Most Famous Teachers Day Quotes

Most Famous Teachers Day Quotes

I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet, strange, I am ungrateful to those teachers.

Khalil Gibran

It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.

Albert Einstein

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.

Henry Adams

A good teacher can inspire hope, ignite the imagination, and instill a love of learning.

Brad Henry

If I am walking with two other men, each of them will serve as my teacher. I will pick out the good points of the one and imitate them, and the bad points of the other and correct them in myself.

Confucius

One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.

Carl Jung

The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards.

Anatole France

I touch the future. I teach.

Christa McAuliffe

I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.

John Steinbeck

You have to grow from the inside out. None can teach you, none can make you spiritual. There is no other teacher but your own soul.

Swami Vivekananda

I am indebted to my father for living, but to my teacher for living well.

Alexander the Great

Education is the key to success in life, and teachers make a lasting impact in the lives of their students.

Solomon Ortiz

Failure is a great teacher, and I think when you make mistakes and you recover from them and you treat them as valuable learning experiences, then you’ve got something to share.

Steve Harvey

A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering on cold iron.

Horace Mann

You can get help from teachers, but you are going to have to learn a lot by yourself, sitting alone in a room.

Dr. Seuss

The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.

C. S. Lewis

None of us got where we are solely by pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. We got here because somebody – a parent, a teacher, an Ivy League crony or a few nuns – bent down and helped us pick up our boots.

Thurgood Marshall

To this end the greatest asset of a school is the personality of the teacher.

John Strachan

The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery.

Mark Van Doren

You never stop learning. If you have a teacher, you never stop being a student.

Elisabeth Rohm

We spend the first twelve months of our children’s lives teaching them to walk and talk and the next twelve telling them to sit down and shut up.

Phyllis Diller

Those who know how to think need no teachers.

Mahatma Gandhi

The one exclusive sign of thorough knowledge is the power of teaching.

Aristotle

Good teachers know how to bring out the best in students.

Charles Kuralt

I like a teacher who gives you something to take home to think about besides homework.

Lily Tomlin

The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence. He inspires self-trust. He guides their eyes from himself to the spirit that quickens him. He will have no disciples.

Amos Bronson Alcott

Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching.

Oscar Wilde

Your best teacher is your last mistake.

Ralph Nader

If I can make a teacher’s salary doing comedy, I think that’s better than being a teacher.

Dave Chappelle

Those who have no record of what their forebears have accomplished lose the inspiration which comes from the teaching of biography and history.

Carter G. Woodson

If you have to put someone on a pedestal, put teachers. They are society’s heroes.

Guy Kawasaki

Most of us end up with no more than five or six people who remember us. Teachers have thousands of people who remember them for the rest of their lives.

Andy Rooney

Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity a greater.

William Hazlitt

History is Philosophy teaching by example.

Thucydides

The thing I loved the most – and still love the most about teaching – is that you can connect with an individual or a group, and see that individual or group exceed their limits.

Mike Krzyzewski

The impending teacher shortage is the most critical education issue we will face in the next decade.

David Price

The teacher is the one who gets the most out of the lessons, and the true teacher is the learner.

Elbert Hubbard

My heart is singing for joy this morning! A miracle has happened! The light of understanding has shone upon my little pupil’s mind, and behold, all things are changed!

Anne Sullivan

The smarter the journalists are, the better off society is. For to a degree, people read the press to inform themselves – and the better the teacher, the better the student body.

Warren Buffett

The dream begins with a teacher who believes in you, who tugs and pushes and leads you to the next plateau, sometimes poking you with a sharp stick called ‘truth’.

Dan Rather

A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

There are two kinds of teachers: the kind that fill you with so much quail shot that you can’t move, and the kind that just gives you a little prod behind and you jump to the skies.

Robert Frost

I would suggest that teachers show their students concrete examples of the negative effects of the actions that gangsta rappers glorify.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

It is by teaching that we teach ourselves, by relating that we observe, by affirming that we examine, by showing that we look, by writing that we think, by pumping that we draw water into the well.

Henri Frederic Amiel

In a completely rational society, the best of us would be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for something else.

Lee Iacocca

Take away paradox from the thinker and you have a professor.

Soren Kierkegaard

Excellence is a better teacher than mediocrity. The lessons of the ordinary are everywhere. Truly profound and original insights are to be found only in studying the exemplary.

Warren Bennis

When people lack teachers, their tendencies are not corrected; when they do not have ritual and moral principles, then their lawlessness is not controlled.

Xun Kuang

Teachers can change lives with just the right mix of chalk and challenges.

Joyce Meyer

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.

Albert Camus

Experience is a good teacher, but she sends in terrific bills.

Minna Antrim

I do not believe there is a problem in this country or the world today which could not be settled if approached through the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount.

Harry S Truman

Everybody’s a teacher if you listen.

Doris Roberts

When I was in junior high school, the teachers voted me the student most likely to end up in the electric chair.

Sylvester Stallone

What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.

Thomas Carlyle

A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas.

H. L. Mencken

What a blind person needs is not a teacher but another self.

Helen Keller

Study how water flows in a valley stream, smoothly and freely between the rocks. Also learn from holy books and wise people. Everything – even mountains, rivers, plants and trees – should be your teacher.

Morihei Ueshiba

The best teacher is the one who suggests rather than dogmatizes, and inspires his listener with the wish to teach himself.

Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

A professor is someone who talks in someone else’s sleep.

W. H. Auden

You know how to tell if the teacher is hung over? Movie Day.

Jay Mohr

Every bit of me is devoted to love and art. And I aspire to try to be a teacher to my young fans who feel just like I felt when I was younger. I just felt like a freak. I guess what I’m trying to say is I’m trying to liberate them, I want to free them of their fears and make them feel that they can make their own space in the world.

Lady Gaga

Teach love, generosity, good manners and some of that will drift from the classroom to the home and who knows, the children will be educating the parents.

Roger Moore

A good teacher, like a good entertainer first must hold his audience’s attention, then he can teach his lesson.

John Henrik Clarke

The five steps in teaching an employee new skills are preparation, explanation, showing, observation and supervision.

Bruce Barton

I cannot emphasize enough the importance of a good teacher.

Temple Grandin

Every man who rises above the common level has received two educations: the first from his teachers; the second, more personal and important, from himself.

Edward Gibbon

Teaching is the only major occupation of man for which we have not yet developed tools that make an average person capable of competence and performance. In teaching we rely on the ‘naturals’, the ones who somehow know how to teach.

Peter Drucker

A teacher should have maximal authority, and minimal power.

Thomas Szasz

Every child should have a caring adult in their lives. And that’s not always a biological parent or family member. It may be a friend or neighbor. Often times it is a teacher.

Joe Manchin

The world of knowledge takes a crazy turn when teachers themselves are taught to learn.

Bertolt Brecht

Only one person in a million becomes enlightened without a teacher’s help.

Bodhidharma

The doctrine of the Kingdom of Heaven, which was the main teaching of Jesus, is certainly one of the most revolutionary doctrines that ever stirred and changed human thought.

H. G. Wells

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

I had a terrible education. I attended a school for emotionally disturbed teachers.

Woody Allen

A self-taught man usually has a poor teacher and a worse student.

Henny Youngman

Police and firefighters are great, but they don’t create wealth. They protect it. That’s crucial. Teaching is a wonderful profession. Teachers help educate people to become good citizens so that citizens can then go create wealth. But they don’t create the wealth themselves.

Rush Limbaugh

In America the schools have become too permissive, the kids now are controlling the schools, the tail is wagging the dog. We’ve got to make a change there and get it back to where the teachers have control of the classrooms.

Chuck Norris

The most important part of teaching is to teach what it is to know.

Simone Weil

That is the difference between good teachers and great teachers: good teachers make the best of a pupil’s means; great teachers foresee a pupil’s ends.

Maria Callas

I saw as a teacher how, if you take that spark of learning that those children have, and you ignite it, you can take a child from any background to a lifetime of creativity and accomplishment.

Paul Wellstone

We expert teachers know that motivation and emotional impact are what matter.

Donald Norman

I was lucky that I met the right mentors and teachers at the right moment.

James Levine

Students rarely disappoint teachers who assure them in advance that they are doomed to failure.

Sidney Hook

We can teach a lot of things, but if the teacher can’t relate by talking to a group of friendly students, he’ll never be a competent teacher.

William Glasser

I think the teaching profession contributes more to the future of our society than any other single profession.

John Wooden

I’m lucky I had some teachers who saw something in me.

Ann Bancroft

We discovered that education is not something which the teacher does, but that it is a natural process which develops spontaneously in the human being.

Maria Montessori

One good teacher in a lifetime may sometimes change a delinquent into a solid citizen.

Philip Wylie

The true aim of everyone who aspires to be a teacher should be, not to impart his own opinions, but to kindle minds.

Frederick William Robertson

I had a ninth grade teacher who told me I was much smarter and much better than I was allowing myself to be.

Scott Hamilton

A teacher is a person who never says anything once.

Howard Nemerov

When we become a really mature, grown-up, wise society, we will put teachers at the center of the community, where they belong. We don’t honor them enough, we don’t pay them enough.

Charles Kuralt

Catholic schools in our Nation’s education have been paramount in teaching the values that we as parents seek to instill in our children.

Joe Baca

Let’s reintroduce corporal punishment in the schools – and use it on the teachers.

P. J. O’Rourke

The best CEOs I know are teachers, and at the core of what they teach is strategy.

Michael Porter

A teacher must believe in the value and interest of his subject as a doctor believes in health.

Gilbert Highet

When I am able to resist the temptation to judge others, I can see them as teachers of forgiveness in my life, reminding me that I can only have peace of mind when I forgive rather than judge.

Gerald Jampolsky

I wanted to be a teacher, but I was a lousy student, one of the slowest readers. It was a tremendous struggle. But I’m lucky I had some teachers who saw something in me.

Ann Bancroft

Teachers believe they have a gift for giving; it drives them with the same irrepressible drive that drives others to create a work of art or a market or a building.

A. Bartlett Giamatti

I have an education degree from the University of Minnesota, and I was a teacher for about a minute.

Loni Anderson

We should not run away from religious teachings. We should run to them.

James Carville

There is no teacher, living or past, who can give us the actual understanding of Truth. A teacher can only put our feet upon the path and point the way. That is all. It is wholly dependent on the individual to make his way to Truth.

Paul Twitchell

Some of my high school teachers did remind me that I had an excellent imagination when it came to making up excuses.

David E. Kelley

A retired teacher paid $62,000 towards her pension and nothing, yes nothing, for full family medical, dental and vision coverage over her entire career. What will we pay her? $1.4 million in pension benefits and another $215,000 in health care benefit premiums over her lifetime.

Chris Christie

TV is bigger than any story it reports. It’s the greatest teaching tool since the printing press.

Fred W. Friendly

Nearly everyone I met, worked with, or read about was my teacher, one way or another.

Loretta Young

I tried to stir the imagination and enthusiasms of students to take risks, to do what they were most afraid of doing, to widen their horizons of action.

James Broughton

A hallmark of the Latino community is to help one another, if students are interested in a way to give back and help their communities, becoming a teacher is probably one of the very best ways of doing that.

Ellen Ochoa

We know the parental support, community support, makes a difference. It’s not just the metrics of testing and putting pressure on the schools and on the teachers.

Donna Shalala

My attitude toward graduate students was different, I must say. I used graduate students as colleagues: I gave them the best problems to work on, and I encouraged them.

Frank Press

For the longest time, you just sound like a broken record, but you have to be consistent when teaching kids.

Heidi Klum

I never had to learn English, French and German because I was brought up as all three languages. I had a private French teacher before I even went to school. That helped a lot.

Karl Lagerfeld

I think teaching should be an exalted profession, not a picked-on profession.

Chuck Schumer

Please stop teaching my children that everyone gets a trophy just for participating. What is this, the Nobel Prize? Not everybody gets a trophy.

Glenn Beck

Americanism demands loyalty to the teacher and respect for his lesson.

Bainbridge Colby

As they work hard for our children, America’s teachers often reach into their own pockets to make sure they have the best classroom supplies. I feel strongly that the federal government should help make up for their personal financial burden.

John Warner

We may have forgotten how to feel. Nobody is teaching us how to live happily ever after, as we’ve heard in fairy tales.

Yakov Smirnoff

A good teacher is a determined person.

Gilbert Highet

A child’s learning is a function more of the characteristics of his classmates than those of the teacher.

James S. Coleman

Advice is sometimes transmitted more successfully through a joke than grave teaching.

Baltasar Gracian

A true teacher defends his students against his own personal influences.

Amos Bronson Alcott

If you are giving a graduate course you don’t try to impress the students with oratory, you try to challenge them, get them to question you.

Noam Chomsky

The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.

William Arthur Ward

Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.

Bill Gates

Let us remember: One book, one pen, one child, and one teacher can change the world.

Malala Yousafzai

Experience is the teacher of all things.

Julius Caesar

Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterward.

Vernon Law

If a country is to be corruption free and become a nation of beautiful minds, I strongly feel there are three key societal members who can make a difference. They are the father, the mother and the teacher.

A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

The greatest sign of success for a teacher… is to be able to say, ‘The children are now working as if I did not exist.’

Maria Montessori

In the practice of tolerance, one’s enemy is the best teacher.

Dalai Lama

Everyone who remembers his own education remembers teachers, not methods and techniques. The teacher is the heart of the educational system.

Sidney Hook

Success is not a good teacher, failure makes you humble.

Shah Rukh Khan

It’s the teacher that makes the difference, not the classroom.

Michael Morpurgo

Why not whip the teacher when the pupil misbehaves?

Diogenes

I believe in God – not in a Catholic God; there is no Catholic God. There is God, and I believe in Jesus Christ, his incarnation. Jesus is my teacher and my pastor, but God, the Father, Abba, is the light and the Creator. This is my Being.

Pope Francis

Consistency is always the best teacher.

Stephon Marbury

A garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience and careful watchfulness; it teaches industry and thrift; above all it teaches entire trust.

Gertrude Jekyll

Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker. Failure is delay, not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead end. Failure is something we can avoid only by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.

Denis Waitley

I am a teacher. It’s how I define myself. A good teacher isn’t someone who gives the answers out to their kids but is understanding of needs and challenges and gives tools to help other people succeed. That’s the way I see myself, so whatever it is that I will do eventually after politics, it’ll have to do a lot with teaching.

Justin Trudeau

If you become a teacher, by your pupils you’ll be taught.

Oscar Hammerstein II

Mama was my greatest teacher, a teacher of compassion, love and fearlessness. If love is sweet as a flower, then my mother is that sweet flower of love.

Stevie Wonder

My dad is white, he’s an art history teacher, he’s very traditional.

Miquita Oliver

In math, you could get 100 percent. It was very fair. That’s what I liked about math. You could figure it out, and the teacher couldn’t have a stupid opinion about it.

Norm MacDonald

The people I passed every morning as I walked up the school’s steps were full of hate. They were white, but so was my teacher, who couldn’t have been more different from them. She was one of the most loving people I had ever known.

Ruby Bridges

Sports are such a great teacher. I think of everything they’ve taught me: camaraderie, humility, how to resolve differences.

Kobe Bryant

For whatever reason, I didn’t succumb to the stereotype that science wasn’t for girls. I got encouragement from my parents. I never ran into a teacher or a counselor who told me that science was for boys. A lot of my friends did.

Sally Ride

Come forth into the light of things, let nature be your teacher.

William Wordsworth

Experience is a great teacher.

John Legend

Achievers have an enabling attitude, realism, and a conviction that they themselves were the laboratory of innovation. Their ability to change themselves is central to their success. They have learned to conserve their energy by minimizing the time spent in regret or complaint. Every event is a lesson to them, every person a teacher.

Marilyn Ferguson

A child’s first teacher is its mother.

Peng Liyuan

It doesn’t matter if you want to be a teacher, an astronaut, or a reggaeton singer, you need to study.

Bad Bunny

The duties of a teacher are neither few nor small, but they elevate the mind and give energy to the character.

Dorothea Dix

Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.

John Updike

A word of encouragement from a teacher to a child can change a life. A word of encouragement from a spouse can save a marriage. A word of encouragement from a leader can inspire a person to reach her potential.

John C. Maxwell

I’m not a writer who teaches. I’m a teacher who writes.

Maya Angelou

The problem with public school is not overcrowding in the classroom. The problem is not teacher unions. The problem is not underfunding or lack of computer equipment. The problem is your damn kids.

P. J. O’Rourke

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.

Hector Berlioz

I grew up middle class – my dad was a high school teacher; there were five kids in our family. We all shared a nine-hundred-square-foot home with one bathroom. That was exciting. And my wife is Irish Catholic and also very, very barely middle class.

Dana Carvey

I think self-reliance and self-responsibility and self-accountability will help you as a parent, a teacher, as a citizen as a friend.

Henry Rollins

My mom was my rock, my confidant and my best friend. She was an elementary school teacher who worked with students with disabilities and she lived every day giving back to her family and her community.

Matt Barnes

I had a speech class in elementary school. And you know how teachers, when a kid is struggling to pronounce a word, used to lead him and say, ‘Johnny, sounds like… ? Johnny, sounds like… ?’ I said out loud, ‘Sounds like Johnny can’t read.’ Teacher told me to leave the room.

Shannon Sharpe

‘Expect nothing and hope for the best’ is my mantra. A drama teacher called Joseph Blatchley told me that, and it’s the best advice I’ve had. If you keep an open mind and don’t expect too muchOf all the hard jobs around, one of the hardest is being a good teacher., then you won’t be disappointed.

Michelle Dockery

If you improve a teacher’s self-esteem, confidence, communication skills or stress levels, you improve that teacher’s overall effectiveness across the curriculum.

Elaine MacDonald

Of all the hard jobs around, one of the hardest is being a good teacher.

Maggie Gallagher

Who am I? I’m a man, an American, a father, a teacher, but most of all, I am a person who knows how the arts can change lives, because they transformed mine. I was a dancer.

Jacques d’Amboise

I was a victim of a stereotype. There were only two of us Negro kids in the whole class, and our English teacher was always stressing the importance of rhythm in poetry. Well, everybody knows – except us – that all Negroes have rhythms, so they elected me class poet.

Langston Hughes

Failure is a better teacher than success. I am what I am today because of failures and successes.

Rakshit Shetty

There is no recipe to be a great teacher, that’s what is unique about them.

Robert Sternberg

I created ‘Captain Underpants’ when I was in the second grade. I was constantly getting in trouble for being the class clown, so my teacher sent me out into the hallway to punish me. It was there in the hall that I began drawing ‘Captain Underpants’. Soon I was making my own comic books about him.

Dav Pilkey

My brother’s my teacher, my mentor, and we both learnt all the acting basics from our father.

Jeff Bridges

If you’re a coach, you’re a teacher.

Nick Saban

I was very studious, too much. I would never go out at weekends. I was very serious. You should have seen me in class – I was blushing and sweating every time the teacher asked me something.

Eva Green

I am a teacher, and I am proud of it. At Cornell University I have taught primarily undergraduates, and indeed almost every year since 1966 have taught first-year general chemistry.

Roald Hoffmann

He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.

Walt Whitman

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that oral teachers and sign teachers found it difficult to sit down in the same room without quarreling, and there was intolerance upon both sides. To say ‘oral method’ to a sign teacher was like waving a red flag in the face of a bull, and to say ‘sign language’ to an oralist aroused the deepest resentment.

Alexander Graham Bell

I liked school, but I used to dread those moments when the teacher would call me up to give an oral report. I forced myself to deal with it and not dwell on the class in front of me – to keep a straight face, give the report and concentrate on getting it right. That’s normally how I perform. That’s how I am.

Steven Wright

A good teacher who can take the zero pay and help kids develop physically, emotionally, socially, is literally an angel.

Eva Amurri

When I was about ten years old, I gave my teacher an April Fool’s sandwich, which had a dead goldfish in it.

Alan Alda

On the first day of school, my teacher, Miss Mdingane, gave each of us an English name and said that from thenceforth that was the name we would answer to in school. This was the custom among Africans in those days and was undoubtedly due to the British bias of our education.

Nelson Mandela

I believe that the testing of the student’s achievements in order to see if he meets some criterion held by the teacher, is directly contrary to the implications of therapy for significant learning.

Carl Rogers

Whenever people ask me: ‘Why didn’t you get up when the bus driver asked you?’ I say it felt as though Harriet Tubman’s hands were pushing me down on one shoulder and Sojourner Truth’s hands were pushing me down on the other shoulder. I felt inspired by these women because my teacher taught us about them in so much detail.

Claudette Colvin

Music when healthy, is the teacher of perfect order, and when depraved, the teacher of perfect disorder.

John Ruskin

Teaching is a profession in which capacity building should occur at every stage of the career – novices working with accomplished colleagues, skillful teachers sharing their craft, and opportunities for teacher leadership.

Randi Weingarten

I’ve learned that mistakes can often be as good a teacher as success.

Jack Welch

I was born 50 years after slavery, in 1913. I was allowed to read. My mother, who was a teacher, taught me when I was a very young child. The first school I attended was a small building that went from first to sixth grade. There was one teacher for all of the students. There could be anywhere from 50 to 60 students of all different ages.

Rosa Parks

No bubble is so iridescent or floats longer than that blown by the successful teacher.

William Osler

Delayed gratification is a sweet lesson whose teacher knows the best is not right now, it is yet to be.

Maximillian Degenerez

I actually found contracting malaria in the Congo fascinating. Observing your body under attack from this microorganism and seeing how it responds is simultaneously fascinating and awful but maybe that’s just because I’m a former biology teacher.

Jeremy Wade

I’m glad I was a teacher.

John Wooden

Art owes its origin to Nature herself… this beautiful creation, the world, supplied the first model, while the original teacher was that divine intelligence which has not only made us superior to the other animals, but like God Himself, if I may venture to say it.

Giorgio Vasari

I had a teacher who stressed for me the importance of diction in terms of… I want to be very careful about how I say this… in terms of supporting one’s voice when one is singing. In other words, if you hold on to your words, your voice will pull through for you when you’re singing. So be true to your vowels.

Julie Andrews

Technology is just a tool. In terms of getting the kids working together and motivating them, the teacher is the most important.

Bill Gates

I do home schooling. I went to regular school until fifth grade, and then I started doing home schooling, which it’s completely different. I have a teacher on set with me and I just work with her, one-on-one.

Miranda Cosgrove

If you don’t have a teacher you can’t have a disciple.

Dallas Willard

We don’t classify all doctors as incompetent because of the infrequent instances of medical malpractice. We don’t use the example of one bad teacher in our children’s school to draw a negative conclusion of the entire teaching profession. We should apply that same rational standard when it comes to how we view law enforcement.

Thom Tillis

What is it in you that brings you to a spiritual teacher in the first place? It’s not the spirit in you, since that is already enlightened, and has no need to seek. No, it is the ego in you that brings you to a teacher.

Ken Wilber

I will venture to maintain that where the teacher is not pleasing to the pupil, there is no education.

Xenophon

Poetry is a special use of language that opens onto the real. The business of the poet is truth telling, which is why in the Celtic tradition no one could be a teacher unless he or she was a poet.

Huston Smith

My father was my teacher. But most importantly he was a great dad.

Beau Bridges

My teacher told me I’d never amount to anything. I left high school at 15, after one year. But my real teachers were all the people around me. And I was a good listener.

Curtis Mayfield

No individual has done more to help me pursue a career in science than my wife of forty-five years. I met Enid Cassandra Morgan during the election campaign of 1948 when she was a Sunday school teacher, a leader of the youth organizations of St. Phillips Episcopal Church, and the head of Harlem Youth for the election of Henry Wallace.

Robert Fogel

I never made it to the school choir because the music teacher didn’t like my voice. I was pretty sad. But he was probably right; I did have a voice a bit like a goat, but my dad told me to never give up and to keep going, and it’s paid off.

Shakira

If you take golf, you have a teacher for the drive, a teacher for the approach play, and a teacher for the putt. That’s three specialist coaches for one player. In football, one coach looks after 25 players.

Johan Cruyff

I am sure it is one’s duty as a teacher to try to show boys that no opinions, no tastes, no emotions are worth much unless they are one’s own. I suffered acutely as a boy from the lack of being shown this.

A. C. Benson

The primary task of a useful teacher is to teach his students to recognize ‘inconvenient’ facts – I mean facts that are inconvenient for their party opinions.

Max Weber

At the age of 6, a teacher full of ambitions, who taught in the small public school of Biran, convinced my family that I should travel to Santiago de Cuba to accompany my older sister who would enter a highly prestigious convent school. Including me was a skill of that very teacher from the little school in Biran.

Fidel Castro

To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.

Joseph Conrad

It’s good to have a good teacher, but you always need a pretty good student.

Grigor Dimitrov

Smartness runs in my family. When I went to school I was so smart my teacher was in my class for five years.

Gracie Allen

Now, what really makes a teacher is love for the human child; for it is love that transforms the social duty of the educator into the higher consciousness of a mission.

Maria Montessori

All it takes is one teacher – just one – to save us from ourselves and make us forget all the others.

Daniel Pennac

I have always admired teachers because teaching, like the priesthood, medicine and writing, is a vocation. You don’t become a teacher because you want wealth. It is the same with writing.

F. Sionil Jose

I’m a teacher still, but with a much larger classroom.

Rick Riordan

Teaching is a very noble profession that shapes the character, caliber, and future of an individual. If the people remember me as a good teacher, that will be the biggest honour for me.

A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

There is no employing class, no working class, no farming class. You may pigeonhole a man or woman as a farmer or a worker or a professional man or an employer or even a banker. But the son of the farmer will be a doctor or a worker or even a banker, and his daughter a teacher. The son of a worker will be an employer – or maybe president.

Herbert Hoover

Writing is such a ‘pretend’ profession. Nobody is counting on you at all. You can’t ‘pretend’ to be a lawyer or a teacher. It takes a lot of grit to continue.

MacKenzie Scott

On the first day of school, you got to be real careful where you sit. You walk into the classroom and just plunk your stuff down on any old desk, and the next thing you know the teacher is saying, ‘I hope you all like where you’re sitting, because these are your permanent seats.’

Jeff Kinney

Adversity is a great teacher, but this teacher makes us pay dearly for its instruction; and often the profit we derive, is not worth the price we paid.

Elizabeth Hardwick

I didn’t really want to be a teacher, but tMy teacher, my great cello teacher Leonard Rose, was such a great cellist, and nurturing man, very patient. But I grew up not only admiring him, but obviously Casals, Rostrotovich, Jacqueline du Pre, and many others, including many of my peers and contemporaries.here was nothing else I could be. Most of those who went to the university became teachers. It was just the racial restriction on Africans.

Oliver Tambo

My teacher, my great cello teacher Leonard Rose, was such a great cellist, and nurturing man, very patient. But I grew up not only admiring him, but obviously Casals, Rostrotovich, Jacqueline du Pre, and many others, including many of my peers and contemporaries.

Yo-Yo Ma

My father was a swim teacher. We used to swim before school, swim after school.

Gordon Ramsay

I was a chemistry major, but I’m always winding up as a teacher in English departments, so I’ve brought scientific thinking to literature. There’s been very little gratitude for this.

Kurt Vonnegut

There’s always someone asking you to underline one piece of yourself – whether it’s Black, woman, mother, dyke, teacher, etc. – because that’s the piece that they need to key in to. They want to dismiss everything else.

Audre Lorde

My mother was an English teacher and she imbibed the habit of reading, and encouraged me to participate in debates and the like.

Divya Khosla Kumar

Fear is not a lasting teacher of duty.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Every day, I would show up, and there were no kids, just me and my teacher in my classroom. Every day, I would be escorted by marshals past a mob of people protesting and boycotting the school. This went on for a whole year.

Ruby Bridges

My teacher told my mum, ‘I think William has dyspraxia,’ and Mum asked what that meant. She said, ‘Well, if I put a chair in the middle of the room and asked every child in the class to walk around it, William would be the only child in the class to walk into it.’ Mum was like, ‘Yeah, that’s my boy’.

Will Poulter

My old dance teacher, Jimmy Wilde, a former European ballroom dancing champion, was so sophisticated.

Anton du Beke

I always was a weird child. My mother told me the story that, in kindergarten, I would come home and tell her about this weird kid in my class who drew only with black crayons and didn’t speak to other kids. I talked about it so much that my mother brought it up with the teacher, who said, ‘What? That’s your son.’

John Waters

History is the only true teacher, the revolution the best school for the proletariat.

Rosa Luxemburg

I am a teacher born and bred, and I believe in the advocacy of teachers. It’s a calling. We want our students to feel impassioned and empowered.

Erin Gruwell

I’ve always remembered something Sanford Meisner, my acting teacher, told us. When you create a character, it’s like making a chair, except instead of making someting out of wood, you make it out of yourself. That’s the actor’s craft – using yourself to create a character.

Robert Duvall

You can’t tell a woman who is called by God to teach that she cannot teach the Word of God… So I think the distinction is that there’s a difference between the authority of a pastor and a Bible teacher.

Charles Stanley

My happiest memory of childhood was my first birthday in reform school. This teacher took an interest in me. In fact, he gave me the first birthday presents I ever got: a box of Cracker Jacks and a can of ABC shoe polish.

Flip Wilson

Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.

Arthur Koestler

I am a teacher. And I think I am a serious one who happens to be enjoying life.

Leo Buscaglia

Heroes represent the best of ourselves, respecting that we are human beings. A hero can be anyone from Gandhi to your classroom teacher, anyone who can show courage when faced with a problem. A hero is someone who is willing to help others in his or her best capacity.

Ricky Martin

I need a teacher quite as much as Helen. I know the education of this child will be the distinguishing event of my life, if I have the brains and perseverance to accomplish it.

Anne Sullivan

I chose to be a maths teacher because I thought the marking would be easy. You’d just tick and cross, whereas if you’re an English teacher, you’ve got to read essays. Then they said I had to analyse the methodology. It takes an eternity, it’s insane!

Romesh Ranganathan

I was a high school teacher when I joined Bullet Club and started going to Japan.

Adam Page

I was a trial lawyer. At the same time, I was a teacher. I taught about the political and social content of film for American University. Then I left and became a teacher at the University of California at Santa Cruz. I taught about the political and social content of film, but I also taught a course in law for undergraduates.

Ben Stein

I’ve done everything from cater, wait tables, pre-school teacher, painting, to being Cinderella, Elmo, a clown, nanny, selling hair… I would do kid’s parties and entertain and do magic and paint faces and balloon animals. The highlight of my life.

Diora Baird

In this outward and physical ceremony we attest once again to the inner and spiritual strength of our Nation. As my high school teacher, Miss Julia Coleman, used to say: ‘We must adjust to changing times and still hold to unchanging principles.’

Jimmy Carter

I remember in school once the teacher gave us a speech about anyone can make it if they try, and then she looked at me and said. ‘I don’t know what you are going to do, Georgie.’

George Foreman

As a coach, you’re like a teacher. You don’t give the players their talent. God gives them talent, but you can give them knowledge, and you can give them information.

Herm Edwards

It is commonly said that a teacher fails if he has not been surpassed by his students. There has been no failure on our part in this regard considering how far they have gone.

Edmond H. Fischer

We must use the wrath of nature as our teacher.

Bhumibol Adulyadej

I started with CB radio, ham radio, and eventually went into computers. And I was just fascinated with it. And back then, when I was in school, computer hacking was encouraged. It was an encouraged activity. In fact, I remember one of the projects my teacher gave me was writing a log-in simulator.

Kevin Mitnick

The greatest teacher I know is the job itself.

James Cash Penney

A good teacher must be able to put himself in the place of those who find learning hard.

Eliphas Levi

My dad’s a teacher and a football coach, and he found a job in New Jersey.

Sadie Sink

My mother was a Sunday school teacher. So I am a byproduct of prayer. My mom just kept on praying for her son.

Steve Harvey

My father still is a lawyer, and my mom was a teacher and then later a career counselor.

Steve Case

The role of the teacher remains the highest calling of a free people. To the teacher, America entrusts her most precious resource, her children; and asks that they be prepared… to face the rigors of individual participation in a democratic society.

Shirley Hufstedler

It was God who made me so beautiful. If I weren’t, then I’d be a teacher.

Linda Evangelista

The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind.

Khalil Gibran

I had a teacher in college who drastically changed the course of my life by telling me that he believed in me as an actor. I never received that support before, and it inspired to me to such a degree that I never looked back. He taught me that it’s okay to be crappy; it’s okay to fight; it’s okay to go to any length.

Taylor Schilling

I’d like to say I was smart enough to finish six grades in five years, but I think perhaps the teacher was just glad to get rid of me.

Alan Shepard

The teacher that I was for decades, and that I still am in a certain way, wondered what was meant by the word education. I was truly dumbfounded at the very thought of dealing with such an essential and extensive subject.

Abdoulaye Wade

Any good teacher knows how important it is to connect with students and understand our culture.

Adora Svitak

Love is a better teacher than duty.

Albert Einstein

I think like a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Failure is a great teacher. At the same time, you must remember, success will never last… Whether it’s tech or fashion, it must be for the customer.

Tadashi Yanai

Steampunk is not a group of children in a classroom, sitting quietly while the teacher reads a story; it’s the kids at recess, playing a wild, endless game of pretend.

Kaja Foglio

My mother was an elementary school teacher for 35 years and taught at the Nixon School in New Jersey. I was raised as a very liberal Democrat, and she was protesting Nixon when he was in office.

Peter Dinklage

I spent most of my high school years on movie sets and I’d have like one teacher, which was really bad.

Devon Sawa

My older brother Joel became an art teacher; my brother Rip ultimately became a television producer and singer and actor himself.

Billy Crystal

The teacher must derive not only the capacity, but the desire, to observe natural phenomena. The teacher must understand and feel her position of observer: the activity must lie in the phenomenon.

Maria Montessori

My mother was a teacher.

Hugh Grant

At high school, instead of the weekly essay, I would write a poem, and the teacher accepted that. The impulse was one of laziness, I’m certain. Poems were shorter than essays.

Paul Muldoon

This is at the heart of all good education, where the teacher asks students to think and engages them in encouraging dialogues, constantly checking for understanding and growth.

William Glasser

My mum, Kathy, works as a GP and my dad, Mark, was a high school maths teacher. He now manages mum’s practice and is also my cricket coach. We are a close-knit family.

Ellyse Perry

Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know.

Vladimir Nabokov

Teachers make a difference, and we would serve our students better by focusing on attracting and retaining the quality teachers by raising teacher pay.

Jeb Bush

I’ve spent my entire life in Kolkata. My nine-year-old daughter, Hiya, studies here. My wife Mohua is a teacher.

Saswata Chatterjee

A teacher enlarges people in all sorts of ways besides just his subject matter.

Wallace Stegner

My name is James Edward Franco. Ted is a nickname for Edward. That’s what my parents called me. I also got ‘Teddy Ruxpin’ a lot. It just got to a point where I got sick of it, so when a teacher called out ‘James Franco’ my junior year of high school, I didn’t correct her.

James Franco

Although I am basically self taught, I consider Debussy my teacher – the most important elements are colour, light and shadow.

Toru Takemitsu

I started running because my neighbour, Patrick Sang, was an athlete and I wanted to be just like him. Patrick came from the same village as I do and my mother used to be his teacher. I was so inspired by his success.

Eliud Kipchoge

A good teacher must know the rules; a good pupil, the exceptions.

Martin H. Fischer

Coach Reid is a great teacher. He understands how people learn, understands how to get people to get the concept of what the play is and why we’re running it.

Patrick Mahomes

I’ve got a friend who is a lion tamer. He used to be a school teacher till he lost his nerve.

Les Dawson

When people say, you know, ‘Good teacher,’ ‘Prophet,’ ‘Really nice guy’… this is not how Jesus thought of Himself. So you’re left with a challenge in that, which is either Jesus was who he said he was or a complete and utter nut case. You have to make a choice on that.

Bono

When I went to college, my goal was to be a college history teacher. I majored in history.

George J. Mitchell

I don’t know anybody who said, ‘I love that teacher, he or she gave a really good homework set,’ or ‘Boy, that was the best class I ever took because those exams were awesome.’ That’s not what people want to talk about. It’s not what influences people in one profession or another.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

I should prefer to have a politician who regularly went to a massage parlour than one who promised a laptop computer for every teacher.

A. N. Wilson

A teacher told my mother that I would never become successful, which illustrates the difficulty of long-run forecasting on inadequate data.

Clive Granger

My dad is a chemical engineer, and my mom was a teacher. They were pretty serious about education, but I always thought about things a little bit differently.

Aaron Levie

Once I accomplish one thing and I’m satisfied, I try something else. I may be 50 and doing something totally outside of music and acting. Maybe I’ll become a kindergarten teacher.

Kid Cudi

Given my age, I am pretty near the end, probably, of my career as a writer, a scholar, a teacher. And I wanted to speak of things I will not be able to do.

George Steiner

I feel so very grateful to have the voice God gave me. It takes a lot of rest and training to sing, and I was lucky that I found a great teacher when I first moved to New York.

Judy Collins

I had a teacher when I was in college, and he was the first person who liked my photos and said, ‘The way you look at girls is your own way of seeing.’ He was the first person who really gave me the confidence to try something.

Sofia Coppola

In schools with a history of chaos, the teacher who can keep the classroom calm becomes virtually indispensable.

Jonathan Kozol

My mom is an art teacher and my dad owns a women’s shoe store, so they’re not actors by any means. Well, I guess to sell women’s shoes, you have to be an actor.

James Wolk

I have always believed that 98% of a student’s progress is due to his own efforts, and 2% to his teacher.

John Philip Sousa

Do I think it’s OK to fight authority as long as you’re only talking about the high school teacher? No.

John Mellencamp

I kind of fell backwards into acting. I was studying to be a high school teacher. I look now and I understand completely, or actually barely, how much work it is to be a teacher. It’s an incredible amount of work.

Nathan Fillion

Jesse Jackson is a leader and a teacher who can open our hearts and open our minds and stir our very souls.

Ann Richards

Research shows that there is only half as much variation in student achievement between schools as there is among classrooms in the same school. If you want your child to get the best education possible, it is actually more important to get him assigned to a great teacher than to a great school.

Bill Gates

As a former high school teacher and a student in a class of 60 urchins at St. Brigid’s grammar school, I know that education is all about discipline and motivation. Disadvantaged students need extra attention, a stable school environment, and enough teacher creativity to stimulate their imaginations. Those things are not expensive.

Bill O’Reilly

The object of teaching a child is to enable him to get along without his teacher.

Elbert Hubbard

If you ask me about vocal technique, I don’t know anything. I could never be a teacher. I just know what my teacher told me: ‘Always sing with a full voice. When they tell you, less sound, more piano – no.’

Anna Netrebko

Usually, girls weren’t encouraged to go to college and major in math and science. My high school calculus teacher, Ms. Paz Jensen, made math appealing and motivated me to continue studying it in college.

Ellen Ochoa

But I think that any young drummer starting out today should get himself a great teacher and learn all there is to know about the instrument that he wants to play.

Buddy Rich

The teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering on cold iron.

Horace Mann

They should regard me as what I am. I am a spiritual leader and teacher.

Louis Farrakhan

The parents have a right to say that no teacher paid by their money shall rob their children of faith in God and send them back to their homes skeptical, or infidels, or agnostics, or atheists.

William Jennings Bryan

Instead of five hundred thousand average algebra teachers, we need one good algebra teacher. We need that teacher to create software, videotape themselves, answer questions, let your computer or the iPad teach algebra… The hallmark of any good technology is that it destroys jobs.

Michael J. Saylor

You can choose your family sometimes. You can choose people, it could be a teacher, it could be a professor, it could be someone you work with that actually genuinely cares about you and wants you to succeed.

Nicolas Cage

I want to be a lawyer, a dancer, an actress, a mother, a wife, a children’s author, a distance runner, a poet, a pianist, a pet store owner, an astronaut, an environmental and humanitarian activist, a psychiatrist, a ballet teacher, and the first woman president.

Rachel Corrie

My parents made it clear that I should never display even the slightest disrespect to individuals who had the power to let me skip a half grade or move into more challenging classes. While it was all right for me to know more about a topic than my sixth-grade teacher had ever learned, questioning her facts could only lead to trouble.

James D. Watson

I used to write things for friends. There was this girl I had a crush on, and she had a teacher she didn’t like at school. I had a real crush on her, so almost every day I would write her a little short story where she would kill him in a different way.

Stephen Colbert

You know, a lot of those angry sort of Southern man characters that I’ve been doing are based on different people I might’ve had as, like, a soccer coach or as a teacher.

Danny McBride

As a student I learned from wonderful teachers and ever since then I’ve thought everyone is a teacher.

Bill Moyers

The teacher’s life should have three periods, study until twenty-five, investigation until forty, profession until sixty, at which age I would have him retired on a double allowance.

William Osler

I spent a few years after college as a Boston public school teacher and I loved it. But I was never committed to it, committed to it as a career.

Lawrence O’Donnell

I’m an unemployed teacher right now and I’m looking for a place to teach.

Bobby Knight

I learned by watching my favorite shows. I would just rewind and say the words back, until they sounded right to me. I never studied the American accent, in terms of getting a teacher or taking phonetics classes. I’ve always been a good mimic. It really wasn’t that hard for me.

Adelaide Kane

I’ve always said I’m a teacher at heart.

Alex Rodriguez

Believe it or not, one teacher used to call me a giant spastic for not being able to play football.

Peter Capaldi

I have been a teacher myself all my life. I have an intense passion to share with people. Our only salvation is in knowledge, in learning.

Leo Buscaglia

My acting teacher used to say that people reveal themselves in their opposites.

Kristin Bauer van Straten

This is what I would have done if I had to have a real job: I would have been a history teacher.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

My teacher Tom Spanbauer, the man who got me started writing in his workshop, used to say: ‘Writers write because they weren’t invited to a party.’ That always struck so true, and people always nod their heads when they hear that. Especially writers.

Chuck Palahniuk

A teacher should have a creative mind.

A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

No voice teacher can be all things to all people. You have to gain information from whatever sources you can. You have to listen.

Renee Fleming

My mom was a chemistry teacher.

Shriya Saran

I was raised in New York City and raised in the New York City theater world. My father was a theater director and an acting teacher, and it was not uncommon for me to have long discussions about the method and what the various different processes were to finding a character and exploring character and realizing that character.

Vin Diesel

When you become a parent, or a teacher, you turn into a manager of this whole system. You become the person controlling the bubble of innocence around a child, regulating it.

Kazuo Ishiguro

There’s many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

Flannery O’Connor

I wanted to be in the police force, a teacher, a judge, lawyer, doctor, and other jobs. Of course, my mind changed as I started to face reality.

Ji Chang-wook

I had kind of a mean piano teacher. I went to Catholic school, so it was like the typical thing you would imagine – a little kid with a white-haired teacher frowning at the fact that I didn’t practice.

Chris Cornell

That’s a big deal for kids, when they come into the kitchen and the teacher is drinking coffee with mom. They react differently on the next day when you say: ‘Sit down and shut-up!’

Ed O’Neill

I don’t learn so good, no matter how good the teacher is.

Warren Zevon

A self-defined challenge is an irresistible teacher.

Marilyn Ferguson

The best thing we can do with rejection is to make it a learning experience – rejection is a great teacher.

Adena Friedman

Howard Zinn was magical as a teacher. Witty, irreverent, and wise, he loved what he was teaching and clearly wanted his students to love it, also.

Alice Walker

In the depth of the near depression, that he faced when he came in, Barack Obama and Democratic leaders in Congress provided ‘recovery funds’ that literally kept our classrooms open. Two years ago, these funds saved nearly 20,000 teacher and education jobs – just here in North Carolina.

Jim Hunt

I’m sure any vocal teacher that listens to me would rather cut my throat than do anything – I do everything all wrong – but I think for me that’s the best – because I don’t think I have a voice so I think what I project would be style – if I learned to sing I’d lose my style.

Julie London

My physics teacher, Thomas Miner was particularly gifted. To this day, I remember how he introduced the subject of physics. He told us we were going to learn how to deal with very simple questions such as how a body falls due to the acceleration of gravity.

Steven Chu

Jesus was a teacher, in a way. I mean, essentially, Jesus was a teacher. He was teaching people. He was helping them see themselves for what they were. He was helping them see their power, their strength, their beauty, what they’re capable of.

Haaz Sleiman

I went to a Catholic high school and it seemed like every time I drew something for a class project, it either got thrown away by the teacher or something.

Mike Judge

If I’d stayed at college I would have become a teacher.

Syd Barrett

My duty as a teacher is to train, educate future programmers.

Niklaus Wirth

NASA was going to pick a public school teacher to go into space, observe and make a journal about the space flight, and I am a teacher who always dreamed of going up into space.

Christa McAuliffe

My parents are the last of the middle class. My father worked for the government designing sea mines. My mother was a substitute teacher. Together, they worked really only until they were sixty.

Lewis Black

The Sunday School teacher talked too much in the way our grade school teacher used to when she told us about George Washington. Pleasant, pretty stories, but not true.

Frances Farmer

Tiger’s a horrible golf teacher.

Stuart Scott

I’ve always been surrounded by many great people and professors, but my family, especially my mom who was a teacher, was the person who encouraged me to study and pushed me to continue. When we’re young, we don’t understand why our parents bug us so much with school and doing homework, but it’s a blessing to have that support at home.

Bad Bunny

A relationship succeeds when obstacles are met with communication and resolution. A relationship flourishes when we take the beloved as our teacher. Shared goals create a transformative, interwoven path.

Alex Grey

I taught myself English. My English teacher was the sitcom ‘Friends.’ Back in the days when I was, like, 15, 14, it was like a syndrome for Korean parents to make their kids watch ‘Friends.’ I thought I was a victim at that time, but now I’m the lucky one.

RM

I had never seen a white teacher before, but Mrs. Henry was the nicest teacher I ever had.

Ruby Bridges

My mother was a P.E. teacher, and she was kind of a fanatic about fitness and nutrition growing up, so it was ingrained in me at a young age. As I get older, I’m finding out it’s not about getting all buffed up and looking good. It’s more about staying healthy and flexible.

Josh Duhamel

I failed eighth grade twice, and then they moved me up to ninth grade. Then I failed that and dropped out. My teacher would hand me a test, and I’d grade it myself with an F, then put my head down on the desk.

Tig Notaro

At the age of 15, a teacher had asked me what I wanted to do for a career, and without knowing why or even how I replied that I wanted to be a poet.

Ama Ata Aidoo

I was born in Paris, and my mother was a French teacher, but then I rebelled against my upbringing and studied Spanish in school. So now I just speak bad French and bad Spanish.

Lydia Leonard

Literature is my life of course, but from an ontological point of view. From an existential point of view, I like being a teacher.

Antonio Tabucchi

The two things I was positive about in life were that I was going to be a teacher at a boarding school or an operative with the CIA posted abroad. I could write a book about all the things I was sure about.

Tucker Carlson

When I left school – or, rather, when I was expelled from school for hitting a kid who had disrespected a teacher – I had nothing, with nowhere to go. Where I’m from, it really means that. Now my family are millionaires. I never dreamed this would be possible.

Tony Bellew

The processes of teaching the child that everything cannot be as he wills it are apt to be painful both to him and to his teacher.

Anne Sullivan

It is not easy to imagine how little interested a scientist usually is in the work of any other, with the possible exception of the teacher who backs him or the student who honors him.

Jean Rostand

When I was in junior high, a foreign-history teacher started a theater class. So I got my feet wet there and through high school, so I was very fascinated with acting as a means of expression.

Dwight Yoakam

I wanted to be a teacher. I love children, so I wanted to deal with children. Then I wanted to be a veterinarian. But by the age of ten or eleven, when I opened my mouth and said, ‘Oh, God, what’s this?’ I kind of knew teaching and being a veterinarian were gonna have to wait.

Whitney Houston

For fifteen years, I was a teacher of youth. They were years out of the fullness and bloom of my younger manhood. They were years mingled of half breathless work, of anxious self-questionings, of planning and replanning, of disillusion, or mounting wonder.

W. E. B. Du Bois

The drawing teacher has this problem of communicating how to draw by osmosis and not by instruction, while the physics teacher has the problem of always teaching techniques, rather than the spirit, of how to go about solving physical problems.

Richard P. Feynman

Over my life as a teacher, women have been too quiet. I’m quiet myself. I don’t think I said three words the whole of graduate school.

Marilynne Robinson

I am a student first, teacher second.

Roy Nelson

China’s republican politics is like a child who just started schooling. He must have a good teacher and be surrounded by good friends. By the same token, the Chinese people, new to the republican politics, must be educated properly. The revolutionary government should be the people’s tutor to impart advanced awareness and experience.

Sun Yat-sen

I was an educated girl. I’d done very well in school. I had a good point average and graduated from USC as an English teacher. My dad didn’t even finish high school.

Marlo Thomas

‘The Turner Diaries’ is a racist daydream by a former physics teacher writing under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald.

Gore Vidal

My dad’s a scientist, and my mom’s a teacher, so I didn’t grow up in a family that was into the entertainment world at all.

Eloise Mumford

What makes ‘The Lorax’ such a powerful fable is partly its shamelessness. It pulls no punches; it wears its teacher heart on its sleeve.

Lydia Millet

The best teacher is very interactive.

Bill Gates

America must be the teacher of democracy, not the advertiser of the consumer society. It is unrealistic for the rest of the world to reach the American living standard.

Mikhail Gorbachev

I read a lot of comic books and any kind of thing I could find. One day, a teacher found me. She grabbed my comic book and tore it up. I was really upset, but then she brought in a pile of books from her own library. That was the best thing that ever happened to me.

Walter Dean Myers

I grew up around books – my grandmother’s house, where I lived as a small child, was full of books. My father was a history teacher, and he loved the Russian novels. There were always books around.

John Irving

I planned on being an English teacher, but I don’t know where that went.

John Krasinski

My dad remembers being in school with my uncle, and the teacher would say outright to the class that the Japanese were second-class citizens and shouldn’t be trusted.

Mike Shinoda

My mother was a public school teacher in Virginia, and we didn’t have any money, we just survived on happiness, on being a happy family.

Dave Grohl

I was an elementary school teacher.

Luciano Pavarotti

The last person to teach me how to act was my A-level Theatre Studies teacher at school, which I literally still draw on. Got an A!

Joe Thomas

I was writing full time after quitting a job as a high school English teacher, and I hadn’t been able to sell anything, and my bank account was down to zero, and all of my friends were like ‘What are you doing in the basement, when are you going to get a real job?’, and my parents thought I’d completely lost it.

Matthew Quick

The American audience has really opened up to women being A.) funny and B.) kinda crude. ‘Bridesmaids’ is R-rated, and I think it was a major coup for women to have an R-rated comedy that did really well. Same as ‘Bad Teacher.’

Chris Pratt

My dad was a football player – a soccer player – for Manchester United, and I loved playing football, but I also happened to be the guy in class who was pretty good at sight reading. My teacher gave me scripts, and I was very comfortable.

Ian McShane

I’d like to think I’m a great teacher.

Gordon Ramsay

I tend to think of a myth and then explore how it would play out if it were happening in the modern-day world. I modify all the myths I use, but I stick very closely to their structure – it is the hidden teacher in me.

Rick Riordan

As a teacher I realize that what one learns in school doesn’t serve for very much at all, that the only thing one can really learn is self-understanding, and this is something that can’t be taught.

Laura Esquivel

I loved Debussy, Stravinsky, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, anything with romantic melodies, especially the nocturnes. Nietzsche was a hero, especially with ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra.’ He gets a bad rap; he’s very misunderstood. He’s a maker of individuals, and he was a teacher of teachers.

Joni Mitchell

I used to work at a school as a teacher’s assistant, and my mom is a principal at an elementary school. I don’t know, I think that’s a pretty good life, teaching kids.

Conor Oberst

I lived in a town of 400 until I was like nine or ten. My dad coached all the sports – he was a gym teacher and health teacher for grades K-12.

January Jones

I’ve done some analysis of the biblical stories as part of my psychological work. I knew that I had more to do, and every time I’ve done it, it’s been extremely valuable. It makes me a better teacher because I have a richer understanding of cultural history.

Jordan Peterson

I learned early on that ‘rabbi’ means teacher, not priest.

George Steiner

For me, it was a choice between band and drama – and I hated the band teacher.

Lucy Deakins

I must have got my detailed, obsessive streak from my father, who was an English teacher, because my mother wasn’t like me at all.

Barbra Streisand

Charming women can true converts make, We love the precepts for the teacher’s sake.

George Farquhar

In other words, if a teacher only teaches in one way, then they conclude that the kids who can’t learn well that way don’t have the ability, when, in fact, it may be that the way the teacher’s teaching is not a particularly good match to the way those kids learn.

Robert Sternberg

Travel stories teach geography; insect stories lead the child into natural science; and so on. The teacher, in short, can use reading to introduce her pupils to the most varied subjects; and the moment they have been thus started, they can go on to any limit guided by the single passion for reading.

Maria Montessori

As a little girl, I didn’t like stories about little girls. I liked stories about dragons and beasts and princes and princesses and fear and terror and the Four Musketeers and almost anything other than nice little girls making moral decisions about whether to tell the teacher about what the other little girl did or did not do.

A. S. Byatt

I was on a sitcom called ‘Gary Unmarried’ for 37 episodes, and then I was in ‘Bad Teacher’ with Cameron Diaz and Justin Timberlake.

Kathryn Newton

My mother’s not a political person. She just doesn’t want me to be mean… sometimes I have to be mean. It’s like a parent or a teacher. Sometimes for the good of everybody you have to be a little bit strong, a little bit confrontational.

Bill O’Reilly

I’m a freak, everything has to be totally flat when I play. Ed Will, my jazz teacher, set up everything completely flat, and then you’d tilt your snare drum away from you, so I do that too. So my snare tilts away from me.

Travis Barker

I always wrote music for my friends, but my focus was on playing piano. I didn’t think I’d be quite good enough to be a soloist, but I believed that if I worked hard enough, I could work as a player, a teacher.

John Williams

I flunked my exam for university two times before I was accepted by what was considered my city’s worst university, Hangzhou Teachers University. I was studying to be a high school English teacher. In my university, I was elected student chairman and later became chairman of the city’s Students Federation.

Jack Ma

There’s this old saying that, if you aren’t particularly gifted in natural sciences, if you don’t want to become a teacher or pastor or doctor, and don’t know what else to do, then you become a lawyer. But I’ve never regretted it.

Bernhard Schlink

Once I understood Bach’s music, I wanted to be a concert pianist. Bach made me dedicate my life to music, and it was that teacher who introduced me to his world.

Nina Simone

I loved almost everything about being a teacher, but I was an unusual teacher.

Dan Simmons

There is no real teacher who in practice does not believe in the existence of the soul, or in a magic that acts on it through speech.

Allan Bloom

Without any doubt at all, teacher quality is the fundamental differentiator. Not just, incidentally, of education, but I would argue, probably the biggest single differentiator of success for the nations of the 21st Century.

David Puttnam

First play I ever did was ‘Footloose.’ I played the part of Willard when I was 16. I think I wore my drama teacher’s jeans and her belt – that’s how small I was. I know a lot of Willard’s back story from the musical that’s not explored in the film. Like he’s got this whole relationship with his mama, and he sings this song ‘Mama Says.’

Miles Teller

I always think about which blood drive was going on in Georgia that day when that husband or mom or school teacher rolled up their sleeve and actually gave me a second chance at life. It’s the ultimate gift of life, and I’m the one who was on the other end.

Niki Taylor

No, I’m happy to go on living the life I’ve chosen. I’m a university teacher and I like my job.

Antonio Tabucchi

I love kids, so two things that I have thought about are being a pediatrician or a kindergarten teacher.

Karlie Kloss

In a home school, the kid does 95% of the work. But in a school system, since it’s an indoctrination system, a teacher has to do 95% of the work.

John Taylor Gatto

The fitness of the pupil is shown in his love for the acquisition of knowledge, his willingness to receive instruction, his reverence for learned and virtuous men, his attendance upon the teacher, and his execution of orders.

Dayananda Saraswati

I was performing at a New Jersey high school, and I asked a class of 2,000 students, ‘How many of you love mathematics?’ and only one hand went up. And that was the hand of the maths teacher!

Shakuntala Devi

My mother was born in Baltimore, and before her marriage, she was an artist and teacher of art.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

If a teacher does not involve himself, his values, his commitments, in the course of discussion, why should the students?

Paul Wellstone

There’s no distinction. A teacher is a preacher. The teachers in public schools are preachers, and the preachers in church are teachers.

KRS-One

Trump gives progressives a way to channel whatever guilt they might have – whether from preventing homebuilding, benefitting from unfair taxes and pensions, or depriving black and Latino students the teacher quality and school funding they need – into a sanctimonious tribal rage against Republican racism.

Michael Shellenberger

Experience is the best teacher of all. And for that, there are no guarantees that one will become an artist. Only the journey matters.

Harry Callahan

I love films that make me react emotionally and physically when you walk out of the cinema. Two of my favorite films however have got to be ‘The Tree Of Life’ and ‘The Piano Teacher,’ which also stars one of my favourite actresses Isabelle Huppert.

Alicia Vikander

My mother is a retired music teacher. She taught me in high school, and she would take us and put us in these madrigal groups. We would go to a museum or whatever and just perform.

Craig Robinson

My father is a visual artist, so I was influenced by him, and my mother is an English teacher who forced me to read a lot of books and poetry and get involved in theatre. I developed a varied taste for different arts.

Taika Waititi

I was a teacher once.

Nita Ambani

Jesus isn’t lettin’ you off the hook. The Scriptures don’t let you off the hook so easily… When people say, you know, ‘Good teacher’, ‘Prophet’, ‘Really nice guy’ … this is not how Jesus thought of Himself.

Bono

I’ve never had the patience of a teacher.

Josh Turner

Tragedy is a hell of a teacher. It’s much too strict, but it’s a hell of a teacher.

Harlan Coben

I have long enjoyed the friendship and companionship of Republicans because I am by instinct a teacher, and I would like to teach them something.

Woodrow Wilson

The first responsibility of the Muslim is as teacher. That is his job, to teach. His first school, his first classroom is within the household. His first student is himself. He masters himself and then he begins to convey the knowledge that he has acquired to the family. The people who are closest to him.

H. Rap Brown

A Latin teacher told me I might make a good actress, and that stuck in my memory. I did some modeling, and Polanski gave me that small part.

Jacqueline Bisset

I grew up in Queens, in New York City, in a middle class Jewish family. My mother was a public school teacher, my father was a lawyer. They were Democrats – kind of middle-of-the-road democrats.

Elliott Abrams

Musicians are like a preacher, a teacher, an actor. You are the mediator who can transfer the energy of beautiful music to the others.

Demis Roussos

I was born in a small town. My parents, my father was a teacher. My mother was a housewife.

Milos Forman

In the balance of my professional life, I’ve had the privilege of the working as a practicing lawyer and teacher.

Neil Gorsuch

When I got to 10th grade at Booker T. Washington High, I had a teacher, Miss Geraldine Nesbitt. I think she came from New York. She helped me begin to question things.

Claudette Colvin

Yes, my teacher is the cold.

Wim Hof

Kathy Dewar, my high-school English teacher, introduced me to journalism. From the moment I wrote my first article for the student paper, I convinced myself that having my name in print – writing in English, interviewing Americans – validated my presence here.

Jose Antonio Vargas

Every child grows; everything depends on the teacher.

Shinichi Suzuki

For every R. Kelly or Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein, there’s, you know, the owner of the grocery store, the coach, the teacher, the neighbor, who are doing the same things. But we don’t pay attention until it’s a big name. And we don’t pay attention ’til it’s a big celebrity.

Tarana Burke

What is the benefit of fasting in our body while filling our souls with innumerable evils? He who does not play at dice, but spends his leisure otherwise, what nonsense does he not utter? What absurdities does he not listen to? Leisure without the fear of God is, for those who do not know how to use time, the teacher of wickedness.

Saint Basil

My dance teacher will show me pictures of girls who are rhythmic gymnasts, and they are super skinny. But I don’t want to be too skinny. I think that looks a little gross when you are dancing. You don’t want to be a scrawny, bony thing.

Maddie Ziegler

My mum was a music teacher. I’ve got three sisters, and we all played instruments when we were kids.

Tom Ellis

My father, Haridutt Bhatt, was a teacher by profession.

Himani Shivpuri

Disobedience is essentially a prideful power struggle against someone in authority over us. It can be a parent, a priesthood leader, a teacher, or ultimately God. A proud person hates the fact that someone is above him. He thinks this lowers his position.

Ezra Taft Benson

During my eleven years as a New York City public school teacher, I saw firsthand the impact that poverty has on the classroom. In low-income neighborhoods like Sunset Park, where I taught, students as young as five years old enter school affected by the stresses often created by poverty: domestic violence, drug abuse, gang activity.

Sal Albanese

When I go to bed at night, I ask God to give me another day; I ask him to keep me strong and make me a good teacher and to keep spreading this right word.

Richard Simmons

My mom was a dance teacher, so she put me in dance school when I was a kid. I did everything. I used to take ballet.

Chris Messina

My father is a teacher; my mother was a telecom employee. I come from Palermo; I was raised in Ethiopia. I am homosexual. I didn’t go to film school.

Luca Guadagnino

There is no better teacher than life itself.

Raveena Tandon

I was adrift for a while. I worked as a substitute teacher; I sold cars.

Ed O’Neill

A master can tell you what he expects of you. A teacher, though, awakens your own expectations.

Patricia Neal

I still remember asking my high school guidance teacher for permission to take a second year of algebra instead of a fifth year of Latin. She looked down her nose at me and sneered, ‘What lady would take mathematics instead of Latin?’

Nancy Roman

I think that ‘Floor Sample’ is a story of resiliency, a lifelong spiritual search, and a lifelong sense of spiritual companionship that is most often expressed as creativity. My desire in writing the book was to step from behind the icon of ‘Julia the teacher’ and introduce ‘Julia the artist.’

Julia Cameron

My teacher said my brain was the size of a pea. He made my life miserable by singling me out in the classroom as a failure.

Willard Wigan

My mom was a teacher – I have the greatest respect for the profession – we need great teachers – not poor or mediocre ones.

Condoleezza Rice

In a sinful world, no community can exist for long where nobody is ever held accountable: no teacher would grade a student’s performance; no citizen would sit on a jury or call a failed leader to account.

Lewis B. Smedes

My mother was a teacher for 40 years. She was part of the United Teachers of New Orleans.

Wendell Pierce

Thus, the standard library will serve as both a tool and as a teacher.

Bjarne Stroustrup

I count myself well educated, for the admirable woman at the head of the school which I attended from the age of four and a half till I was thirteen and a half, was a born teacher in advance of her own times.

Catherine Helen Spence

I suppose a good director is like a teacher. I think that someone like David Cronenberg was very much like a teacher, because there’s an openness, but a certain set of rules of behavior, and a certain conduct expected. But there’s an atmosphere that’s relaxed and conducive to exploration, and that is created by someone like Cronenberg.

Viggo Mortensen

I wonder if liberal kids call liberal talk shows and ask how to get along in a conservative teacher’s class? No. No. It doesn’t happen, ’cause there’s no thought of getting along.

Rush Limbaugh

When I was about 15 – that would be some 60 years ago – I remember my father, a secondary school teacher, was always keen to know what homework I had been set, and would look over my shoulder.

Michael Rosen

I’m into books – I love literature, so I toyed with the idea of being an English teacher. I had a fantastic English teacher at school. I think great English teachers make the world go round.

Taron Egerton

I’m home schooled, and I have a teacher that goes with me on all my movies.

Dakota Fanning

I am a teacher and the reason I’m a teacher is because I’m learning as hard as I can. I’m not any different from anybody else. I am searching and having some success finding answers.

Andy Andrews

I went to what can only be described as a slum school in Salford – rough and full of trainee punks – but I was very lucky in that I had one inspiring teacher, John Malone, who gave the whole class an interest in romantic poetry.

John Cooper Clarke

When every church becomes a school, every cathedral a university, every clergyman a teacher, and all their hearers brave and honest thinkers, then – and not until then – will the dream of poet, patriot, philanthropist and philosopher become a real and blessed truth.

Robert Green Ingersoll

As a teacher, my strategy is to encourage questioning. I’m the least authoritarian professor you’ll ever meet.

Niall Ferguson

A teacher is never too smart to learn from his pupils. But while runners differ, basic principles never change. So it’s a matter of fitting your current practices to fit the event and the individual. See, what’s good for you might not be worth a darn for the next guy.

Bill Bowerman

My mother was a teacher. She was grooming my brother and me to be successful, accomplished people.

Laverne Cox

I do believe that when your child does poorly on a test, your first step should not necessarily be to attack the teacher or the school’s curriculum. It should be to look at the idea that, maybe, the child didn’t work hard enough.

Amy Chua

I’m so free-spirited. Everyone has a me inside them: that loud girl that just wanna go, ‘Ayyyy!’ No matter if you a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher, it comes out.

Cardi B

The single most important thing in a child’s performance is the quality of the teacher. Making sure a child spends the maximum amount of time with inspirational teachers is the most important thing.

Michael Gove

You know, if you’re a human and living on the planet, it doesn’t matter what you do; you are not immune to the challenges, the trials, the difficulty. And that fact that I happen to be a coach and a minister and a spiritual teacher doesn’t mean anything. I’m still human.

Iyanla Vanzant

My senior year at College Park, University of Maryland, I took an elective class in crime fiction taught by Charles C. Mish. He turned me on in a big way to reading and books. I was lucky to have a teacher who changed the course of my life.

George Pelecanos

I was suspended and discarded. I was told to go to hell by administrators. I was placed in classes far beneath my intelligence. I even had a teacher tell me my life was ruined.

Jamaal Bowman

I love doing demonstrations. I think to be a great chef you have to be a great teacher. I love doing classes with people who love food and enjoy food, bringing them all around one table so to speak.

Michael Symon

I didn’t read so much Japanese literature. Because my father was a teacher of Japanese literature, I just wanted to do something else.

Haruki Murakami

I like to be loved by my children, and I quite like the ‘Guardian’ hating me. I like it when I read they want me to die painfully. Then I think I’ve really got under their skin. It’s like annoying a teacher. Once they’ve shown signs of weakness, you really can go for them.

Jeremy Clarkson

The ideal direction is using something like Khan Academy for every student to work at their own pace, to master concepts before moving on, and then the teacher using Khan Academy as a tool so that you can have a room of 20 or 30 kids all working on different things, but you can still kind of administrate that chaos.

Sal Khan

For me, the terror of the zombie is that at any moment, your friend, your family, you neighbor, your teacher, the guy at the bodega down the street, can be revealed as the monster they’ve always been.

Colson Whitehead

It’s not our job to choose the best Sunday school teacher, like Jimmy Carter was. It’s our job to choose who would defend and protect our nation, who would be the best president.

Jerry Falwell, Jr.

History is my biggest teacher.

Rhiannon Giddens

It was a weird stage of my life, to leave Simon & Garfunkel at the height of our success and become a math teacher. I would talk them through a math problem and ask if anyone had any questions, and they would say, ‘What were the Beatles like?’

Art Garfunkel

I went to a school called Tring Park School for the Performing Arts. I went because initially I was very naughty, and my mom thought if I was busy, I’d be better. And I didn’t really do acting until later on in the school, with an amazing teacher. I left, went traveling, came back.

Daisy Ridley

Aamir Khan in a sense, was my first teacher for filmmaking. He used to answer my doubts on the sets of ‘Joh Jeeta Wahi Sikander.’

Farah Khan

There are moments as a teacher when I’m conscious that I’m trotting out the same exact phrase my professor used with me years ago. It’s an eerie feeling, as if my old mentor is not just in the room, but in my shoes, using me as his mouthpiece.

Abraham Verghese

My father’s a preacher, my mother’s a teacher, thus I rhyme.

Saul Williams

In every role that I do – whether I’m a teacher, actor or mentor – I do it with total dedication and as much honesty as I feel is required because there’s no alternative to honesty and hard work.

Anupam Kher

Fear is not a good teacher. The lessons of fear are quickly forgotten.

Mary Catherine Bateson

As places of learning, schools have a responsibility to also educate on nutrition, which we all can agree is far more important than algebra, no matter what your third-period teacher claims.

Lynda Resnick

Born Virginia Marshall but nicknamed Gig, my mother was a home economics teacher who had come all the way across the whole state of Virginia, from her home on the Eastern Shore to our little Appalachian coal town to marry my daddy, Ernest Smith, whose family had lived in these mountains for generations.

Lee Smith

When I was able to go to school in my early years, my third grade teacher, Ms. Harris, convinced me that one day I would be a writer. I heard her, but I knew that I had to leave Georgia, and unlike my friend Ray Charles, I did not go around with ‘Georgia on My Mind.’

John Henrik Clarke

Probably the biggest influence on my career was the late John Hersey, who, while he was at ‘The New Yorker,’ wrote one of the masterpieces of narrative non-fiction, ‘Hiroshima.’ Hersey was a teacher of mine at Yale, and a friend. He got me to see the possibility of journalism not just as a business but as an art form.

Hampton Sides

I personally do not believe ‘Premam’ has influenced anyone in any way; it has just portrayed characters and is one man’s story where he falls in love with his teacher, and I don’t believe people would use this as a reason to imitate it.

Sai Pallavi

There’s no question that a great teacher can make a huge difference in a student’s achievement, and we need to recruit, train and reward more such teachers. But here’s what some new studies are also showing: We need better parents. Parents more focused on their children’s education can also make a huge difference in a student’s achievement.

Thomas Friedman

A very bland eleven-year-old, playing computer games. I went to a local primary school but I wasn’t anything special or anything insanely interesting. I didn’t have a crazy personality. I was somewhat book smart, but I wasn’t hanging off the teacher, nor was I messing up in class. I wasn’t doing much to disrupt anything. I was just there, existing.

Santan Dave

I think it’s ironic when Plato makes the learned woman Aspasia Socrates’ teacher, but I think women crop up more in the Platonic dialogues than they do normally in texts of the period, and in an un-hysterical way.

Bettany Hughes

In many ways, ‘What Teachers Make: In Praise of the Greatest Job in the World’ is just one big thank-you note to my teachers. The book is dedicated to my fifth and sixth grade English teacher, Dr. Joseph D’Angelo, a massive force of erudition, martial artistry, culture, and love.

Taylor Mali

You know how you’re in elementary school and the teacher goes around the room and, like, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ I said, ‘NBA player.’ And she’s like, ‘Well, OK. Maybe pick a real job.’ But I really believed it. I felt like I was meant to be here.

Kyle Kuzma

As a former teacher, I have a high passion for quality student learning and high standards.

Kay Ivey

We often grow up being told that we can do this or that, but if you don’t see anybody that looks like you doing it, you don’t believe you can do it. But I had great teachers, and I wanted to be a great teacher.

Jesse Williams

Golf is about knowledge, and studying another player – more than listening to a teacher – is the best way to get it.

Vijay Singh

To be a teacher you have to have a very giving, selfless personality. I don’t think I’m that selfless and giving.

Chris Parnell

A wonderful acting teacher I love, Josh Pais, has a system I love for being in the moment in acting, but also in life. And one of the things he reminds me of is to take a moment and just be here now.

Alysia Reiner

I love the idea that it doesn’t take one person only to achieve your potential. It takes a village, it takes a community, a street, a teacher, a mother.

Mira Nair

Aim to write for an hour per day. I used to be a teacher, and an hour a day before school was all it took for me to write my first book. Don’t get discouraged if a holiday or illness interrupts your writing habit. Just start it up again.

Caroline Lawrence

In my work as a historian and in my relationships as a friend, teacher, wife, and mother, I have come to think that the most useful way to understand the past and make it work for you is to look at the trade-offs and contradictions that, however deeply buried, can be uncovered in every memory, good or bad.

Stephanie Coontz

I think experience is the biggest teacher.

Justin Herbert

I stopped and gazed on the little dull man who was being paid to be a teacher of teachers. I turned and walked to the door, slammed it closed with a bang, and broken glass crashed to the floor. There was uproar behind me in the class, which did not interest me at all.

Burl Ives

My very beloved and deceased third-grade teacher, Cliff Kehod, was the one that I really remember calling me Ike a lot. It just stuck. It is a dog’s name, but I love dogs.

Ike Barinholtz

Dad worked his entire career as an aviation technician. Mom was a legal secretary who became a teacher. We lived a simple American life.

Brian Sandoval

I see myself as an old man and an unqualified teacher to the nation. I think being a teacher is probably the most important thing you can be in politics.

Tony Benn

Experience is a good teacher.

Gina Haspel

I grew up in Rome, in actually what I would say was a liberal, open-minded family. My father was an architect and my mother was a teacher of art history, so it was sort of intellectual, and maybe a bit much for me when I was a child.

Frida Giannini

I would say that my role model, as far as just somebody leading by example, which to me is what a great youth counselor does – they are there to talk to and lead by example – would be my mom, but she wasn’t a youth counselor. She was a teacher, and she is a good person and definitely one of the biggest influences in my life.

Carrie Underwood

I thought, well of course, Kinsey absolutely adored teaching. He was a wonderful teacher. So these kids really inspired me. So that was a clue I hung onto. He loved young people, he absolutely loved them. And he loved teaching them and trying to help them.

Liam Neeson

I remember studying so hard for so long and saying to my parents, ‘I will be a teacher.’ And they were looking at me like, ‘Girl… you just want to be on stage. Stop pretending.’ So when I chose to do music, they were relieved. My parents were more intelligent and lucid than I was.

Christine and the Queens

Sometimes in life, your best teacher is experience and going through something to figure it out.

Fabolous

I could never have pictured myself writing a book when I was 25 years old. My mom was an English teacher but I wasn’t that way growing up.

Tony Dungy

My first teacher… was extremely strict, mean, and deeply religious.

Tobias Forge

I guess by taking lessons early on, and really trying to play all the rudimentary stuff, and try to have it sound as good as my teacher. It took a lot of practice, which I enjoyed, and still do.

Matt Cameron

I became a teacher all right. I wanted to become a teacher because I had a misconception about it. I didn’t know that I’d be going into – when I first became a high school teacher in New York, that I’d be going into a battle zone, and no one prepared me for that.

Frank McCourt

A little girl who finds a puzzle frustrating might ask her busy mother (or teacher) for help. The child gets one message if her mother expresses clear pleasure at the request and quite another if mommy responds with a curt ‘Don’t bother me – I’ve got important work to do.’

Daniel Goleman

You never know what’s going to happen. My mother was an English teacher. If someone had told her that I was going to write a book, she would never have believed that. So you can never say never.

Tony Dungy

Most of my teachers wanted to send me to the principal’s office. But my fourth-grade teacher once put her arms around me and said, ‘You sure write well.’ And I’ve had good penmanship until this day. She was the only one who ever said anything nice to me. That’s the kind of motivation that students need.

Andrew Young

My name is Jennifer, and when I first went to school, my kindergarten teacher called me Jenny, and from then on, I was Jenny.

Jenny Han

The Black Panthers was what we would call today a criminal gang that was formed by Huey Newton. Now, interestingly enough, I knew Huey Newton before he formed the Black Panthers. He was a student of mine when I was a teacher, instructor at Oakland City College back in the very early 1960s.

Edwin Meese

I told my mom the reason I started working out was because I wanted to break the necks of the people picking on me. I wanted to hurt them. I said I didn’t want any teacher to put me down any more.

Herschel Walker

When I was 16, I played Macbeth at school and my English teacher said, ‘I think you may have acting talent. Try to get into the National Youth Theatre of Great Britain and see where you get.’ I wouldn’t have thought of that at all. I wanted to be a surgeon, but I wasn’t a clever man.

David Suchet

I started elocution lessons because I was being teased, and I had a brilliant drama teacher. At the age of 14, I appeared at the National Theatre in ‘The Crucible.’

Gina Bellman

Found out I’m actually a pretty good teacher.

Joe Thornton

I’ve noticed that my resolutions involve me not doing stuff that I wasn’t going to do anyway so here’s something more positive. I’m going to retrain as a Latin teacher in a provincial public school.

Arthur Smith

I loved gymnastics, and my gymnastics teacher said ballet was essential to help my dance routines in competitions. I only really went because my friends were going as well. It wasn’t this kind of hidden love. Then, slowly, my friends stopped going and I thought, ‘I like this. I am going to stay.’

Darcey Bussell

Evil can be a teacher, if you look at the wisdom of its negative power.

Tom Brown, Jr.

I wear scarves all the time. Even in the summer, I wear scarves – even a thin one. My old vocal teacher told me that, and I stick to it. The only time I get sick is when I forget to wear my scarf. I don’t know, it might be mental, but it works for me.

Ravyn Lenae

My dad was a high school teacher and made no money.

William Baldwin

My painting teacher in high school used to say, ‘I can’t paint like I want to, but through practice I’ll get better.’ But I don’t think that’s true. I think sometimes you just can’t paint.

Ellie Kemper

My art teacher in junior high was a very out gay man and a mentor to me. He would tell us about Greenwich Village and show us the ‘Village Voice’ and describe his life, but it was all sort of subversive and below the radar.

Gus Van Sant

My mom is a history teacher, so we’d go on all these historic trips as kids around Halloween, because it was kind of creepy.

Sharon Van Etten

I am a certified yoga teacher and I love to cycle and swim.

Cara Buono

If you told me when I was a teen that I would end up being a teacher, I would have said you’re out of your mind, because quite frankly I hated school.

Tim Gunn

My mother was the strength. She was the anchor. She was a preacher and a teacher.

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

Christine Bass was my high school music teacher. She took a program on its last legs and within a few years turned into one of the best programs in the country. Our high school dominated national choir competitions all through her 20-plus year tenure.

Aaron Lazar

I think, initially, my rebellion, my rebellion of going to college when my dad would have liked me to stay home and work in the herbs, I think that it was a pretty mild rebellion in the sense that I thought, ‘Well, I’m going to go learn how to be a music teacher so that I can come home and do choir.’

Tara Westover

My first memory in the world is my gym teacher ripping my mother’s necklace off her neck and throwing it out the window and her running downstairs to go after it. I have no memory before that. I was 4. My father had a lot of girlfriends and my mother had a lot of boyfriends.

Mike Nichols

We were working ‘Good Teacher’ up, and it became apparent to me that, as we were playing it, the song had a Hendrix, ‘Crosstown Traffic’ vibe and feel to it.

Rickey Medlocke

The task of the mediator is to help the parties to open difficult issues and nudge them forward in the peace process. The mediator’s role combines those of a ship’s pilot, consulting medical doctor, midwife and teacher.

Martti Ahtisaari

Whether it’s a state trooper patrolling our highways, a teacher staying late to help a struggling student, or a social worker rescuing an abused child, quality state employees are essential to good government.

Kay Ivey

I still remember the moment when my teacher, Mr. Budaza, walked into class and said, ‘Today we are going to study ‘Julius Caesar,’ one of Shakespeare’s most important plays.’

John Kani

A helpful thing for me has always been – this is from a great acting teacher Declan Donnellan – is this beautiful way of expressing how and why people do things that other people may not do. It’s a simple sentence that says, ‘I understand you; you don’t understand me.’

Benedict Samuel

I always remember the teachings of our ancestors: respect for God, teacher, government, and both parents. Even after I became president, I have not changed in this matter in the slightest. I hold these teachings in high esteem, and I believe in their truth.

Suharto

While teaching, I also worked undercover in the lower courts by saying I was a young law teacher wanting experience in criminal law. The judges were happy to assist me but what I learned was how corrupt the lower courts were. Judges were accepting money right in the courtroom.

Samuel Dash

If you lock me in the room with a piano teacher for a year I might be able to knock out a rendition of ‘Roll Out The Barrel,’ but will I ever be a concert pianist? No.

Alan Sugar

In the first year in New York, I went to this amazing teacher named Jen Waldman. She does lots of different classes, but one of her classes was where you went and worked on a song. And suddenly I felt like an artist again, and because I had worked the whole song, when I went into the audition room, I could connect to something in the 16 bars.

Jonathan Groff

I could undertake to be an efficient pupil if it were possible to find an efficient teacher.

Gertrude Stein

I think for me I was in kindergarten, so I was very young and my teacher acknowledged that I was very dyslexic when it came to reading and writing and processing that information.

A. J. Pritchard

I have to be composed; I have to be poised. I have to remember what my first piano teacher told me: ‘You do not touch that piano until you are ready and until they are ready to listen to you.

Nina Simone

Credentials are critical if you want to do something professional. If you want to become a doctor or lawyer or teacher or professor, there is a credentialing process. But there are a lot of other things where it’s not clear they’re that important.

Peter Thiel

My dad was an actor and a writer; my mum was a drama teacher. My grandma was an actress. My aunt is an actress. My granddad was a cameraman. They would’ve been surprised if I wanted to be a dentist or something like that.

Charlie Rowe

I did an A Level in Theatre Studies and had a really inspirational teacher, and then I just went on to university.

Jessica Raine

Both of my children – my daughter Caroline, a public school teacher, and my son Elliot, an Army Ranger – are dedicating their lives to public service; thus, they have inspired my own decision to run for Congress.

Ann Callis

I worked as a draftsman for the Department of Environmental Protection, and as a teacher, in N.Y.C.; at a big bank and a small ad agency, a tiny law firm and a few giant ones; as a cashier and a dishwasher; preparing deli sandwiches and stringing tennis racquets and pruning evergreens into conical Christmas-tree shapes.

Chris Pavone

I have never actually abandoned singing. I have sung at lots of friends’ weddings and family events to keep up my classical repertoire, and I get together with a music teacher every few months.

Alexander Armstrong

My English teacher always gave me scripts for plays, but I was into sports. My friend said there were small parts I could go up for, but the director gave me the part of Mozart, which was kind of the lead role. From then on I just loved it.

Santiago Cabrera

I’m a conservative, pro-life governor in a state where it is really tough to be both. A state like New Jersey, with lots of Democrats, but still we cut taxes, we balanced budgets. We fought the teacher’s union.

Chris Christie

You don’t want to engage in road rage when the person in the next car might be your child’s future teacher or your dentist’s father.

Kim Edwards

I grew up singing. My mother was a music teacher.

Connie Britton

It’s cool for me because I’m a director, but I’m also a teacher. I’m a lover of cinema, and I love working with people who are hungry and have the energy to really do better work.

John Singleton

Last time I was in Jamaica I financed a teacher to teach in an orphanage.

Ziggy Marley

I was very inspired by my mother. She was a vocal teacher and sang in a band, and my first memories of her were going out with her on the local circuit.

Daryl Hall

As an undergraduate, I took two writing workshops taught by Elizabeth Hardwick. She was certainly a major influence, though more as a writer I greatly admired than as a teacher. As for other writers, I think it’s safe to say that my work has been and continues to be influenced to one degree or another by every writer whose work I love and admire.

Sigrid Nunez

When people think of the word ‘drive,’ they often think you have it or you don’t, and that’s where we’re wrong. Drive is something that can be encouraged by a wonderful teacher, by a terrific classroom environment, by an awesome soccer team that you are on, and it can be squashed as well.

Angela Duckworth

If I weren’t an actor, I’d either be a teacher or a critic.

Dennis Haysbert

My father was my trainer, my teacher. He was closer to my sister in the sense that she adored him and he adored her. He was more like my pal. Because of the 13-year gap, I think by the time I came along, it wasn’t a big deal. I wasn’t spoilt or cherished, I was just put to work.

Felicity Kendal

The Ric Flair, I am his teacher from the Minnesota. We work together. He great performer, he great talker.

The Iron Sheik

I really feel like if they’d have let me just pace in the back of the classroom while the teacher was talking, I’d have done much better. I have to move. But you know, that’s disruptive for the class, and as a result, there was a ripple effect of having to sit still that found its way into every aspect of my life.

Ryan Gosling

I never did very well in math – I could never seem to persuade the teacher that I hadn’t meant my answers literally.

Calvin Trillin

Going to talk to my little girl’s teacher is a far cry from what people probably think I spend my time doing.

Duff McKagan

Then I heard this genius teacher Stella Adler – I recommend you read anything you might find about her and if you have anyone interested in theatre, you get them one of her books.

Harvey Keitel

I’m the son of an everyman. My father is a teacher. He teaches physics at a boys’ school in Sydney.

Alex O’Loughlin

Read something of interest every day – something of interest to you, not to your teacher or your best friend or your minister/rabbi/priest. Comics count. So does poetry. So do editorials in your school newspaper. Or a biography of a rock star. Or an instructional manual. Or the Bible.

Jane Yolen

I want to work with kids. I would love to be a teacher.

Amy Lee

I wouldn’t change a thing about this journey. It was the best teacher I’ve ever had and was everything I could’ve hoped for.

Julius Peppers

I was terrified of being a teacher. To stand in front of a classroom, the responsibility is boggling. Imagine! Standing in front of people!

John Glover

My parents were early converts to Christianity in my part of Nigeria. They were not just converts; my father was an evangelist, a religious teacher. He and my mother traveled for thirty-five years to different parts of Igboland, spreading the gospel.

Chinua Achebe

I was the worst teacher you have ever imagined – not that we did not have fun. We had a ton of fun. We just did not learn any scripture. I would think all week long what could I talk about on Sunday, and then I would scramble on Saturday to find some kind of scripture to go with it. This was my teaching.

Beth Moore

I don’t even need to know – if you have something to prove to your old boss or your dad or your third grade teacher or yourself, it doesn’t matter. You need that hustle and that fire, and I don’t care where it comes from.

Emily Weiss

I started to learn Greek when I was in high school, the last year of high school, by accident, because my teacher knew Greek and she offered to teach me on the lunch hour, so we did it in an informal way, and then I did it at university, and that was the main thing of my life.

Anne Carson

I loved being a part of ‘Celebrity MasterChef.’ The process was scary and I was so out of my comfort zone but I’ve learnt so much. Doing something I’d never done before put me in the position of the celebs on ‘Strictly’ and because of that experience, I think i’ll be a better teacher because of it.

A. J. Pritchard

I am a business owner. I’m a teacher. I think Justin’s actually kind of plain, kind of nerdy. But when I morph into Alyssa, I’m like this… Well, this creature, everything that Justin couldn’t be.

Alyssa Edwards

I loved theatre and did magic, too, but I was never the best at it – there was never a teacher saying, ‘You’re great, you have to make this your career!’ I was good at science and math. I figured I’d go into science and become a dentist.

Nathan Fielder

Success is a lousy teacher, but failure is a friend, philosopher, and guide.

Ayushmann Khurrana

I was born in Norway, and when I was little I went to live in Detroit, Michigan. My father was a professor of philosophy at Wayne University, and my mother was also a teacher.

Marta Kristen

I was studying primary school education. I was going to be a teacher. I was going to get my teaching qualification and have that as my safety net and then tackle the music industry.

Jack Garratt

My acting teacher in high school was really influential, and we still keep in touch.

Brandon Jay McLaren

I started out as a music teacher; I never planned on becoming an actress.

Li Bingbing

I was used to theatre classes. I studied with my mother; she was a theatre teacher and directed, too, so it was very family-like. Then I studied with a great teacher in Paris, and she was wonderful; she pushed me, but she was a warm soul.

Juliette Binoche

Even being too good at teaching is risky at research universities; the joke is that a ‘teacher of the year’ award is the kiss of death for non-tenured professors.

Max Boot

I wanted to be a teacher.

Kim Kardashian

I can’t tell you how many people say they were turned off from science because of a science teacher that completely sucked out all the inspiration and enthusiasm they had for the course.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

The Holy Spirit is our comforter, our teacher. That’s why, in prayer, we can ask the Lord to open up Scripture and make it come alive to us, to open our understanding. He left his Spirit with us until we join him in Heaven.

Michele Bachmann

I suspect a singing teacher would have a fit with my diction. They’d probably think I was doing a very bad job.

Elizabeth Fraser

There’s a film I did called ‘Front of the Class’, about a teacher who had Tourette’s. That was a beautiful blend of drama and comedy. There’s some great moments of levity in the script.

James Wolk

Listen to my advice; I have some experience. In a way, it is me being a teacher, which is what I wanted to be. I still feel I could go into teaching. What is teaching but passing on your knowledge to those who are at the beginning? Some people are born with that gift.

Grace Jones

My brother is a policeman; my sister’s an English teacher. When I hear what they make versus what I make, it’s ridiculous.

Robert Sean Leonard

Growing up in Kansas City, I was always neat, the teacher’s pet, know-it-all type.

Gretchen Rubin

When I first came to Los Angeles, I was a teacher in Compton. I know how in need schools are around the country.

Kym Whitley

In middle school, I had a teacher who regularly reminded students of the Monday night Young Life meetings he sponsored; on Tuesdays, he’d spend the first few minutes of class palling around with the chosen ones about all the fun and fellowship they’d experienced together.

Laura Moser

My second grade teacher told me I would never graduate high school. That I was going to be a juvenile delinquent.

Miles Teller

Before Juilliard, I was a schoolteacher for a little bit. I taught in a charter school. I was a substitute teacher for kids ages 3 to 6.

Samira Wiley

I first decided to become an actor at school. A teacher gave us a play to do and that had a major impact. At first, I wanted to work in the theatre, but there was something about the ambience of film, especially American films, that always attracted me.

Jean Reno

Benevolence alone will not make a teacher, nor will learning alone do it. The gift of teaching is a peculiar talent, and implies a need and a craving in the teacher himself.

John Jay Chapman

There is no better teacher than adversity. Every defeat, every heartbreak, every loss, contains its own seed, its own lesson on how to improve your performance the next time.

Malcolm X

There are many teachers who could ruin you. Before you know it you could be a pale copy of this teacher or that teacher. You have to evolve on your own.

Berenice Abbott

Ask everyone whether they’re an actor or a doctor or a teacher or whatever is entitled to his or her opinion. But unfortunately, because actors are in the public eye, whether we want it or not, sometimes our opinions carry more weight or influence than they deserve.

Debra Messing

I started studying music at the age of five and a half. My older sister was taking piano lessons. When her teacher left our apartment, I would get up on the piano bench and start picking out the notes that were part of my sister’s lessons.

Marvin Hamlisch

I’m embarrassed every time I look a teacher in the eye, because we ask them to do so much for so little.

Phil McGraw

I was a writer. I just wasn’t a very good one. I was lucky enough to have a playwriting teacher who told me that I’d be a better actor than I would a playwright.

Liev Schreiber

I went to school at this log school house. A white woman was my teacher, I do not remember her name. My father had to pay her one dollar a month for me. Us kids that went to school did not have desks, we used slates and set on the hued down logs for seats.

Joe Davis

My father was my main influence. He was a preacher, but he was also a history and political science teacher, and since he was my hero, I wanted to follow in his footsteps and become a teacher.

David Soul

Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or ill it teaches the whole people by its example.

Timothy McVeigh

All I wanted was to be a university teacher.

Jalal Talabani

When I had my first voice lesson I was 15 years old. And I had a really good teacher. This is what made all the difference. A good teacher will teach you the technique, but also how to listen to your voice.

Cecilia Bartoli

The main thing I am interested in is my experience as a teacher.

Frank McCourt

I think it is most important for a teacher to play the pieces and studies that are being played by the student.

James Galway

I decided at age 9, but I was reinforced at age 13 when a teacher told me I had talent. I can’t say she really motivated me because I already knew. I knew I had talent. I went to the Jewish community theater and got in plays there. Then I went for the movies.’

Richard Dreyfuss

I felt like I was a teacher. But nowadays, I am as much a student of his. He writes a lot of what we play.

Gary Burton

You know, I loved math. My mom was a math teacher.

Joan Cusack

I was on Oprah’s show recently talking about the people who impacted me the most. One was a teacher and one was my soccer coach. I didn’t even go into my family, who had the most influence.

Andrew Shue

I’d never been a teacher before, and here I was starting my first day with these eager students. There was a shortage of teachers, and they had been without a math teacher for six months. They were so excited to learn math.

Andrew Shue

As a former teacher and a mother and grandmother, I know firsthand the importance of a quality education.

Sue Kelly

I wanted to become a kindergarten teacher like my mother.

Zhang Ziyi

I do readings at the public library. I just did a benefit scene night for my old acting teacher.

Mark Ruffalo

I’ve never considered myself a celebrity or even part of the entertainment business. I’m a cooking teacher.

Martin Yan

Find a good teacher, as I found for my sons. I feel the worst thing you can do is to try and teach your own children yourself, because there is a natural rebellion that occurs.

Keith Emerson

When I started out back in Louisville, there was Harry Collins. He was my first teacher. He saw that I was so obsessed with magic that he taught me the love of magic.

Lance Burton

To make the moral achievement implicit in science a source of strength to civilization, the scientist will have to have the cooperation also of the philosopher and the religious teacher.

Arthur Compton

I studied with a blind teacher from about 5 until I was 16, at two different schools. From the age of 12 until 16, I was in a boarding school-which, I believe, at that time was compulsory for blind children.

George Shearing

There is a shortage of teachers but the January 2001 schools census showed that teacher numbers were at their highest level than at any time since 1984 – and 11,000 higher than 1997.

Estelle Morris

There was a teacher who recognized that I was interested in cartooning and he was great.

Jonathan Shapiro

Children are already accustomed to a world that moves faster and is more exciting than anything a teacher in front of a classroom can do.

Major Owens

We can not wait until we have enough trained people willing to work at a teacher’s salary and under conditions imposed upon teachers in order to improve what happens in the classroom.

Major Owens

I do think we know that a teacher who knows what he or she is doing, knows their subject matter, and knows how to impart knowledge to kids is a critical piece of closing the achievement gap.

Margaret Spellings

Jackson went from the professor’s chair to the officer’s saddle. He carried with him the very elements of character which made him odious as a teacher; but I never saw him in an arbitrary mood.

Daniel H. Hill

When my opera Plump Jack was performed in 1989, my first piano teacher sent me something that I’d composed when I was four. I remember I played it, and it still sounded like me. I’m the same composer I was then.

Gordon Getty

I was told to challenge every spiritual teacher, every world leader to utter the one sentence that no religion, no political party, and no nation on the face of the earth will dare utter: ‘Ours is not a better way, ours is merely another way.

Neale Donald Walsch

I taught in a small teacher’s college for three or four years, at which point all the administrators got a pay raise and the teaching faculty didn’t.

David Eddings

My mother was told she couldn’t go to medical school because she was a woman and a Jew. So she became a teacher in the New York City public school system.

Marilyn Hacker

As a teacher you are more or less obliged to pay the same amount of attention to everything. That can wear you down.

Marilyn Hacker

But the fact is, no matter how good the teacher, how small the class, how focused on quality education the school may be none of this matters if we ignore the individual needs of our students.

Roy Barnes

Writing, I’m convinced, should be a subversive activity – frowned on by the authorities – and not one cooed over and praised beyond common sense by some teacher.

Dan Simmons

You know, a football coach is nothing more than a teacher. You teach them the same subject, and you have a group of new guys every year.

Darrell Royal

I played saxophone, so I was into jazz. I learned from each audience and each teacher that I had. I can’t really tell you any rules or anything, but the way I develop my beliefs is really just by personally learning from different situations.

Chad Hugo

I think my parents were happy that I’d gone to university and gotten a degree in history so they thought, ‘Well if acting doesn’t work for him, he can always become a history teacher or something.’ Fortunately, the acting worked out.

Derek Jacobi

So what does a good teacher do? Create tension – but just the right amount.

Donald Norman

The answer, of course, in the mouth of a Christian teacher is that in Christianity alone is there both present joy and future hope.

Mary Augusta Ward

When I left Europe in 1987 I did so with the thought that my relevance as a composition teacher would benefit from a certain cool distance to certain tendencies I had been observing for several years with increasing disquiet.

Brian Ferneyhough

He was very commanding, and you had to know what you were doing to work for Mr. Rogers. I learned how to ride very quickly with him as my riding teacher.

Glenn Ford

He was the editor of our paper. He created the publishing house in Hebrew. He was – I wouldn’t say the ‘guru’ – but really he was our teacher and a most respected man. I wrote for the paper of the youth movement.

Shimon Peres

I was a hyper kid in school and the teacher suggested to my mom she needed to do something with me.

Devon Sawa

One of the most extraordinary things about being a spiritual teacher is the rare privilege of being able to look deeply into the very souls of many human beings at the same time.

Andrew Cohen

A friend of mine said, no matter what I do I always look like an English teacher. She actually said, you still look like a Campbell’s Soup kid.

Kate Clinton

It is worth while too to warn the teacher that undue severity in correcting faults is liable at times to discourage a boy’s mind from effort.

Quintilian

I remember a moment when the Prince went back to his old school, Grammar School in Melbourne, and slightly to his horror his old music teacher produced a cello.

Anthony Holden

I’ve been a teacher at the college level, in composition mostly, and I’ve been an editor on magazines.

Jane Haddam

I remember the mentoring experiences of some teachers that I had, like a second term home room teacher in public school that really was very helpful to me.

Sanford I. Weill

My father was a writer and an acting teacher.

Noah Hathaway

Research is starting to show that a child should be engaged at least 20 hours a week. I do not think it matters which program you choose as long as it keeps the child actively engaged with the therapist, teacher, or parent for at least 20 hours a week.

Temple Grandin

Following my junior year in high school, I went on a camping trip through Russia in a group led by Horst Momber, a young language teacher from Roosevelt.

Peter Agre

Teacher unions are an interest group that acts in defense of their own interests, which means the union bosses’ interests, not the members.

Peter Brimelow

My first acting job happened by accident when I was really young. I was in fifth grade and my teacher saw an ad in the paper and took me to the audition after school and I got the part.

Ajay Naidu

My first career was as a coach and a teacher.

David Friedman

People can look to me as a teacher, but I consider myself a student of hip-hop.

Doug E. Fresh

In the case of my book, I don’t think it’s really the coming-out gay novel that everyone really needed, even though it was received as such. The boy is too creepy, he betrays his teacher, the only adult man with whom he’s enjoyed a sexual experience, etc.

Edmund White

I wasn’t originally taking drama, but the drama teacher asked me to audition for Bye, Bye Birdie. I did and got the lead role. Initially I was kind of scared, but once I did it I got bitten by the bug and loved it.

Kevin Richardson

My ambition in high school was to be a high school coach and teacher, and that’s still what I do: teach.

Mike Krzyzewski

I think some parents now look at a youngster failing as the final thing. It’s a process, and failure is part of the process. I would like it if the teacher and the parents would connect more. I think that used to be, but we’re losing a little bit of that right now.

Mike Krzyzewski

My father was a teacher, and there were teachers all around, his friends, they were working for the Government and their behaviour was within strictly limited areas.

C. L. R. James

If I had a personal wish for the new ideas in this new book it would be that every parent, every counselor, every teacher, every professor, every sports coach that deals with young people would understand the three circle concept.

James Collins

Cultural dominance of middle-class norms prevail in middle-class schools with a teacher teaching toward those standards and with students striving to maintain those standards.

James S. Coleman

My father was a schoolteacher and my mother came from a teacher’s family.

Simon van der Meer

I got started when I was 3 years old because my father was a music teacher and my lessons were free. Instead of learning to walk, you learn to play the piano.

Carla Bley

When you are studying jazz, the best thing to do is listen to records or listen to live music. It isn’t as though you go to a teacher. You just listen as much as you can and absorb everything.

Carla Bley

It was difficult being a teacher and out of the closet in the ’50s. By the time I retired, the English department was proud of having a gay poet of a certain minor fame. It was a very satisfactory change!

Thom Gunn

My old teacher’s definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.

Thom Gunn

After this, I took private lessons in Italian from an elementary school teacher. He gave me themes to write about, and some of them turned out so well that he told me to publish them in a newspaper.

Grazia Deledda

It was my family that wanted me to be a teacher. That was safe, you see. To be a painter was terrible.

Josef Albers

My being a teacher had a decisive influence on making language and systems as simple as possible so that in my teaching, I could concentrate on the essential issues of programming rather than on details of language and notation.

Niklaus Wirth

The teacher of history’s work should be, ideally, not simply a description of past cultures, but a performance of the culture in which we live and are increasingly taking our being.

William Irwin Thompson

I was strongly encouraged by a science teacher who took an interest in me and presented me with a key to the laboratory to allow me to work whenever I wanted.

Frederick Reines

That is a secondary teacher conception – the writer as an observer.

Peter Bichsel

I had a heartbreaking experience when I was 9. I always wanted to be a guard. The most wonderful girl in the world was a guard. When I got polio and then went back to school, they made me a guard. A teacher took away my guard button.

Francis Ford Coppola

My father also happened to be an intellectual, as learned, literate, informed, and curious as anyone I have known. Unobtrusively and casually, he was my wise and gentle teacher.

James Tobin

I had an art teacher who’s the reason I got there in high school who encouraged me to go to Alabama. That’s where she had gone and kept raving over their art department.

Sela Ward

Mike Watt and I had the same teacher. Mr. Tanaka.

Krist Novoselic

My first public impression was my French teacher, Derek Swift.

Rory Bremner

I basically started playing violin at the age of six. That lasted about three years because my previous teacher died and the second teacher didn’t really know how to successfully get me going.

Miroslav Vitous

My major was Fine Arts and Education thinking I would become an Art Teacher. I couldn’t visualize myself as an art teacher, thinking how it wouldn’t work.

Mark Mothersbaugh

When I was a teacher, teachers would come into my classroom and admire my desk on which lay nothing whatever, whereas theirs were heaped with papers and books.

Norman MacCaig

If you put down a list of jobs, doctor, lawyer, janitor, teacher or movie star, everybody would pick the movie star. And why? So you could lie around the pool, drink margaritas and send money to your parents. So that’s what I did.

Steve Guttenberg

There happened to be guitar classes at the college, and there was a guitar teacher there with whom I used to play. In addition, I also would go out into country schools and teach little kids basic guitar and singing a few times a week.

Mark Knopfler

Before I got Doctor Who, I went to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. I went back to take the final grade exam, which is the grade you have to take before you can take the teacher’s diploma.

Sarah Sutton

Therefore, a person should first be changed by a teacher’s instructions, and guided by principles of ritual. Only then can he observe the rules of courtesy and humility, obey the conventions and rules of society, and achieve order.

Xun Kuang

Faulkner turned out to be a great teacher. When a student asked a question ineptly, he answered the question with what the student had really wanted to know.

Leslie Fiedler

In my teens, I developed a passionate idolatry for a teacher of English literature. I wanted to do something that he would approve of more, so I thought I should be some sort of a scholar.

Trevor Nunn

Writing became an obsessive compulsive habit but I had almost no money so I thought about being an urban firefighter and having lots of free time in which to write or becoming an English teacher and thinking about books and writers on a daily basis. That swayed me.

David Guterson

The office of the public teacher is an unenviable and thankless one.

Felix Adler

I claim Dickens as a mentor. He’s my teacher. He’s one of my driving forces.

Anne Rice

The message of music was also the first thing what I learned from my first teacher. She was an organist too and she was very devoted to what she played, so she had a respect for every piece and she felt that she is not allowed to add something of her own.

Kurt Masur

But the idea that I should be a teacher and a researcher of some sort did not vary over the years.

Amartya Sen

I could never have a better teacher in those days than my father.

Tony Visconti

I really enjoyed hanging out with some of the teachers. This one chemistry teacher, she liked hanging out. I liked making explosives. We would stay after school and blow things up.

Maya Lin

What students lack in school is an intellectual relationship or conversation with the teacher.

William Glasser

Prior to being allowed to enter the profession, prospective teachers should be asked to talk with a group of friendly students for at least half an hour and be able to engage them in an interesting conversation about any subject the prospective teacher wants to talk about.

William Glasser

In a Glasser Quality School there is no such thing as a closed book test. Students are told to get out their notes and open their books. There is no such thing as being forbidden to ask the teacher or another student for help.

William Glasser

Every single major push in education has made it worse and right now it’s really bad because everything we’ve done is de-humanizing education. It’s destroying the possibility of the teacher and the student having a warm, friendly, intellectual relationship.

William Glasser

My grandmother was a teacher, my sister was a teacher, my daughter was a teacher and is now a superintendent in northern California, and my son-in-law is a high school principal. I am surrounded.

Loni Anderson

I would take William H. Macy as a teacher any day of the week. He’s incredible. He’s got a lot of hard-earned experience.

Skeet Ulrich

I was sent to a nice Church of England girls’ school and at that time, after university, a woman was expected to become a teacher, a nurse or a missionary – prior to marriage.

Kate Adie

I feel really good in the teacher role.

Jimmy Chamberlin

I had one companion. He was a teacher from the Ukraine who spoke English so we could communicate a bit. I learnt a few Russian words, but it was hard to concentrate.

Mathias Rust

I went whole hog at the actor’s lifestyle – really embraced it. I had by then known how much I loved acting already, because I discovered acting from a teacher in the seminary – that’s the first place I ever did it, in the seminary.

Peter Jurasik

I didn’t have a teacher like Sister Mary Ignatius.

Christopher Durang

Having been an educator for so many years I know that all a good teacher can do is set a context, raise questions or enter into a kind of a dialogic relationship with their students.

Godfrey Reggio

If it wasn’t for my drama teacher, I wouldn’t be here right now.

Kel Mitchell

Far from wishing to awaken the artist in the pupil prematurely, the teacher considers it his first task to make him a skilled artisan with sovereign control of his craft.

Eugen Herrigel

The second, and I think this is the much more overt and I think it is the main cause, I have been increasingly demonstrating or trying to demonstrate that every possible stance a critic, a scholar, a teacher can take towards a poem is itself inevitably and necessarily poetic.

Harold Bloom

Ironically, for a few million people in the Far East, I did become an English teacher through my music.

Pat Boone

My father followed, during most of his life, the precarious occupation of a country school teacher.

Simon Newcomb

What we now call school training, the pursuit of fixed studies at stated hours under the constant guidance of a teacher, I could scarcely be said to have enjoyed.

Simon Newcomb

Vadim was both my teacher and my husband. I placed myself entirely in his hands.

Brigitte Bardot

I had a teacher in art school who said something about the only works he really enjoyed seeing or found much in were works where he had a sense that a discovery was made in the course of making this object. I like to hold to that as my marching orders.

Martin Mull

Well, financially it’s a little bit better. But it’s better than than when I was a teacher. But I kind of – it’s allowed me to buy a house. And I’ve been able to help my mother with some stuff and my brother. So, that’s nice.

Clay Aiken

But I was going to be a teacher my entire life, so I wasn’t counting on money to much.

Clay Aiken

And I found out, the other part of it is that I found out and in my desire to life successfully, that baseball fit very well into my life. It’s been a great teacher, trainer, mentor and you’ll see what I mean in the next few minutes that I have to speak.

Dave Winfield

I was a teacher for a long time. I taught at a community college: voice, theory, humanities. And nowadays, music education is a dying thing. Funding is being cut more and more and more.

Jon Secada

I want to thank my mum, my daddy, my coach, my teacher, everybody in my life.

Jet Li

I would probably be a teacher if I weren’t a comedian.

Brad Garrett

I wanted to be a ballet teacher.

Jaclyn Smith

As a former high school teacher, I know that investing in education is one of the most important things we can do, not only for our children, but for the benefit of our whole community.

Ed Pastor

We love the precepts for the teacher’s sake.

George Farquhar

As a teacher, as a propagandist, Mr. Shaw is no good at all, even in his own generation. But as a personality, he is immortal.

Max Beerbohm

In high school, I was Mr. Choir Boy. I had solos, I was helping out the tenors with their parts and our choir teacher would ask me what songs we should do.

Lucas Grabeel

Well, the teacher I studied with for nineteen and a half years was a man named Paul Gavert. He was a great lieder singer, so basically I’m a trained lieder singer because of that teacher. The teacher I currently study with – since 1995 – is Joan Lader, who also studied with Gavert.

Betty Buckley

For one thing, I teach my students what my teacher for twenty years, Paul Gavert, told me, ‘The voice follows… the voice follows everything about you… who you are.’

Betty Buckley

I got into acting because my teachers kept nudging me into it. The power a teacher has to influence someone is so great. I can’t think of a profession I have more respect for.

Jon Hamm

I enjoyed school – although I ran away on the first day. I’d reminded the teacher that it was nearly time for ‘Watch With Mother’ on TV.

Paul O’Grady

My primary school teacher once poured a bottle of curdled school milk forcefully down my throat. Then I threw it up all over her suede shoes. I’d rather have drunk from the spittoon in Barney’s barber shop.

Paul O’Grady

I went to a college in New York called New Paltz. I studied theater there for four years. I also studied privately in NYC with a teacher named Robert X. Modica.

Aida Turturro

Students never think it can be the teacher’s fault and so I thought I was stupid. I was frustrated and would come home and cry because I couldn’t do it. Then we got a new teacher who made math accessible. That made all the difference and I learned that it’s how you present it that makes it scary or friendly.

Danica McKellar

In high school, a teacher once suggested that I be a math major in college. I thought, ‘Me? You’ve got to be joking!’ I mean, in junior high, I used to come home and cry because I was so afraid of my math homework. Seriously, I was terrified of math.

Danica McKellar

I always wanted to be a teacher.

Nicky Hilton

I want to clear up a few myths about myself. People have written that I was a kindergarten teacher and a former Miss Texas, and neither is true.

Krista Allen

I hope that I serve by being a teacher.

Jenna Bush

As a teacher you can see the difference in kids who have parents who were involved. That difference, by the time these kids get to the third grade, is drastic.

Jenna Bush

I’ve always written. When I was in school, the only teacher who ever liked me was my creative writing teacher. I used to enter poetry competitions, and I don’t think I ever lost one. So I had the idea for a while of being some kind of poet.

Justin Townes Earle

When I graduated from high school, the teacher said I was throwing my life away following music, and the same teacher invited me back to speak at the school. I don’t say that to brag, I just want to be an example.

Big Sean

I’m like a really goofy home ec teacher.

Alton Brown

Yes, I was actually an acting teacher for a while.

Alanna Ubach

You really have to be a morning person if you want to be a teacher.

Alanna Ubach

When I was in fourth grade… this wonderful teacher said you didn’t have to write a book report, you could just talk about the book, you could do a drawing of the book, you could write a play inspired by the book, and that’s what I did. I got to be so famous. I had to go around to every school and perform it. It was just so natural and fun.

Didi Conn

I’m blessed with a good pair of ears. That’s how I fooled my piano teacher. I’d watch his fingers and I’d listen to it, and I just kind of basically learned it by myself.

Eddie Van Halen

I have to be a teacher to my daughters.

Carnie Wilson

I dropped out of high school when I was 16, after I had a huge argument with my English teacher over the meaning of the word ‘existentialism.’

Craig Ferguson

I got picked on a lot, even by teachers too. I liked to listen to musicals and bake, and my homeroom teacher found out and mocked me in front of the whole class for baking.

Dan Savage

Quite honestly I never had a desire to be an actor. I tell people, I did not choose acting; acting chose me. I never grew up wanting to be an actor. I wanted to play football. In about 9th grade an English teacher told me I had a talent to act. He said I should audition for a performing arts high school so I did on a whim. I got accepted.

Ving Rhames

I took an acting class. After the first day, the teacher quit, so they said take another. When I saw ‘How to be a Stand-up Comedian,’ it resonated. I realized I’d rather make 200 people laugh than make one person cry.

Wendy Liebman

When I started writing full time I had not long stopped being a teacher and when at last I had a full day to write, I would put music on and wonder to myself – am I allowed to do this? Then I thought: ‘I am control of this and no one is telling me what I can do.’

Roddy Doyle

I wanted to be an English teacher. I wanted to do it for the corduroy jackets with patches on the side. When I got to college, as I was walking across campus one day, I ripped off a little flyer for this sketch-comedy group. It ended up being one of the greatest things I’ve ever done.

John Krasinski

My humanitarian work evolved from being with my family. My mom, my dad, they really set a great example for giving back. My mom was a nurse, my dad was a school teacher. But my mom did a lot of things for geriatrics and elderly people. She would do home visits for free.

Cat Cora

Encouragement from my high school teacher Patty Hart said ‘you need to focus and theater might be your route out of here.’ I created the program, went to college and graduate school and now here I am.

Jeffrey Donovan

I had a great movement teacher – he showed me how to walk so I wasn’t becoming like a cartoon.

John Leguizamo

I had people in my life who didn’t give up on me: my mother, my aunt, my science teacher. I had one-on-one speech therapy. I had a nanny who spent all day playing turn-taking games with me.

Temple Grandin

I think eventually I want to become a teacher, like my father wanted to be, and hopefully positively influence the next generation.

Ann Curry

I was born in Corpus Christi, Texas, the youngest of four girls, including my oldest sister, Lisa, who has special needs. My mom was a special education teacher, and my dad worked on the Army base. We weren’t wealthy, but we were determined to succeed.

Eva Longoria

If you’re a doctor or a lawyer or teacher, if you only get three things right out of 10, you’re considered a failure.

Jamie Moyer

My mother wanted to be a teacher when she was young, and my father didn’t approve of it, so she fought very hard to become one. And she did it. So when I said I wanted to become an actress, my mother was very supportive. She always said to me, ‘There’s no such thing as ‘can’t.’

Archie Panjabi

My art teacher in junior high was a very out gay man and a mentor to me.

Gus Van Sant

There are ways we can go do a better job of educating young moms and dads about the vital role they have as the child’s first teacher. I think there are ways in which we can partner with local school districts and states to do a better job to provide nutrition options at school.

Tom Vilsack

I started the class late. The teacher said I would have to learn as much in half a year that the others learned in a year. I did it.

Katarina Witt

Events are the best teacher for us. You try to learn from people, there is always some bend to it.

Yoko Ono

My job requires me to put on a little dress and run around the streets of New York in heels. But I also had the financial means to hire a yoga teacher to come to my house while my sitter watched the newborn. For 95 percent of the world, that’s not realistic.

Sarah Jessica Parker

From a very early age, my wife and I told our son that there are times and places for everything. I told him, look, when you’re in class, you have to be quiet and listen to your teacher, but when you go out to the playground, you can scream and be silly.

Mark Hoppus

I think there are so many ways to become interested in music. I believe signs of sustained interest gives a sense of the right time. Music, if thought of as a language, would perhaps indicate that as early as possible is not so bad. I do believe that a really nurturing first teacher that makes the child love something is crucial.

Yo-Yo Ma

I’m sure that had I not been a coach, I would have been some form of a teacher.

John Madden

When I was very, very young, seven years old, I heard there was school where you could go to learn to draw. That was my absolute driven passion, to become an artist or a painter. So the romantic realist in me, I studied to be a graphic design artist and an art teacher.

David Coverdale

I think once you’re in the public eye, whether you’re a boss, a teacher or whatever you do, that you’re automatically in the position of role model. You have people looking up to you, so whether you choose to accept it or not is a different question.

Talib Kweli

To the teacher weighed down with paperwork, I say: you’ve been messed around too often. You came into teaching to spend your time teaching children not filling in forms.

William Hague

I think the British people are very, very attached to the idea that the health service is free at the point of use. But there is no reason why every doctor, nurse and teacher in this country has to be employed by the state.

George Osborne

Money is such an amazing teacher: What you choose to do with your money shows whether you are truly powerful or powerless.

Suze Orman

Being a mother has been my greatest teacher and also the most self-sacrificing thing I’ve ever done.

Katey Sagal

As a teacher at Princeton, I’m surrounded by people who work hard so I just make good use of my time. And I don’t really think of it as work – writing a novel, in one sense, is a problem-solving exercise.

Joyce Carol Oates

I think it goes back to my high school days. In computer class, the first assignment was to write a program to print the first 100 Fibonacci numbers. Instead, I wrote a program that would steal passwords of students. My teacher gave me an A.

Kevin Mitnick

When I was in the first grade I was afraid of the teacher and had a miserable time in the reading circle, a difficulty that was overcome by the loving patience of my second grade teacher. Even though I could read, I refused to do so.

Beverly Cleary

The contrasts between what is spent today to educate a child in the poorest New York City neighborhoods, where teacher salaries are often even lower than the city averages, and spending levels in the wealthiest suburban areas are daunting challenges to any hope New Yorkers might retain that even semblances of fairness still prevail.

Jonathan Kozol

Both my grandmothers had upright pianos, and I just knew how to play since I was a child. Nobody taught me. I sounded like a grown-up, and then I learned how to read music. I played so well by ear I could fool the teacher to believe I could play the notes. She’d make the mistake of playing the song once, and I could play it.

Valerie Simpson

Oh, stuff the critics. I don’t care. Too many people are snooty about classical. Look, I wasn’t brought up in a home where we listened to classical music. It was a singing teacher that thought it would be best for my voice. Then I moved into crossover. And if that makes the music accessible to more people, then great.

Katherine Jenkins

In the fourth grade, my history teacher gave us a project: Why was the auto industry located in Detroit, Michigan? I didn’t know I was going to be an economist, but I knew I was going to do something that was involved in answering questions like that one because I thought that was a fascinating question.

Mark Zandi

I want to be involved with young people in some way. Teenagers. Because that’s the most vulnerable time. I have a fantasy of becoming a teacher one day.

Elisabeth Shue

I never wore a tie voluntarily, even though I was forced to wear one for photos when I was young and for official events at school. I used to wrap my tie in a newspaper, and whenever the teacher checked I would quickly put it on again. I’m not used to it. Most Bolivians don’t wear ties.

Evo Morales

My brother’s a teacher in Costa Rica and actually does a more important and significant job than I will ever do.

Dominic Monaghan

I worked as a secretary, a waitress and a dance teacher – all in high school.

Jennie Garth

I have good relationships with Hillary Clinton, Joseph Biden and especially Richard Holbrooke – he is my teacher. I learned a lot of great things from him.

Mikheil Saakashvili

I can remember exactly where I sat when my teacher first read Roald Dahl’s ‘James and the Giant Peach’.

Dave Eggers

If we are to negotiate the coming years safely, we may need a new kind of leadership. To put it more precisely, we need the rediscovery of an ancient kind of leadership that has rarely been given the prominence it deserves. I mean the leader as teacher.

Jonathan Sacks

My mother was an English teacher who decided to become a math teacher, and she used me as a guinea pig at home. My father had been a math teacher and then went to work at a steel mill because, frankly, he could make more money doing that.

Freeman A. Hrabowski III

I had a really creative teacher at primary school. He used to get us doing things such as singing Spandau Ballet in drag in the choir, and I remember loving it.

Dominic Cooper

I made my drama teacher cry. I only took drama to get out of writing papers in English and the teacher was this thespian Broadway geek and here I was this Italian guy from Staten Island and I would put her in tears.

Vinny Guadagnino

I was 20 years old, working as a roofer and a telemarketer and driving a taxi, just barely getting by. A friend of a friend suggested I try acting. I was like, ‘Why? What am I going to do? Community theater?’ But I took a class, and the teacher thought that I had potential, so I moved to Vancouver and started auditioning.

Cory Monteith

I remember telling my creative writing teacher that you never want to have a journal, because if you lose it, then someone’s going to know all your secrets. And then she stopped using a journal, but I always write everything down… Anytime I travel, I try and fill up notepads.

Garrett Hedlund

I had a great drama teacher in high school, and that’s when I started to learn about the history of theater.

Elizabeth Olsen

I had a classic gym teacher in junior high who wore a weightlifter’s belt all the time.

Danny McBride

My younger sister had kids before I did, and managed to earn a master’s degree while raising them as a single parent. Now she’s a brilliant second-grade teacher. I’m in awe of her ability to juggle everything and still be a great mother.

Idina Menzel

One of the things I’ve always liked about my husband is he’s very good at lots of stuff. He was an English teacher when I met him. He wrote poetry and played the guitar. As time went on, he decided to go into economics, so he’s very analytical and mathematical in addition to his artsy side.

Ally Condie

I wasn’t a very good teacher.

Amos Lee

I had one drama teacher who was amazing, Ms. Perkins. She really tried to inspire me and get me going.

Carlos Pena, Jr.

I don’t find acting to be a particularly noble way to make a living. I’m not saving anybody’s life, I’m not a teacher, I’m not working for UNICEF. I don’t think I’m some big deal.

Ellen Pompeo

I had this wonderful career and thought I would retire as a teacher.

Tim Gunn

I’m just not a natural teacher.

David Benioff

When I was writing ‘The Abstinence Teacher,’ I really tried to immerse myself in contemporary American evangelical culture.

Tom Perrotta

I don’t have a lot of skills, but one thing I can do is, I can compartmentalize. I can make that a little world that I can go back to, so I can be a waitress, or I can be a teacher, and then go and work on my book.

Dana Spiotta

If you love dance and you have the gift of teaching, teaching is super amazing and important because my teachers planted that seed in me. As a teacher you understand the difference or the definition of a Baryshnikov or a Gregory Hines, so teaching is really important and very necessary.

Laurieann Gibson

I wasn’t a ballet baby. My first dance class was in an outdoor pavilion when I was three. It was called ‘creative movement.’ The teacher gave us chiffon scarves in beautiful colors. She turned on some music and said, ‘Now go dance.’ So for me, dance has always been about self-expression.

Carrie Ann Inaba

I was a mimic when I was a child. I mimicked the teacher and made friends that way, actually. That was a very subversive activity, because I was a goody-goody who never got in trouble. But if I went off in the corner and mimicked the teacher, people loved it.

Anna Deavere Smith

The fact of the matter is that when there are feelings involved and you like someone, it doesn’t matter if you’re an actor, a teacher, a doctor, a lawyer, a receptionist – you can’t really help it when you have feelings for someone.

Jessica Szohr

My mother was an actress and my voice teacher, an incredible voice teacher. My biological father is an actor, and my stepfather, who raised me along with my mother, is a psychotherapist. I was always supported in creative ventures.

Laura Benanti

As a teacher myself I’ve been in situations where parents come at you, and sometimes parents come across like the teacher doesn’t want the best for their kid and it can be really, really hurtful.

Rosalind Wiseman

I took Spanish in high school and I didn’t do too well in it. My Spanish teacher told me not to go on with Spanish anymore, so I was discouraged a little bit.

Tyler Posey

I had my heart set on becoming an English teacher, but stumbled into acting after meeting a theatrical agent in my dad’s restaurant in San Diego.

Charisma Carpenter

I had a great drama teacher, and he sort of made out drama school as this incredibly difficult thing to get into: 6,000 people apply every year, and some of the schools only have 12 places. It’s a phenomenally difficult thing to get into. And that excited me – I wanted that challenge.

Jeremy Irvine

A few years back, when my style was ‘punk grandma,’ I picked up an amazing pair of sandals – orthopaedic ones, with really thick soles. I’ve given them away to a friend now, because these days my look is more ‘1980s substitute teacher gone wild.’

Beth Ditto

A father is a person who’s around, participating in a child’s life. He’s a teacher who helps to guide and shape and mold that young person, someone for that young person to talk to, to share with, their ups and their downs, their fears and their concerns.

Michael Nutter

My mother wanted me to be a teacher. She had this vision of me walking across the quadrangle in an Oxford college wearing my academic gown.

Simon Callow

If I wasn’t an actor, I’d be a teacher, a history teacher. After all, teaching is very much like performing. A teacher is an actor, in a way. It takes a great deal to get, and hold, a class.

Richard Dreyfuss

My mother is a special education teacher but also an artist, and my father an advertising executive. They are about as wacky as you can get without being alcoholics.

Sloane Crosley

I was attending the University of Alberta. I was going to be a high school teacher, like my parents. I failed – no, I didn’t fail a class, I just barely passed. I really didn’t try. It was Canadian history, through the plays of the time. My God, those were boring plays.

Nathan Fillion

I reached a time in college when I didn’t know what I wanted to do. At that time, women’s careers were essentially nursing, secretarial and teaching. My mother advised me to get my teacher’s certificate.

Kay Granger

I didn’t want to be the archetypal sponging brother-in-law, so I didn’t go into acting when I got to the States. I thought, ‘No, I’ll go to school and then I’ll be an English teacher; that’ll be fun.’ But I was horrible as a teacher. As hard as I tried, I just couldn’t inspire those kids to take an interest in Milton and Shakespeare and Donne.

John Mahoney

I had a teacher, he was 86 years old and his name was Luigi in New York City, and he said, ‘Never stop moving. You get to reinvent yourself.’ So you have to find ways to reinventing yourself. Especially today, because it’s a whole different market – social media is so important.

Ben Vereen

There is no education system in the world – none at all – that’s better than its average teacher.

David Puttnam

I got into acting my junior year of high school. We got a new hot drama teacher and I was like ‘Alright, I’ll try drama.’

Miles Teller

It’s quite hard to have your mom as a teacher – it’s like, she’s not necessarily a ‘real teacher’ for me. But she’d always teach me to really hear the music, and develop my ear, and to try and hear the harmonics of the piano.

Birdy

When a music teacher that I had at school was taken ill and we had a variety show and I had to fill in – that’s when I realized I had a voice.

Lily Allen

My mum is a school teacher and my dad is an electrician.

Jai Courtney

My mother, a teacher, encouraged me to use my creativity as an actual way to make a living, and my father, a Mississippi physician, did two things. First, he taught me that all human beings should be treated equally because no one is better than anyone else, and he never pressured me to become a doctor.

Greg Iles

My mother was a teacher, my father was a community organizer. I come from a working class background.

Chris Hayes

I was in three academic clubs, a huge book worm and the teacher’s pet. I was kind of an easy target for bullies.

Nicole Gale Anderson

I did not study science at school until I was 13, when I was totally turned on by a seemingly dreary old teacher who suddenly, unannounced, manufactured a huge explosion in the middle of a totally boring monologue. From then on, all of his class wanted to make explosions.

Robert Winston

I worked as a teacher in the public school system in New York City for several years, and I was a victim of the layoffs, you know, in the mid-’70s. And then I worked as a sales engineer for a company in New Jersey that was selling industrial filtration equipment.

Feisal Abdul Rauf

President Obama and Secretary Duncan have made stronger teacher evaluation a key part of their education reform efforts. Under their signature plan, called ‘Race to the Top,’ states can win federal support for schools by improving teacher evaluations.

Juan Williams

I know I have this kind of teaching element in me, but I don’t want to become a ‘teacher of theater’ because that would formalize something that I’d much rather keep casual.

Richard Griffiths

When I started performing, I decided that if in five years I couldn’t earn as much money acting as I could as a teacher, it would be unrealistic for me to continue on the stage.

Pauline Collins

I’m crazy about Shakespeare, who was a notorious word inventor. And my wife is an English teacher, and she’s hilarious.

Rob Delaney

I was a theater dork in high school and did all the plays. My theater teacher in high school, Janet Spahr, was absolutely incredible and mentored me throughout school. She taught me a lot about relying on my instincts.

Melissa Rauch

My mother was a first-grade teacher, so I credit her with this lifelong intellectual curiosity I have, and love of reading and learning.

Chesley Sullenberger

I saw myself as a teacher’s pet but with a little of Ed Haskell mixed in. I was the teacher’s pet, but that didn’t mean that I was trying to pull one over.

Damon Lindelof

I’ve always been – as a teacher, as graduate student, as a student, and I think, really, as a child – I’ve been interested in poems, but not so much for what the take home pay is, what you might sum up from them in moral or intellectual terms or whatever, but what’s in the certain lines and how lines relates to other lines.

David Ferry

When I was in graduate school, I had a teacher who said to me, ‘Women writers should marry somebody who thinks writing is cute. Because if they really realised what writing was, they would run a mile.’

Lorrie Moore

I think good actors are born with a kind of native gift. When you study too much with an acting teacher, that gets taken away. You lose your sense of spontaneity.

Titus Welliver

The teacher is commodified, the school is a shop, the subjects are consumer goods. To read, to think, to reflect, isn’t a question of want, it’s a question of need.

Daniel Pennac

Personally, I had a great education. My mum was a trained teacher, a Montessori teacher, and I know that I could not have written ‘Eragon’ if I had gone into a public school system because I would have just been too busy attending classes and doing homework – I wouldn’t have had the time to write.

Christopher Paolini

Writing is very cathartic for me. As a teacher, I hear many students say that writing can be painful and exhausting. It can be, but ultimately I believe that if you push through, the process is healing and exhilarating.

Francesca Lia Block

During my own gap year, I learned an invaluable lesson – that I was a lousy teacher. Even though the children I ‘taught,’ in upcountry Uganda, were desperate for qualifications, they largely ignored me. Until, that is, I realised that they wanted to hear about other young persons around the world.

Simon Hoggart

I initially wanted to be a teacher, and then I was going to become an engineer and build bridges and highways, but pretty soon I went into the business world. I never did get to be a teacher except in a different way.

Louis V. Gerstner, Jr.

I was very short. Everybody else was two years older in my class, and I had curly hair and was teacher’s pet.

Howard Stringer

The young people I teach now know they are being sold down the river before we even start studying the trends and numbers. That’s the toughest part of being a high school economics teacher… being a witness when our children realize that the greatest deficit of all is a deficit of leadership.

Kurt Bills

I remember my fourth grade teacher reading ‘Charlotte’s Web’ and ‘Stuart Little’ to us – both, of course, by E. B. White. His stories were genuinely funny, thought provoking and full of irony and charm. He didn’t condescend to his readers, which was why I liked his books, and why I wasn’t a big reader of other children’s’ books.

Louis Sachar

We all go back to our roots. My father went to the central west, went to Ilfracombe in 1919. He was the manager of the wool scour there. And, Ilfracombe was right at the heart of Australia’s great wool industry, and my mother was a teacher at Winton.

Quentin Bryce

I tried writing fiction as a little kid, but had a teacher humiliate me, so didn’t write again until I was a senior in college.

Janet Fitch

I was a very bad accountant; I didn’t care about money, golf or discovering fraud. After about a year I was sacked; then I went into teacher training.

Joanne Harris

When I was in college, I had the good fortune to have Joyce Carol Oates as my writing teacher. She told me that I could take an aspect of myself, and from that one bit of personality, I can create a character. This is what I have done, particularly in my novels.

Jonathan Ames

I’m trained as a teacher; that’s the only thing I’ve got a certificate for.

Quentin Blake

I call myself a meditation teacher rather than a spiritual teacher.

Sharon Salzberg

I’ve spent quite a bit of my life as a meditation teacher and writer commending the strengths of love and compassion.

Sharon Salzberg

One of the first serious attempts I made to write a novel was when I was in Grade 6 and I had read ‘Matilda.’ I wrote my own version and my teacher had it bound and permitted me to read it to the class – cementing my love of reading, writing and Roald Dahl!

Randa Abdel-Fattah

As a teacher, I’ve never seen anything like ‘Harry Potter.’ That’s why I smart when people talk about the ‘next’ ‘Harry Potter.’ There is no ‘next’ ‘Harry Potter.’

Rick Riordan

I loved the idea of making history interesting for kids! When Scholastic approached me about ‘The 39 Clues’, I immediately started going through the ‘greatest hits’ from my years as a social studies teacher, and picked the historical characters and eras that most appealed to my students.

Rick Riordan

I’ve been reading Greek mythology since I was a kid. I also taught it when I was a sixth grade teacher, so I knew a lot of mythological monsters already. Sometimes I still use books and Web sites to research, though. Every time I research Greek mythology, I learn something new!

Rick Riordan

I see myself as, first and above all, a teacher of history; next, a writer of European history; next, a commentator on European affairs; next, a public intellectual voice within the American left; and only then an occasional, opportunistic participant in the pained American discussion of the Jewish matter.

Tony Judt

Scripture has always been a part of my life. My dad was a pastor. My mother was a speaker, writer, and teacher. I memorized Scripture from the time I was little.

Gloria Gaither

I started out as a high school teacher in inner-city Chicago and realized quite quickly that my students weren’t that motivated.

Jack Canfield

The Chinese mom is not the helicopter mom. I would never do their homework for them. It’s all about: Take responsibility, don’t blame others. Be self-reliant. Never blame the teacher.

Amy Chua

The best teacher is an entertainer.

Bob Keeshan

My students know I have a life, they know I’ve written about my life. They know some detail, probably more than they know about their physics teacher, but I would’ve told them anyway!

Marya Hornbacher

No matter how much you like your local school teacher, he or she is a government agent.

Nancy Pearcey

I’m a goody-goody. I’m the person who sits in the back row, makes fun of the teacher, and secretly does the extra-credit work.

Patricia Marx

I didn’t go to university, and so, every time that I work, I’m looking for a teacher in a way. I’m looking for people that I can learn from and to have the chance to work with people that I admire.

Diego Luna

A coach, especially at a college level – much more at a college or high school level, than at a pro level – you’re more of a teacher than an actual coach.

Matthew McConaughey

I was never a class clown or anything like that, but I do remember being in the first grade and my teacher, Mr. Chad, told the class one day that we were going to do some exercises. He meant math exercises, but I stood up and started doing jumping jacks. To this day, I don’t know what possessed me to do that, but all my friends cracked up.

Will Ferrell

Every writing teacher gives the subliminal message, every time they teach: ‘Your life counts for something.’ In no other subject that I know of is that message given.

Roger Rosenblatt

My mom is an art teacher and is very much into the performing arts. What can I say? She is the female in my life and has guided me on how to act and conduct myself. A lot of my strength comes from her.

Erin Andrews

My mother had been a grade-school teacher, and my father had an eighth-grade education.

Gordon Bell

Your chemistry high school teacher lied to you when they told you that there was such a thing as a vacuum, that you could take space and move every particle out of it.

Adam Riess

I want to be a science teacher. My friends asked me why, but I’m intrigued by it and I’m quite good at science at school.

Keisha Castle-Hughes

We need to do teacher training to educate them about what temperament means. Shyness is painful and you want to help a child with shyness – but the underlying temperament of being a careful, sensitive person is to be honoured, valued and respected.

Susan Cain

I remember I used to come up to my teacher crying because I couldn’t read. She would say: ‘You can do this. You just don’t want to do this.’

Max Brooks

I wrote about a bird that cleaned a crocodile’s teeth. The story was so good that my teacher could not believe that a ten-year-old could write that well. I was even punished because my teacher thought I’d lied about writing it! I had always loved to write, but it was then that I realized that I had a talent for it.

Brian Jacques

I had an acting teacher tell me once that if you’re playing a car salesman, you don’t want to be an OK car salesman, you want to play the best car salesman.

Aaron Tveit

School district policies and practices have not kept pace with student and teacher needs.

Eli Broad

I was bought an electric guitar when I was 12, but my guitar teacher beat me up. I didn’t like guitar lessons and I got quite bored. My teacher was obviously bored giving me lessons, and one day I offered him a liquorice toffee, but he didn’t answer. So I threw it at him, it hit him in the face, and he sort of beat me up.

Simon Cowell

As a kid, I had this ultimate goal to be a teacher. I wanted to be a history teacher like my dad.

Mike Trout

Before college, I hadn’t voluntarily read anything that might be called literature; I didn’t think I’d understand it; I never seemed to understand my English teacher’s interpretations of what we read.

Melissa Bank

My mother was a teacher, and when she wanted to show me art and literature and science, she’d take me to museums, parks and free exhibitions.

David Blaine

I think if I hadn’t been a writer, I’d have been a teacher like my dad. He was a college professor, and one of my greatest regrets is that he passed away before I was able to prove to him that I wasn’t going to be stuck working at Rax Roast Beef for the rest of my life!

Meg Cabot

Americans always ask how much I love my accent, and I don’t get that – I think I sound like a school teacher.

Freddie Stroma

I’m very grateful and fully aware that 90 percent of actors are not working. Going from public school teacher to a show like ‘Grey’s Anatomy’, I love what I do.

Jesse Williams

Find a good teacher that will keep the game fun. Work hard and don’t be afraid to have success or disappointment. That is what golf is all about.

Paula Creamer

When I was 14 or 15, our teacher introduced us to Dickens’ ‘A Tale of Two Cities.’ It was just for entertainment – we read it aloud – and all of a sudden it became a treasure.

Dermot Healy

My father was a teacher and my mother also worked in the school, so the family has a background in education.

Nick Cave

My parents were not affluent people and were not – didn’t come from the extremities of education. My mother had a high school diploma. I often think I so wish she’d come out of the hills in Appalachia and been able to go on to college. I think she would have made a wonderful teacher.

Dwight Yoakam

Mitch Glazer and I went to high school together, and his mother was my English teacher for two years. She was my favorite teacher, and I followed Mitch’s career as a journalist, so we’ve kind of kept in touch over the years.

Mickey Rourke

The drama teacher that I had in high school, back in Texas, was the only teacher who didn’t kick me out of his class. He turned me on to ‘The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.’ I had picked up Dylan with ‘Bringing It All Back Home,’ and he turned me on to the first couple of albums, which I hadn’t heard.

Steve Earle

I was never one to go up to someone as a five- or six-year-old and say, ‘Hello, my name’s Paul, will you be my friend?’ But I found if I did an impression of the PE teacher or whatever and people laughed, then they did like me, and so then they started talking to me, rather than me making the initial overture and then maybe being rebuffed.

Paul Merton

It’s my belief that you can take everyone down a logical path if you take them slowly enough, and the trouble is that mathematical brains can get scrambled a little bit on the way. You get a bad teacher, it messes you up for the rest of the journey.

Marcus du Sautoy

I don’t want to do panel games or adverts. I really like challenges. I always get roles as an art teacher or a photographer. In the future I want to play something like a mugger/assassin/pastry chef.

Dylan Moran

I had a public school education – 3,000 kids when I was there. And there were a lot of teachers who would just sit there. You’d come in and sign your name and the teacher would just sit there at the head of the class and you would literally just have to stay in your seat for 40 minutes and that was the only thing you’d have to do in class.

Casey Affleck

My degree was in education, but the idea of being a teacher lost out to being a reporter. I worked at a newspaper for a while, then went to New York and worked in PR at RCA and NBC, and at ‘The United States Steel Hour,’ a drama series.

Joan Ganz Cooney

My dad always told me to stand up to bullies, and Bill O’Reilly is kind of a bully, and he’s the kind of kid who hits other kids on the playground. And when you hit him, he runs to the teacher and says, ‘Teacher, sue him.’

Al Franken

I want to do a character in a one-woman show who’s a yoga teacher from the Bronx. I could do the best accent: ‘Raise yaw ahms up! Reach faw da sky!’

Cara Buono

I was always shouted at by my teacher because I would draw straight on the table in the school.

Christian Louboutin

Actually, acting turned out to be the perfect job for me, because I had a lot of different interests. I thought about being a priest at one point. I thought about being a teacher. I thought about being a lawyer. But I think acting is probably the best job for me.

John C. Reilly

If you are a lousy teacher, you should be fired.

Geoffrey Canada

The average American worker gets something like 14 days of paid vacation. In my school, you’d use up ten of those taking care of your kids on teacher professional days, then tack on a couple more for kids getting sick.

Hanna Rosin

I thought I’d grow up to be a teacher, or maybe run for political office.

Jake Shimabukuro

My mom is a public school teacher and works with third grade students.

Jane McGonigal

I decided to take a stab at acting. I entered the American Academy of Dramatic Art, where one teacher told me I’d never make it – I was too tall.

Fred Gwynne

I have taught some master classes and things at my alma mater and sometimes at my kids’ school. I will go in and talk to the theater students. I wouldn’t really call myself a teacher.

Annie Potts

I didn’t really like reading much before I did ‘The Golden Compass’. But then my teacher told me to read it. And I thought, ‘Oh God, I’m going to have to read a whole book by myself!’ It’s not that I couldn’t read, it’s just that I didn’t really like books very much. But the book that she lent me I really enjoyed.

Dakota Blue Richards

I had a great acting teacher in high school. But I didn’t like acting because it took too many people to get the job done. You have to talk to too many people and listen to others’ opinions. With music, you get a few friends together and just make it.

Hugh Dillon

I’d have to say I’m most proud of my mentoring camp that I do in Dallas every year for one hundred boys from single-parent homes. I was raised by a mother who was a Sunday school teacher and a father who worked hard. Together they taught me to give back.

Steve Harvey

I was a good student. My mom is a teacher, and her side of the family is all teachers. She put a big emphasis on getting good grades.

Tyler Hilton

I had a great chemistry teacher and found it really interesting to learn how things are made up and how they work.

Kelli Berglund

I took a couple of classes in clowning, but that was more like Lucille Ball kind of slapstick, not Ringling Brothers. But we had to do things silently, and the teacher would do this running commentary. ‘Does this make Clown sad? Oh, Clown doesn’t like that, does Clown?’ Always ‘Clown.’ Never a name.

June Diane Raphael

I’m blessed because I had my mom as a teacher – sixth through eighth grade – and she is one of the best teachers I’ve ever had.

Bellamy Young

I trained in Toronto with a private acting teacher, who was wonderful, for years growing up.

Megan Park

I did tap dancing and stuff like that at drama school. I did ballet as well. My dance teacher and I didn’t necessarily get along all that well sometimes. She’s brilliant… but it’s just because I don’t like wearing tights that I put up a bit of a fight there, I think.

Tom Weston-Jones

My high-school a cappella teacher would embarrass me in front of the choir. ‘Mavis, you’re in the basement. Mavis, you’re singing with the boys.’ I said, ‘Mr. Finch, my voice isn’t soprano. I can’t sing up there with the girls.’ So I just got out of the choir.

Mavis Staples

When I was either 7 or 8 years old, I did a sketch every day of my teacher and what she wore. At the end of the year, I gave her the sketchbook. For me, the sketching of dresses was about fantasy and dreams.

Alber Elbaz

I still don’t know what I’m going to be. I love acting. I would love to be an English teacher. I would love to be a housewife and have a chateau in the South of France, I would love to be a singer that travels to cafes around different towns.

Bethany Joy Lenz

In high school, a teacher’s friend in the police department asked me to go into a bar and flash a fake ID saying I was 21 even though I wasn’t. They were assuming the bar wasn’t carding people. Anyway, she forgot to ask for it back. I used it all freshman year in college.

Betsy Brandt

I’ve never considered being a cop. I could be a teacher, I could be a minister, a social worker or a professor. As long I don’t have to see blood and see people die every day, if I could inspire or help in their lives, that’s something I’d want to do.

Ruben Santiago-Hudson

In high school, I had a wonderful teacher who, coincidentally also taught Meryl Streep before me. At the same time I had my own rock band, I played bass and sang. I was one of those kids who really enjoyed being with my friends and doing rather insane, but fun, creative things.

Roger Bart

Life changed at 40 for me, as predicted by my acting teacher when I was leaving college. I became more hirable and more interesting… I’m not sure why.

Roger Bart

I’d always enjoyed acting at high school, and I was all lined up to do an honours degree course in biology at a Canadian university, and at the eleventh hour the drama teacher I had said, ‘You know, you’ll get a lot more girls if you go into acting,’ and that kinda sold it.

Matt Frewer

I remember in grammar school the teacher asked if anyone had any hobbies. I was the only one with any hobbies and I had every hobby there was… name anything, no matter how esoteric. I could have given everyone a hobby and still had 40 or 50 to take home.

Cormac McCarthy

At Cornell, my acting teacher said you cannot be religious and be an artist. I sort of got it, because faith is a comfort and art comes from a lot of places, in a lot of people, from the dark chasm.

Catherine Hicks

When I was child, I never spoke. Teacher used to write remarks on my note book. My mom sent me to a trainer. I started talking, and it gave me confidence.

Boman Irani

When I was 11, I played the part of Rumpelstiltskin, and my teacher told me I would make a great actor.

Brian Blessed

I was all-state in four sports in New Jersey, but sometimes I couldn’t get served at a restaurant two blocks from my high school. There were no job opportunities then… the only thing a black youth could aspire to be was a bellboy or a pullman or an elevator operator, or, maybe, a teacher. There was a time when all we had was black baseball.

Monte Irvin

I first started actually playing guitar when I was eleven years old. I had some neighborhood friends who told me they were starting a band and needed a guitarist. I told my folks, and by the next day I had a guitar lesson set up with a local teacher.

Darren Robinson

I’m not a prophet. I’m not a teacher. I have no degrees. My degree is from the University of Life.

Jamie Lee Curtis

A lot of moms give their kids line reads. My mom wasn’t put in that position because I always had an acting teacher helping with the feelings rather than how to say something.

Kirsten Dunst

My daughter became a teacher right out of college.

Al Franken

Prior to going to college, I had a pretty strong accent, and that was one of the things I had to work on a lot. I went to North Carolina School of the Arts; my speech teacher… that was one of the things we really had to work on over the years, and thankfully I think it finally worked.

Chris Parnell

I think day care is terrific. Kids get to be around other kids, and they’re playing, and they’re teaching each other. When I was in college, my summer job was being a preschool teacher. I loved it, and after that experience, I said I can’t wait to put my kid in day care because I could see how much they loved it.

Jessica Valenti

I always thought I would be a teacher. And I think I actually lived up to my initial dreams, because what I do now is teach millions and millions of people many different kinds of things.

Martha Stewart

My mother was a piano teacher, my father an inventor. He invented the reflective paint they still use on airstrips. They had faith in my ambition, and I think that made all the difference.

Chuck Close

I owe the little formal education I got to my drama teacher, Mr. Pickett, who got us to read Shakespeare, Moliere, and other classics.

Dennis Quaid

I was a teacher most of my life, which I loved. I had a very happy working life, and when I retired, I thought I must do something, and I’ve always read a lot of fiction – you learn so much from fiction. My sentimental education came mostly from fiction, I should say, so I thought I’d try.

Anita Brookner

I wanted to be a landscape architect, but I trained as a teacher; I worked in publishing; I was a waitress.

Deborah Moggach

I was never any good in the school theatrical productions. I always got a role like the March Hare. A Latin teacher told me I might make a good actress, and that stuck in my memory.

Jacqueline Bisset

I had a Spanish teacher in high school. I rarely got in trouble in her room because I felt I was disappointing her if I got a bad grade. That had more power over me than teachers who told me I talked too much. That level of respect I had for her made me not want to fail for her.

Clay Aiken

Back in the day for me was a great time in my life – I was in my 20s. Most people refer to their experiences in their twenties as being a highlight in their life. It’s a period of time where you often develop your own way, your own sound, your own identity, and that happened with me, when I was with a great teacher – Miles Davis.

Herbie Hancock

Remember when you were in school and the teacher would put a picture under an overhead projector so you could see it on the wall? God, I loved that. Tellya the truth, I used to look at that beam of light and think it was God.

Lynda Barry

People go into cartooning because they’re shy and they’re angry. That’s when you’re sitting in the back of a classroom drawing the teacher.

Matt Groening

I went to a performance-art high school, and a teacher there was signing me up for open-mic nights at the comedy club. I think about it now, and I think, ‘Well, that may be inappropriate,’ but it was great!’

Margaret Cho

Ineffective substitute teaching is a problem that means thousands of hours of lost learning for America’s students. It cannot be dismissed with a sigh and ‘Just wait for the teacher to come back on Monday.’

Adora Svitak

I’m all self-taught. I never had a teacher. Even for English, and French, and German, I hardly went to school.

Karl Lagerfeld

I was 11 when a teacher suggested to my parents that they should send me to drama classes to curb my disruptive ways in the classroom. The next Saturday I was acting, and thereafter it became a ritual of my youth to see a show at the Belvoir on Sundays and, if I was lucky, another at the Opera House on Monday after school.

David Wenham

I wanted to be what my high-school civics and history teacher thought of as a good American. That automatically involved taking an interest in government.

Olivia De Havilland

I grew up the son of an acting teacher, so I was kind of introduced to all of these various methods early… I’ve never been really good at articulating how, what that process is in the way that Stanislavsky could.

Vin Diesel

My parents, grandmother and brother were teachers. My mother taught Latin and French and was the school librarian. My father taught geography and a popular class called Family Living, the precursor to Sociology, which he eventually taught. My grandmother was a beloved one-room school teacher at Knob School, near Sonora in Larue County, Ky.

Sam Abell

My mother was a high school arts teacher, so I was always surrounded by the arts.

John Lasseter

I went to school at the San Francisco Art Institute, thinking I was going to become an art teacher. Within the first six months I was there, I was told that I couldn’t be an art teacher unless I became an artist first.

Annie Leibovitz

My history teacher was utterly terrifying, but her lessons were very inspiring. She got me interested in people and stories, which then led me to acting.

Laura Carmichael

I’m a teacher and a writer; my life is words. When I see the denigration of language, it hurts me, and it’s easy to denigrate a word by trivializing it.

Elie Wiesel

I don’t go to New York. I don’t go to parties. I just do my business and study nature. My career is 28 years in an obscure art school, with limited staff and no perks. All I am is a teacher.

Camille Paglia

My mom is a teacher, my dad was a writer for television, his dad was a writer for television, and combining those two has been sort of the goal of my life.

Joss Whedon

I loved teaching and I did a lot of work as a teacher’s assistant in college, and my favorite experience was basically getting a laugh from a bunch of people because they had just understood something.

Joss Whedon

My family was going back to England to visit my mother’s grandmother, who was very ill. We went up to Liverpool and I met my great-aunt, who was just a force of nature. She was an elocution teacher and a huge enthusiast for theater and the classics. I took her amateur acting class, and she was really impressed with me.

Kim Cattrall

Knowing what to expect from a teacher is a really good thing, of course: It lets you get the right answers more quickly than you would otherwise.

Alison Gopnik

I did things like get in a cupboard before the teacher came in at the beginning of a lesson, and then, two minutes before the end of the class, I come out of the cupboard and go, ‘Sorry I’m late.’

Miranda Hart

About me – I used to want to be a P.E. teacher, and kind of still do.

Miranda Hart

To say what I would have been if I wasn’t boxing, I don’t know why, but I always wanted to be an x-ray technician or a substitute teacher. Those two occupations always stuck with me, maybe because my substitute teacher didn’t give us homework, or because I’ve always had x-rays of my hands.

Sugar Ray Leonard

I think all of us could play the teacher because we all grew up with teachers. It’s just kind of this peeking-over-the-shoulder presence that we’ve all grown up knowing.

Ryan Eggold

I had an inspirational teacher at my junior school: Peter Nixon. He was enthusiastic, knowledgeable and slightly scary – a good combination for a teacher.

Stephen Mangan

I have a terrible tendency to lick my fingers when I cook. So much so that I got a telling off from my pastry teacher years ago, who said it would hinder my prospects.

Yotam Ottolenghi

I eat tons, three full meals a day, and I never go to the gym. When I was a child, my geography teacher said, ‘You may be slim now but if you carry on eating like that, you’ll end up being really fat.’ Fortunately, I really don’t think I’ve changed much in the past two decades, so that teacher was an idiot.

Gina Bellman

I was a nursery school teacher, and I worked with youth groups. I loved that job. It was exhausting, but you got a lot back – all their purity and insight and innocence is so on the surface, and they’re so unrepressed; they’d really scream at you and then give you a massive kiss.

Bat for Lashes

I signed up with Kundalini yoga teacher training, which has been shifting me in some really beautiful ways.

Angela Lindvall

Pride adversely affects all our relationships – our relationship with God and His servants, between husband and wife, parent and child, employer and employee, teacher and student, and all mankind.

Ezra Taft Benson

My father was a trained accountant, a BCom from Sydenham College and a self-taught violinist. In the 1920s, when he was in his teens, he heard a great violinist, Jascha Heifetz, and he was so inspired listening to him that he bought himself a violin, and with a little help from an Italian teacher, he learned to play it.

Zubin Mehta

Arnold Schwarzenegger cut teacher’s salaries and parks and libraries rather than raise taxes for the many California millionaires and billionaires.

Adam McKay

The whole point of art school is that you’re going to be able to have nudes all day long and a teacher who is there to move you. It’s great. I did a tiny bit in the one school in Paris, and it was wonderful because you’d have a nude taking a crazy position, and you’d have 10 seconds to do a drawing. Then you’d do a one-minute drawing.

Lou Doillon

The first programming assignment I had in high school was to find the first 100 Fibonacci numbers. Instead, I thought it would be cooler to write a program to get the teacher’s password and all the other students’ passwords. And the teacher gave me an A and told the class how smart I was.

Kevin Mitnick

It was my fifth grade teacher who introduced the idea that writing could be more than a hobby for me.

Lauren DeStefano

There has never been, and there will never be, another human who will be more successful than the humble Teacher, Jesus Christ.

Monica Johnson

My mother had been an English teacher in India before she came to the U.K., and she taught me to read early on – not only in English, but in Hindi, too. My teachers didn’t like the fact that I was reading more quickly than they were teaching, and as a consequence, I would sometimes get bored in class.

Sanjeev Bhaskar

The Chinese are brought up to believe that you should be silent in class. The teacher speaks, and you just listen and absorb what they say.

Caleb Deschanel