Teaching is tough. There are days when you want to crawl into a dark hole and stay there forever. But then there are days when you love your job and feel so blessed to be making a difference in the lives of the children and adults you teach. These quotes are for those tough days when you need a little extra boost of motivation to get you through. To all of the tutors, tutors, and educators out there, thank you for what you do!

These quotes are ideal for motivating tutors to keep offering students their best day after day.

• Nikos Kazantzakis: Ideal tutors are those who use themselves as bridges over which they invite their students to cross, then having facilitated their crossing, joyfully collapse, encouraging them to create bridges of their own.

 

• Richard Bach: Learning is finding out what we already know. Doing is demonstrating that you know it. Teaching is reminding others that they know just as well as you. You are all learners, doers, and tutors.

 

• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: A tutor who can arouse a feeling for one single good action, for one single good poem, accomplishes more than he who fills our memory with rows and rows of natural objects, classified with name and form.

 

• Frank Smith: Thought flows in terms of stories — stories about events, stories about people, and stories about intentions and achievements. The best tutors are the best storytellers. We learn in the form of stories.

 

• Marva Collins: Once children learn how to learn, nothing is going to narrow their mind. The essence of teaching is to make learning contagious, to have one idea spark another.

 

• Horace Mann: A tutor who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering on cold iron.

 

• Carol Buchner: They may forget what you said but they will never forget how you made them feel.

 

• Buddhist Proverb: If a seed of a lettuce will not grow, we do not blame the lettuce. Instead, the fault lies with us for not having nourished the seed properly.Josef Albers: Good teaching is more a giving of right questions than a giving of right answers.

 

• Confucius: Every truth has four corners: as a tutor I give you one corner, and it is for you to find the other three.

 

• Kahlil Gibran: The tutor who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind.

 

• Henry B. Adams: A tutor affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.

 

• Mark Twain: Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.

 

• Plato: Do not train children to learning by force and harshness, but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.

 

• Eliphas Levi: A good tutor must be able to put himself in the place of those who find learning hard.

 

• Maria Montessori: The greatest sign of a success for a tutor…is to be able to say, “The children are now working as if I did not exist.”

 

• Rachel Carson: If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, the excitement, and the mystery of the world we live in.

 

• Albert Einstein: It is the supreme art of the tutor to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.

 

• Benjamin Franklin: Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.

 

• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them become what they are capable of becoming.

 

• Helen Keller: Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement, nothing can be done without hope and confidence.

 

• Jean Jacques Rosseau: We should not teach children the sciences but give them a taste for them.

 

• Abraham Maslow: If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.

 

• Dr. David M. Burns: Aim for success, not perfection. Never give up your right to be wrong, because then you will lose the ability to learn new things and move forward with your life. Remember that fear always lurks behind perfectionism.

 

• Bill Vaughan: People learn something every day, and a lot of times it’s that what they learned the day before was wrong.

 

• Claus Moser: Education costs money, but then so does ignorance.

 

• Victor Hugo: He, who opens a school door, closes a prison.

 

• Erich Fromm: Why should society feel responsible only for the education of children, and not for the education of all adults of every age?

 

• Vilfredo Pareto: Give me a fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections. You can keep your sterile truth for yourself.

 

• Jacob Bronowski: It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it.

 

• Martin H. Fischer: The entire world is a laboratory to the inquiring mind.

 

• Mary Kay Ash: Don’t limit yourself. Many people limit themselves to what they think they can do. You can go as far as your mind lets you. What you believe, you can achieve.

 

• Antoine de Saint-Exupery: Each man must look to himself to teach him the meaning of life. It is not something discovered. It is something molded.

 

• Margaret Mead: Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world; indeed it is the only thing that ever has.

 

• Tyron Edwards: The great end of education is to discipline rather than to furnish the mind; to train it to the use of its own powers rather than to fill it with the accumulation of others.

 

• John F. Kennedy: Let us think of education as the means of developing our greatest abilities, because in each of us there is a private hope and dream which, fulfilled, can be translated into benefit for everyone and greater strength of the nation.

 

• Malcolm S. Forbes: Education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.

 

• Thomas Jefferson: Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of both mind and body will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.

 

• Aristotle: Education is the best provision for old age.

 

• Abraham Lincoln: Upon the subject of education, not presuming to dictate any plan or system respecting it, I can only say that I view it as the most important subject which we as a people may be engaged in.

 

• Helen Keller: Have you ever been at sea in a dense fog, when it seemed as if a tangible white darkness shut you in and the great ship, tense and anxious, groped her way toward the shore with plummet and sounding-line, and you waited with beating heart for something to happen? I was like that ship before my education began, only I was without compass or sounding line, and no way of knowing how near the harbour was. “Light! Give me light!” was the wordless cry of my soul, and the light of love shone on me in that very hour.

 

• Jim Rohn: If someone is going down the wrong road, he doesn’t need motivation to speed him up. What he needs is education to turn him around.

 

• Henry Peter Brougham: Education makes a people easy to lead but difficult to drive: easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.

 

• T.S. Eliot: It is in fact a part of the function of education to help us escape, not from our own time — for we are bound by that — but from the intellectual and emotional limitations of our time.

 

• William Haley: Education would be much more effective if its purpose was to ensure that by the time they leave school every boy and girl should know how much they do not know and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know it.

 

• Will Durant: Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

 

• Robert Frost: Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.

 

• George Washington Carver: Education is the key to unlock the golden door of freedom.

 

• B. F. Skinner: Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.

 

• Aristotle: The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.

 

• Sydney J. Harris: The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.

 

• Franklin D. Roosevelt: The school is the last expenditure upon which America should be willing to economize.

 

• G.K. Chesterton: Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.

 

• Ernest Dimnet: Children have to be educated, but they have also to be left to educate themselves.

 

• "I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live by the light that I have. I must stand with anybody that stands right, and stand with him while he is right, and part with him when he goes wrong."

 

• Everyone is trying to accomplish something big, not realizing that life is made up of little things.

 

• If you are not willing to learn, No one can help you. If you are determined to learn, No one can stop you.

 

• The secret to happiness is to do what you like. The secret to success is to like what you do.

 

• Set your goals high enough to inspire you and low enough to encourage you.

 

• Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.

 

• Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again. This time more intelligently.

 

• We are all here for some special reason. Stop being a prisoner of you past. Become the architect of your future.

 

• Some people want it to happen, some people wish it would happen, others make it happen.

 

• Live like you will die tomorrow, dream like you will live forever.

 

• Believe in yourself and there will come a day when others will have no choice but to believe with you.

 

• Success is sweet and sweeter if long delayed and gotten through many struggles and defeats.

 

• If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it wouldn’t seem wonderful at all.

 

• Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle.

 

• Everyone has a will to win but very few have the will to prepare to win.

 

• You need a plan to build a house. To build a life, it is even more important to have a plan or goal.

 

• There is always a little more toothpaste in the tube. Think about it.

 

• Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.

 

• People know you for what you’ve done, not for what you plan to do.

 

• You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.

 

• Success is simple. Do what’s right, the right way, at the right time.

 

• Never, never and never give up.

 

• Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going.

 

• Just don’t give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there’s love and inspiration, I don’t think you can go wrong.

 

• Experience is how life catches up with us and teaches us to love and forgive each other.

 

• You’ll never leave where you are until you decide where you’d rather be.

 

• Trying and Doing are two different things. When you try, you hope. When you do, you succeed.

 

• As you breathe, another person takes his last. So stop complaining but rather live your life with what you got. Make every breath count.

 

• Live like a candle which burns itself but gives light to others.

 

• Don’t let little things get you down.