114 Wonderful Education Quotes
that Extol the Value of Education



How can anyone know anything without education? The education quotes given here highlight the importance of education.

We all study and learn. Some of us go to college and some get even higher degrees. Does it mean that we are educated? Not necessarily. There is a difference between education and learning by rote. Education does not necessarily happen in the confines of the four walls of a school or a college. The world is full of examples of self educated people, many of whom never attended college and in some cases, even school! The education quotes given below tell us what education is and what it is not.

Note: Some quotes given below deal with other aspects of education, like wisdom, knowledge, etc. They can be considered as wisdom quotes, knowledge quotes, etc.

Education Quotes (1)

  • The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn …and change.
    ~ Carl Rogers

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

  • You educate a man; you educate a man. You educate a woman; you educate a generation.
    ~ Brigham Young

  • Intelligence plus character-that is the goal of true education.
    ~ Martin Luther King Jr.

  • The difference between school and life? In school, you're taught a lesson and then given a test. In life, you're given a test that teaches you a lesson.
    ~ Tom Bodett

An education quote by Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), English writer, essayist and lexicographer.
  • The next best thing to knowing something is knowing where to find it.
    ~ Samuel Johnson


  • Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today.
    ~ Malcolm X

  • Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.
    ~ Leonardo da Vinci

  • Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.
    ~ C.S. Lewis


  • Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.
    ~ E.M. Forster

  • Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.
    ~ G.K. Chesterton

One learns by doing a thing; for though you think you know it, you have no certainty until you try.
~ Sophocles
  • One learns by doing a thing; for though you think you know it, you have no certainty until you try.
    ~
    Sophocles


Education Quotes by Aristotle (2)

  • All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth. 
    ~ Aristotle

  • The roots of education are bitter but the fruits are sweet.
    ~ Aristotle

  • Those who educate children well are more to be honored than parents, for these only gave life, those the art of living well.
    ~ Aristotle

  • The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living differ from the dead.
    ~ Aristotle

  • Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.
    ~ Aristotle

  • It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
    ~ Aristotle

An education quote by Aristotle.
  • Education is an ornament in prosperity and a refuge in adversity.
    ~ Aristotle


Education Quotes by Mahatma Gandhi (3)

  • Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.
    ~ Mahatma Gandhi

  • There is no school equal to a decent home and no teacher equal to a virtuous parent.
    ~ Mahatma Gandhi

  • Literacy in itself is no education. Literacy is not the end of education or even the beginning. By education I mean an all-round drawing out of the best in the child and man-body, mind and spirit.
    ~ Mahatma Gandhi

  • By education, I mean an all-round drawing of the best in child and man in body, mind and spirit.
    ~ Mahatma Gandhi

  • The real difficulty is that people have no idea of what education truly is. We assess the value of education in the same manner as we assess the value of land or of shares in the stock-exchange market. We want to provide only such education as would enable the student to earn more. We hardly give any thought to the improvement of the character of the educated. The girls, we say, do not have to earn; so why should they be educated? As long as such ideas persist there is no hope of our ever knowing the true value of education.
    ~ Mahatma Gandhi

  • Persistent questioning and healthy inquisitiveness are the first requisite for acquiring learning of any kind.
    ~ Mahatma Gandhi

  • True education must correspond to the surrounding circumstances or it is not a healthy growth.
    ~ Mahatma Gandhi

  • What is really needed to make democracy function is not knowledge of facts, but right education.
    ~ Mahatma Gandhi

  • If we want to reach real peace in this world, we should start educating children.
    ~ Mahatma Gandhi

  • An education that does not teach us to discriminate between good and bad, to assimilate the one and eschew the other, is a misnomer.
    ~ Mahatma Gandhi


Education Quotes by Confucius (4)

  • Give a bowl of rice to a man and you will feed him for a day. Teach him how to grow his own rice and you will save his life.
    ~ Confucius

  • Education breeds confidence. Confidence breeds hope. Hope breeds peace.
    ~ Confucius

  • I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.
    ~ Confucius

  • A man who has committed a mistake and doesn't correct it is committing another mistake.
    ~ Confucius

  • Acquire new knowledge whilst thinking over the old, and you may become a teacher of others.
    ~ Confucius

  • He who knows all the answers has not been asked all the questions.
    ~ Confucius

  • When a wise man points at the moon the imbecile examines the finger.
    ~ Confucius

  • Learning without thought is labour lost; thought without learning is perilous.
    ~ Confucius
A knowledge quote by Confucius.
  • Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance.
    ~ Confucius


Education Quotes (5)

  • Education makes a greater difference between man and man than nature has made between man and brute.
    ~ John Adams

  • The important thing is not so much that every child should be taught, as that every child should be given the wish to learn.
    ~ John Lubbock

  • The aim of education is the knowledge, not of facts, but of values.
    ~ William Burroughs

  • We learn more by looking for the answer to a question and not finding it than we do from learning the answer itself.
    ~ Lloyd Alexander

  • Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.
    ~ Isaac Asimov

An education quote by Anthony D'Angelo.
  • Develop a passion for learning. If you do, you'll never cease to grow.
    ~ Anthony D'Angelo


Education Quotes (6)


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

  • Natural abilities are like natural plants; they need pruning by study.
    ~ Francis Bacon

  • All men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education.
    ~ Sir Walter Scott

  • In learning you will teach, and in teaching you will learn.
    ~ Phil Collins

  • To educate a person in the mind but not in morals is to educate a menace to society.
    ~ Theodore Roosevelt


Education Quotes (7)

  • Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune.
    ~ Jim Rohn

  • Wisdom.... comes not from age, but from education and learning.
    ~ Anton Chekhov

  • Do you know the difference between education and experience? Education is when you read the fine print; experience is what you get when you don't.
    ~ Pete Seeger

  • Real learning comes about when the competitive spirit has ceased.
    ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

  • It is always a much easier task to educate uneducated people than to re-educate the mis-educated.
    ~ Herbert M. Shelton


A beautiful quote on knowledge.
  • It's not what you don't know that hurts you; it's what you think you know that isn't so.
    ~ Source unknown

  • The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.
    ~ John Powell

  • Education is not filling a pail but the lighting of a fire.
    ~ William Butler Yeats

  • The one real object of education is to have a man in the condition of continually asking questions.
    ~ Bishop Mandell Creighton

  • 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

  • Teaching kids how to feed themselves and how to live in a community responsibly is the center of an education.
    ~ Alice Water

An education quote by Alvin Toffler.
  • The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.
    ~ Alvin Toffler


Education Quotes (8)

  • Education is the power to think clearly, the power to act well in the world's work, and the power to appreciate life.
    ~ Brigham Young

  • The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done; men and women who are creative, inventive and discoverers, who can be critical and verify, and not accept, everything they are offered.
    ~ Jean Piaget

  • A fondness for reading, properly directed, must be an education in itself.
    ~ Jane Austen

  • The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil. It is not for you to choose what he shall know, what he shall do. It is chosen and foreordained and he only holds the key to his own secret.
    ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

  • People think of education as something they can finish.
    ~ Isaac Asimov

An education quote by Robert Maynard Hutchins.
  • The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives.
    ~ Robert Maynard Hutchins

  • Once you've decided that something's absolutely true, you've closed your mind on it, and a closed mind doesn't go anywhere. Question everything. That's what education's all about.
    ~ David Eddings

  • The purpose of education is not to validate ignorance but to overcome it.
    ~ Lawrence Krauss

  • What sculpture is to a block of marble education is to the human soul.
    ~ Joseph Addison

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

  • When learning is purposeful, creativity blossoms. When creativity blossoms, thinking emanates. When thinking emanates, knowledge is fully lit. When knowledge is lit, economy flourishes.
    ~ A.P.J. Abdul Kalam


Education Quotes (9)

  • There is no knowledge that is not power.
    ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

  • Life is a succession of lessons, which must be lived to be understood.
    ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

  • If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.
    ~ Anonymous

  • I think you learn more if you're laughing at the same time.
    ~ Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows

  • When you wish to instruct, be brief; that men's [children's] minds take in quickly what you say, learn its lesson, and retain it faithfully. Every word that is unnecessary only pours over the side of a brimming mind.
    ~ Cicero

An education quote by B.F.Skinner.
  • Education is what survives when what has been learned has long been forgotten.
    ~ B. F. Skinner

  • True education does not consist merely in the acquiring of a few facts of science, history, literature, or art, but in the development of character.
    ~ David O. McKay

  • Our care of the child should be governed, not by the desire to make him learn things, but by the endeavor always to keep burning within him that light which is called intelligence.
    ~ Maria Montessori

  • What you learn today, for no reason at all, will help you discover all the wonderful secrets of tomorrow.
    ~ Norton Juster

  • It's what we think we know that keeps us from learning.
    ~ Claude Bernard

  • Education: that which reveals to the wise, and conceals from the stupid, the vast limits of their knowledge.
    ~ Mark Twain

An education quote by Benjamin Disraeli.
  • Seeing much, suffering much, and studying much are the three pillars of learning.
    ~ Benjamin Disraeli


Education Quotes (10)

  • Imagination is the source of every form of human achievement. And it's the one thing that I believe we are systematically jeopardizing in the way we educate our children and ourselves.
    ~ Sir Ken Robinson
  • Nine tenths of education is encouragement.
    ~ Anatole France
  • With guns you can kill terrorists, with education you can kill terrorism.
    ~ Malala Yousafzai
  • It is clearly absurd to limit the term 'education' to a person's formal schooling.
    ~ Murray N. Rothbard
  • Formal education teaches how to stand, but to see the rainbow you must come out and walk many steps on your own.
    ~ Amit Ray

An education quote by Edward Bulwer-Lytton.
  • The best teacher is the one who suggests rather than dogmatize, and inspires his listener with the wish to teach himself.
    ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton


Education Quotes (11)

  • If you are planning for a year, sow rice; if you are planning for a decade, plant trees; if you are planning for a lifetime, educate people.
    ~ Chinese proverb

  • Education...has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.
    ~ George Macaulay Trevelyan

  • Mental acuity of any kind comes from solving problems yourself, not from being told how to solve them.
    ~ Paul Lockhart

  • You can teach a student a lesson for a day; but if you can teach him to learn by creating curiosity, he will continue the learning process as long as he lives.
    ~ Clay P. Bedford

  • Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants.
    ~ John W. Gardner

A beautiful Chinese proverb on seeking knowledge.
  • He who asks a question is a fool for a minute; he who does not, remains a fool forever.
    ~ Chinese proverb


Education Quotes (12)

  • The mediocre teacher tells.
    The good teacher explains.
    The superior teacher demonstrates.
    The great teacher inspires.
    ~ William Arthur Ward

  • The purpose of learning is growth, and our minds, unlike our bodies, can continue growing as we continue to live.
    ~ Mortimer Adler

  • Education is learning what you didn't even know you didn't know.
    ~ Daniel J. Boorstin

  • It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.
    ~ Epictetus

  • The best teachers are those who show you where to look but don’t tell you what to see.
    ~ Alexandra K. Trenfor

  • An education is not so much about making a living as making a person.
    ~ Tara Westover


Education Quotes (13)

  • If you would like to thoroughly know anything, teach it to others.
    ~ Tryon Edwards

  • Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
    ~ Edward Everett

  • My idea of education is to unsettle the minds of the young and inflame their intellects.
    ~ Robert Maynard Hutchins

  • We cannot hold a torch to light another's path without brightening our own.
    ~ Ben Sweetland


  • The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
    ~ William James

  • The aim of a college education is to teach you to know a good man when you see one.
    ~ William James

  • Education is the manifestation of perfection already existing in man.
    ~ Swami Vivekananda

A very deep education quote by Will Durant.
  • Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
    ~ Will Durant


Education Quotes (14)

  • Education is not confined to books, and the finest characters often graduate from no college, but make experience their master, and life their book. [Some care] only for the mental culture, and [are] in danger of over-studying, under the delusion . . . that learning must be had at all costs, forgetting that health and real wisdom are better.
    ~ Louisa May Alcott

  • It is a thousand times better to have common sense without education than to have education without common sense.
    ~ Robert G. Ingersoll

  • 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.
    ~ William Haley

  • Children have to be educated, but they have also to be left to educate themselves.
    ~Abbé Dimnet

  • Education is learning what you didn't know you didn't know.
    ~George Boas

  • The things taught in schools & colleges are not an education but the means of education.
    ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson



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