georges Braque photo

“The arts which achieve their effect through purity have never been arts that were good for everything. Greek sculpture (among others) with its decadence, teaches us this.”

Georges Braque (1882–1963) French painter and sculptor

Source: 1908 - 1920, quotes from Artists on Art...(1972), p. 422 - Braque's quote, Paris 1917