Teaching Quotes

"Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry"

Robert Morgan, Soldier

"The real trouble with film school is that the people teaching are so far out of the industry that they don't give the students an idea of what's happening"

Brian De Palma, Director

"I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching, I think"

Robert Morgan, Soldier

"When I was teaching at Harvard in the 1970s, I went to Project Incorporated in Cambridge and took photography classes. I didn't even know how to aim the camera in those days"

Ann Beattie, Writer

"I teach well. I used to really like teaching a lot. I enjoyed it a lot and I was good at it"

Art Garfunkel, Musician

"Imagine my surprise when, after a lifetime of teaching me to keep personal things to myself, Mom insisted my drawings were the start of a comic strip for millions of people to enjoy"

Cathy Guisewite, Cartoonist

"Still today, I cannot cross the threshold of a teaching institution without physical symptoms, in my chest and my stomach, of discomfort or anxiety. And yet I have never left school"

Jacques Derrida, Philosopher

"The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery"

Mark Van Doren, Poet

"I admire the fact that the central core of Buddhist teaching involves mindfulness and loving kindness and compassion"

Ron Reagan, Journalist

"What we can do as individuals may not be very much on the global scale, but we have to start the change by living as we are teaching"

Harri Holkeri, Politician

"I'm very fast on teaching guys. Like, when I came over here, I only had two rehearsals with the band. I wondered when I first got here... but it sure came up great"

Ike Turner, Musician

"Even when Darwin's teaching first made its appearance, it became clear at once that its scientific, materialist core, its teaching concerning the evolution of living nature, was antagonistic to the idealism that reigned in biology"

Trofim Lysenko, Celebrity

"In teaching, I wanted to offer a general pharmacology course based on chemical principles, biochemical classification and mathematical modelling. In the event I achieved neither of my ambitions"

James W. Black, Scientist

"Parents should be encouraged to read to their children, and teachers should be equipped with all available techniques for teaching literacy, so the varying needs and capacities of individual kids can be taken into account"

Hugh Mackay

"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, Educator

"Plus, teaching brings home to you very fast that you actually know nothing. I didn't realize that before"

Hugh Grant, Actor

"In teaching man, experimental science results in lessening his pride more and more by proving to him every day that primary causes, like the objective reality of things, will be hidden from him forever and that he can only know relations"

Claude Bernard, Psychologist

"I hate thinking about it, teaching about it, and writing about it. But the plain truth is that hell is real and real people go there for eternity"

Bill Hybels, Clergyman

"In God, the characteristics of men and women that we admire in men and women are combined. That's been a traditional Catholic teaching that God is the combination of opposites"

Andrew Greeley, Clergyman

"Jewish fundamentalism is teaching that Jews can fight with guns and with civil war, against being relocated off the West Bank, and disobey the orders of their government. That is the call to jihad, to several kinds of jihad"

Arthur Hertzberg, Theologian

"Yale places great stress on undergraduate and graduate teaching. I like teaching, and I do a lot of it"

James Tobin, Economist

"All the ills from which America suffers can be traced to the teaching of evolution"

William Jennings Bryan, Lawyer

"An Englishman teaching an American about food is like the blind leading the one-eyed"

A. J. Liebling, Journalist

"Public misbehavior by the famous is a powerful teaching tool"

Bill O'Reilly, Journalist

"To hold that the act of homosexual sodomy is somehow protected as a fundamental right would be to cast aside millennia of moral teaching"

Warren E. Burger, Judge

"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, Poet

"We shouldn't any of us be afraid of teaching protective measures to save lives"

Kyan Douglas, Celebrity

"The day is past when schools could afford to give sufficient time and attention to the teaching of the ancient languages to enable the student to get that enjoyment out of classical literature that made the lives of our grandfathers so rich"

James Loeb, Businessman

"Koranic teaching still insists that the sun moves around the earth. How can we advance when they teach things like that?"

Taslima Nasrin, Writer

"I was endorsed by many corporations to work with their people. Since I had several hundred successful case histories, I realized that it was really valuable and everybody should have access to the information, so I started teaching seminars to groups of people"

Leonard Orr, Celebrity

"My reading is extremely eclectic. Lately I've been teaching myself computer graphics, so I'm reading a lot about that. I read books of trivia, of facts"

Jack Prelutsky, Poet

"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, Actor

"I couldn't run a tight schedule, and if you're any good at teaching, you get sucked dry because you like your students and you're trying to help them, but you don't have any time left to write yourself"

Jim Harrison, Writer

"If a person wants to be publicly gay, they should not be teaching in the public schools"

Jim DeMint, Politician

"Those 25 dancers we worked with for a day, in as highly productive a way as possible - a long class, a period of teaching bits of the repertory - in fact I didn't teach Bank, I've used parts of Oil and Water"

Siobhan Davies, Dancer

"I wonder what it means about American literary culture and its transmission when I consider the number of American poets who earn their living teaching creative writing in universities. I've ended up doing that myself"

Marilyn Hacker, Poet

"I try to write everyday. I do that much better over here than when I'm teaching. I always rewrite, usually fairly close-on which is to say first draft, then put it aside for 24 hours then more drafts"

Marilyn Hacker, Poet

"I always considered myself being an organizer. I'm very good at teaching singers, I'm very good at staging a show, to entertain people. But I never included myself. I never applied this to me as an artist"

Ike Turner, Musician

"I teach one semester a year, and this year I'm just teaching one course during that semester, a writing workshop for older students in their late 20s and early 30s, people in our graduate program who are already working on a manuscript and trying to bring it to completion"

Tobias Wolff, Writer

"Because I don't have to be careful of people's feelings when I teach literature, and I do when I'm teaching writing"

Tobias Wolff, Writer

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