5 Thought-Provoking Teacher Quotes

Great Thought-Provoking Quotes for Teachers

All teachers know that education is full of surprises. There is always something new to learn, and it can often come from the most unexpected of places, and lead to surprising realizations. The following people found that the more they learned, the more they realized how little they knew. Keep reading to see these thought-provoking teacher quotes.

“Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing; education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.”
– Will Durant

“Everything you’ve learned in school as “obvious” becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There’s not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.”
– R. Buckminster Fuller

“The central question is whether the wonderfully diverse and gifted assemblage of human beings on this earth really knows how to run a civilization.”
– Adlai Stevenson

“A man’s ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful – while his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides being ugly. Which is the best man to deal with – he who knows nothing about a subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows nothing, or he who really knows something about it, but thinks that he knows all?”
– Henry David Thoreau

“The more we live by our intellect, the less we understand the meaning of life.”
-Leo Tolstoy

What do you think about these thoughts? What thought-provoking teacher quotes do you know? Do you have any of them posted in your classroom? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

About the Author
Carolina Fransen is the EdTech Apps and Tools Editor at SimpleK12.com. She writes regularly about the use of educational technology in K-12 classrooms, and she loves investigating teaching jobs in some of her favorite locales. If you have an app, tool, website, or service that you think we should know about, please send your information or tip to editor@simplek12.com.

SOURCE:  “Sunbeams.” The Sun Magazine, May 2015: 48. Print.