Educator Quotes

The proliferation of electronic gadgets doesn't necessarily increase the opportunities for learning, it simply increases the opportunity to present information in a variety of ways. We must be careful not to be seduced by the gadgets at the cost of losing sight of the interpersonal.

He is gone now. His shop is gone. Weld Square is gone.
His life has been wiped clean off the board.
But I wake in the night and I see his face and I hear his voice.

Charles Reis Felix

We really seek intelligence not for the answers it may suggest to the problems of life, but because we believe it is life,—not for aid in making the will of God prevail, but because we believe it is the will of God. We love it, as we love virtue, for its own sake, and we believe it is only virtue's other and more precise name.

Grace! 'tis a charming Sound,
Harmonious to my Ear!
Heav'n with the Echo shall resound,
And all the Earth shall hear.

Philip Doddridge

When students' language, culture and experience are ignored or excluded in classroom interactions, students are immediately starting from a disadvantage. Everything they have learned about life and the world up to this point is being dismissed as irrelevant to school learning; there are few points of connection to curriculum materials or instruction and so students are expected to learn in an experiential vacuum. Students' silence and nonparticipation under these conditions have frequently been interpreted as lack of academic ability or effort, and teachers' interactions with students have reflected a pattern of low expectations which become self-fulfilling.

The virtues which keep this world sweet and the faithfulness which keeps it steadfast are chiefly those of the average man. The danger of the two-talent man is that he will be content with mediocrity.

Walter Russell Bowie

In the presence of such weird and wondrous beauty [the night heavens], the tenderest sentiments of the heart are aroused. A feeling of awe and reverence, of softened melancholy mingled with a thought of God, comes over us, and awakens the better nature within us.

Joel Dorman Steele

I remember when I was young, in the north, they went to the grammar school little children: they came from thence great lubbers: always learning, and little profiting: learning without book everything, understanding within the book little or nothing.

Science is a most useful thing for us all. It is one of the most useful ornaments of man. There is no dress which embellishes the body more than science does the mind.

Watch where he comes walking
Out of the Christmas flame,
Dancing, double-talking:
Herod is his name.

Charles Causley

The student is to collect and evaluate facts. The facts are locked up in the patient.

Abraham Flexner

Teach your children to listen carefully and to speak thoughtfully. The best way to teach this is to listen carefully and speak thoughtfully to your children, from the time they are babies. Take their questions and ideas seriously... learning to speak and listen as if our words matter is fundamental to education. Dialogue is not the same as mindless chatter. Above all, listen, listen, and listen to your kids.

Grace Llewellyn

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

Of Gertrude Stein:

The supreme egocentric of the most perfect clique of egocentrics.

It is commonly agreed also that both "great" and "good" can be judged only from a certain distance. Contemporary works can be appreciated and enjoyed but not very properly judged.

Take from others what you want, but never be a disciple of anyone.

Mathematics, too, is a language, and as concerns its structure and content it is the most perfect language which exists, superior to any vernacular; indeed, since it is understood by every people, mathematics may be called the language of languages. Through it, as it were, nature herself speaks; through it the Creator of the world has spoken, and through it the Preserver of the world continues to speak.

Christian Heinrich von Dillmann

Whether something 'has color' or not is as hard to define verbally as are such questions as, 'What is music?' or 'What is musical?

I'm much better at working out ideas in action than I am in theorizing about it and then transferring my thinking to action. I don't work that way. I work with tentative ideas and I experiment and then with that experimentation in action, I finally come to the conclusions about what I think is the right way to do it.

Poverty is mean and degrading to the human spirit, whereas a life of conscious simplicity can have both a beauty and a functional integrity that elevates the human spirit.

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 fire put an end to the typically bustling business activities in downtown Beijing. But its psychological impact was much stronger than the financial losses. It left the Beijing residents in a constant state of terror and fear... Most missionary properties, residences of the foreign teachers at the Imperial University and the Eastern and the Southern Cathedrals were reduced to aches. Many Chinese priests and christian converts perished together in the roaring flames.

When men differ in any matter of belief, let them meet each other manfully.

Francis Wayland

If no other consideration had convinced me of the value of the Christian life, the Christ like work which the Church of all denominations in America has done during the last 35 years for the elevation of the black man would have made me a Christian.

Booker T. Washington

When you can no longer feel the life that you are, you are likely to try to fill up your life with things.