These are notable quotes from an assortment of sources, speaking about
education, children, or parenting. Enjoy them and be inspired by them.
If you have a favorite educational quote that you would like to see included here, email it to:
guiltfreehomeschooling@gmail.com
and include “Quote” in the subject line.
“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life believing that is is stupid.”
~Albert Einstein
“Homeschooling is a very old way of doing things. If you look at any of the bills in your wallet or the coins in your pocket, they all have a picture of a homeschooler on them”
~William Lloyd
“Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some of us more than we can ever learn from books.”
~John Lubbock
“Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a reminder that one of the reasons we read fiction is because fiction helps train the moral imagination.”
~Chuck Colson
“The important thing is not so much that every child should be taught, as that every child should be given the wish to learn.”
~John Lubbock
“Don’t you wish there were a knob on the television to turn up the intelligence? There’s one marked ‘Brightness,’ but it doesn’t work.”
~Unknown
“Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.”
~Edgar Allan Poe
“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”
~Mark Twain
“If parents of each generation truly knew what was happening in their son’s school, the history of education would be quite different.”
~C.S. Lewis
“Clearly there is an appropriate kind of sheltering. When those who are opposed to homeschooling accuse me of sheltering my children, my reply is always, ‘What are you going to accuse me of next, feeding and clothing them?'”
~R.C. Sproul, Jr.
“Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality.”
~Beatrix Potter
“I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays and have things arranged for them that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas.”
~Agatha Christie
“Children require guidance and sympathy far more than instruction.”
~Anne Sullivan
“The man who DOES NOT read good books has no advantage over the man who CANNOT read them.”
~Mark Twain
“I never teach my pupils; I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn.”
~Albert Einstein
“It is the great triumph of compulsory, government monopoly mass-schooling that among even the best of my fellow teachers, and among even the best of my students’ parents, only a small number can imagine a different way to do things.”
~John Taylor Gatto
“All men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education.”
~Sir Walter Scott
“I am beginning to suspect all elaborate systems of education. They seem to me to be built upon the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think. Whereas if the child is left to himself, he will think more and better, if less showily. Let him go and come freely, let him touch real things and combine his impressions for himself instead of sitting indoors at a little round table, while a sweet-voiced teacher suggests that he builds a stone wall with his wooden blocks or plant straw trees in bead flower-pots. Such teaching fills the mind with artificial associations that must be got rid of, before the child can develop independent ideas out of actual experiences.”
~Anne Sullivan
“If you think without acting, it’s wasted effort. If you act without thinking, it’s suicide.”
~Winston Churchill
“Four Classes of Readers–
The first may be compared to an hourglass; their reading being as the sand, it runs in and it runs out, and leaves not a vestige behind. A second class resembles a sponge, which imbibe everything, and returns it nearly in the same state, only a little dirtier. A third class is like a jelly bag which allows all that is pure to pass away, and leaves only the refuse and the dregs. The fourth class may be compared to the slaves of the diamond mines of Golconda, who, casting aside all that is worthless, preserve only the pure gem.”
~Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“There are only 10 types of people in this world: those who understand binary, and those who don’t.”
~Unknown
“Trusting in God does not remove us from the realm of diligence.”
~Allistair Begg, pastor
“Fairy tales do not tell children that dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children that dragons can be killed.”
~G.K. Chesterton
“To hear is to forget, to see is to remember, to do is to understand.”
~Chinese proverb
“God not only has the power to change your life, He has the power to change your day.
~Beth Moore
“How can it be a large career to tell other people’s children about [arithmetic], and a small career to tell one’s own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No; a woman’s function is laborious because it is gigantic, not because it is minute.”
~G.K. Chesterton
“Dead animals don’t evolve. A fatal design flaw can’t be fixed by evolution.”
~Chuck Missler
“‘Luck’ is when preparation meets opportunity.”
~Unknown
“We learn…
–10% of what we read,
–20% of what we hear,
–30% of what we see,
–50% of what we see and hear,
–70% of what we discuss,
–80% of what we experience,
–95% of what we teach others.
~William Glassner
“Unless there is within us that which is above us, we shall soon yield to that which is about us.”
~P.T. Forsyth
“We are all ignorant. We’re just ignorant about different things.”
~Mark Twain
“Education is learning to listen to anything without losing your temper.”
~Louis Pasteur
“We are not retreating — we are advancing in another direction.”
~Gen. Douglas MacArthur
“Discipline is proof of love. The kid who won’t pick up his toys is the kid who won’t come home on time and who won’t stay away from drugs.”
~James McDonald, pastor
“I wish that my children may, as soon as may be, feel the principles of reason and honor working in them, and that I may carry on their education very much upon those principles.”
~Cotton Mather
“‘Hope’ is not a strategy.”
~Unknown
“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
~Albert Einstein
“We learn from history that we do not learn from history.”
~George Hegel
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
~George Santayana
Scary quote:
“The education of all children, from the moment they can get along without a mother’s care, shall be in state institutions at state expense.”
~Karl Marx: The Communist Manifesto
Scary quote:
“It is the absolute right of the state to supervise the formation of public opinion.”
~Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Minister of Propaganda
“The wealthy have large libraries, while the poor have large televisions.”
~Unknown
“It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.”
~Albert Einstein
“I hate, loathe, and despise schools… School is bad for you if you have any talent. You should be cultivating that talent in your own particular way.”
~Maurice Sendak, Author: Where the Wild Things Are
“Although our Western belief is that ‘talk is cheap,’ Hebrew writers and thinkers viewed words as being arrows that, when shot, would carry packets of energy that would leave a lasting impression upon the hearers.”
~Jon Courson, Pastor
“Accusing a homeschool kid of missing out on socialization is like accusing a work-at-home entrepreneur of missing out on corporate politics.”
~Perry Marshall
“Few things can help an individual more than to place responsibility on him, and to let him know that you trust him.”
~Booker T. Washington
“Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing is like shoveling the walk before it stops snowing.”
~Phyllis Diller
“The mediocre teacher tells.
The good teacher explains.
The superior teacher demonstrates.
The great teacher inspires.”
~William Arthur Ward
“To teach is to learn twice.”
~Joseph Joubert
“I would be the most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.”
~Anna Quindlen
“Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad.”
~Anonymous
“If you throw a rock into a pack of dogs, the one that howls is the one you hit.”
~Anonymous American proverb
“Youth ages. Immaturity is outgrown. Ignorance can be educated, and drunkenness sobered, but stupid lasts forever.”
~Aristophanes, Greek comic, 5th century B.C.
“If you have to swallow a frog, don’t look at the frog too long. If you have to swallow two frogs, swallow the biggest one first.”
~Anonymous
“Learning is a treasure that will follow its owner everywhere.”
~Chinese proverb
“How can it be a large career to tell other people’s children about (arithmetic), and a small career to tell one’s own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No; a woman’s function is laborious because it is gigantic, not because it is minute.”
~G.K. Chesterton
“Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.”
~John Dewey
“Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”
~James Baldwin
“Not everything that counts can be counted; and not everything that can be counted counts.”
~Albert Einstein
“Just as eating against one’s will is injurious to health, so study without a liking for it spoils the memory.”
~Leonardo Da Vinci
“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery everday. Never lose a holy curiosity.”
~Albert Einstein
“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”
~Peter Drucker
“All men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education.”
~Sir Walter Scott
“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”
~William Butler Yeats
[Some would say a spark already exists, and education is the process of feeding the fire without putting it out.]
“To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.”
~ Theodore Roosevelt
“If you bungle raising your children, I don’t think whatever else you do well matters very much.”
~ Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
