19th-century Educator Quotes

Robert Baden-Powell

Josef Albers

Booker T. Washington

Jigoro Kano

A. S. Neill

Vasil Levski

Annie Sullivan

"Softly, softly, catchee monkey," is the West African rendering of a very valuable precept. An awful lot of men fail through lack of patient persistence.

Robert Baden-Powell

The law must be stable, but it must not stand still.

No man shall be more exacting of me or my conduct than I am of myself.

There is nothing in the universe that I fear, but that I shall not know all my duty, or fail to do it.

The night of trouble is at times so dark that the interwoven gold with which Providence relieves the woof of calamity remains undiscovered.

He comes to the teacher with his eyes filled with a thousand pictures, but they are ignored, and he is robbed of them one by one until at last the beauty of this world fades from his sight and it is changed to a vale of tears.

Wilbur S. Jackman

Work of all kinds is got from poor women, at prices that will not keep soul and body together, and then the articles thus made aresold for prices that give monstrous prices to the capitalist, who thus grows rich on the hard labor of our sex.

Catharine Beecher

A person ignorant of Botany, on beholding the profusion of flowers which adorn the face of nature, would discover general resemblances, and form in his mind some order of arrangement; but the Botanist learns to distinguish the least conspicuous parts of a plant as most important in a system of classification.

Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps

Nursing is an art, and an art requiring an organised practical and scientific training. For nursing is the skilled servant of medicine, surgery, and hygiene.

The secret of a lucid analysis is, like that of untangling a snarl of yarn, viz: to get hold of the right end of the thread.

Calvin M. Woodward

The student of mathematics should trust no middleman, but go with his own head to original sources, to the masters themselves. Second-hand ideas are as full of bacteria as second-hand books and clothing.

Edgar Odell Lovett

They call every insect a "bug," but bugs are bugs, flies are flies, ants are ants, and neither flies nor ants are bugs. Indeed, no insects are bugs - excepting just bugs!

Margaret Warner Morley

Every one's abilities may be increased or strengthened by a kind of culture.

When the masses become better informed about science, they will feel less need for help from supernatural Higher Powers. The need for religion will end when man becomes sensible enough to govern himself.

Francisco Ferrer Guardia

Deafness, though it be total and congenital, imposes no limits on the intellectual development of its subjects, save in the single direction of the appreciation of acoustic phenomena.

Edward Miner Gallaudet

Other things being equal, it is the person who can lift his work up to the plane of the intuitional and inspiration who achieves greatness, both in his work and in his career.

The freest child is the child who is most interested in what he is doing, and at whose hand are the materials for his work or play.

Caroline Pratt (educator)

Nervous exhaustion from mental overwork is most often due to neglect of this rule and the brain worker should limit his regular day's work to a reasonable number of hours per day and those when the brain is at its best.

Maurice Bigelow

If prejudice could only reason, it would dispel itself.

William Pickens

Why may we not add Geology to the list of poetical sciences? Why shall not that science, which is the second science in eras and magnitudes, and the first, in affording scope for the imagination, be brought into favor with the Muses and afford themes for the Poet?

Edward Hitchcock Jr.

A tale is told of a man in Paris during the upheaval in 1948, who saw a friend marching after a crowd toward the barricades. Warning him that these could not be held against the troops, that he had better keep way, he received this reply, " I must follow them. I am their leader."

Abbott Lawrence Lowell

There are four types of students: the sponge, the funnel, the strainer, and the sieve. The sponge, which soaks up everything; the funnel, which takes in at one end and lets out at the other; the strainer, which permits the wine to pass out and retains the lees; and the sieve, which separates the bran from the fine flour.

Ethel Percy Andrus

A gentleman can always be told by the way he speaks to those that he thinks are his inferiors in some respect. His equals he does not wish to offend, his superiors he does not dare to offend, and of those whom he considers his inferiors he would be all the more considerate.

Fanny Jackson Coppin

There are so many New Yorks that you can always find the special one that fits your special pattern.

Lucy Sprague Mitchell

It's a great mistake, I think, to put children off with falsehoods and nonsense, when their growing powers of observation and discrimination excite in them a desire to know about things.