125 Inspiring Education Quotes That'll Keep Your Desire to Learn Burning Bright (2023)

The importance of education cannot be understated. It's what helps us adapt and grow. And during these especially unique and trying times, these uplifting education quotes remind us to stay strong and keep growing, learning and adapting.

As this big list of famous quotes about education and learning reaffirms, education is the key to opportunity.

From inspiring quotes about learning—which remind us that failure is a necessary part of the process—to quotes on education from some of history's most famous and influential leaders, these 125 education quotes about learning will keep your fire burning.Read this list for the best quotes about education, quotes about learning, famous quotes about education and more.

After all, as Socrates said in one of the most famous education quotes of all-time: "Education is the kindly of a flame, not the filling of a vessel."

125 Education Quotes

1. Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel. –Socrates

2. Man’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions. –Oliver Wendell Holmes

3. Being a student is easy. Learning requires actual work. —William Crawford

4. Education is not the filling of a pot but the lighting of a fire. —W.B. Yeats

5. Don’t just teach your children to read.Teach them to question what they read.Teach them to question everything. –George Carlin

6. Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever. ―Mahatma Gandhi

7. Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn. –Benjamin Franklin

8. Change is the end result of all true learning. ―Leo Buscaglia

9. I am still learning. —Michelangelo

10. It is not from ourselves that we learn to be better than we are. –Wendell Berry

11. Life is an open book test. Learning how to learn is your most valuable skill in the online world. —Marc Cuban

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12. The more I read, the more I acquire, the more certain I am that I know nothing. –Voltaire

13. Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today. —Malcolm X

14. All learning has an emotional base. –Plato

15. Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance. —Will Durant

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16. I never learned from a man who agreed with me. –Robert A. Heinlein

17. He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying. —Friedrich Nietzsche

18. You don’t understand anything until you learn it more than one way. —Marvin Minsky

19. Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another. _G.K. Chesterton

20. The beautiful thing about learning is that nobody can take it away from you. ―B.B. King

21. By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest. –Confucius

22. What sculpture is to a block of marble education is to the human soul. —Joseph Addison

23. Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. —Henry Ford

24. A well-educated mind will always have more questions than answers. —Helen Keller

25. Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don’t. —Bill Nye

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26. Take what you learn and make a difference with it. —Tony Robbins

27. Your attitude, not your aptitude, will determine your altitude. —Zig Ziglar

28. A little learning is a dangerous thing. –Alexander Pope

29. Don’t make up your mind. “Knowing” is the end of learning. —Naval Ravikant

30. 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. —Jim Rohn

31. To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil’s soul. ―Muriel Spark

32. Any fool can know. The point is to understand. –Albert Einstein

33. Never stop learning. Never stop growing. —Mel Robbins

34. 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

35. Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn. –Benjamin Franklin

36. Education is the ability to meet life’s situations. —Dr. John G. Hibben

37. The more you learn, the more you earn. —Warren Buffett

38. Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough. —Alain de Botton

39. Learning starts with failure; the first failure is the beginning of education. –John Hersey

40. All the world is a laboratory to the inquiring mind. –Martin Fisher

41. Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new. —Albert Einstein

42. Be curious, not judgmental. —Walt Whitman

43. Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely. —Auguste Rodin

44. The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows. —Sydney J. Harris

45. Try to learn something about everything and everything about —Thomas Huxley

46. An investment in knowledge pays the best interest. —Benjamin Franklin

47. 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. —T.S. Eliot

48. 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

49. That which we persist in doing becomes easier for us to do; not that the nature of the thing itself is changed, but that our power to do is increased. –Ralph Waldo Emerson

50. The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go. –Dr. Seuss

51. Nine tenths of education is encouragement. —Anatole France

52. For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them. ―Aristotle

53. The first half of my life I went to school, the second half of my life I got an education. —Mark Twain

54. Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself. —Eleanor Roosevelt

55. The human mind is our fundamental resource. –John F. Kennedy

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

57. I am learning all the time. The tombstone will be my diploma. —Eartha Kitt

58. Life is a journey, not a destination. —Ralph Waldo Emerson

59. 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

60. Even the genius asks questions. –Tupac Shakur

61. Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune. —Jim Rohn

62. I believe that education is all about being excited about something. Seeing passion and enthusiasm helps push an educational message. —Steve Irwin

63.The great aim of education is not knowledge but action. —Herbert Spencer

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

65. The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn and change. —Carl Rogers

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

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

68. A teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary. —Thomas Carruthers

69. They know enough who know how to learn. —Henry Adams

70. Recipes tell you nothing. Learning techniques is the key. —Tom Colicchio

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

72. A learning curve is essential to growth. —Tammy Bjelland

73. Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence. ―Abigail Adams

74. The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet. —Aristotle

75. Never let formal education get in the way of your learning. –Mark Twain

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76. You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over. –Richard Branson

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

78. Too often we give children answers to remember rather than problems to solve. —Robert Lewin

79.You will either step forward into growth, or you will step backward into safety. —Abraham Maslow

80.Always walk through life as if you have something new to learn and you will. —Vernon Howard

81. Knowledge is power. Information is liberating. Education is the premise of progress, in every society, in every family. —Kofi Annan

82. Learning is synthesizing seemingly divergent ideas and data. –Terry Heick

83. He who opens a school door, closes a prison. ―Victor Hugo

84. Learning is like rowing upstream: not to advance is to drop back. —Chinese proverb

85. It is impossible to begin to learn that which one thinks one already knows. —Epictetus

86. Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world. —Nelson Mandela

87. 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

88. I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. —Pablo Picasso

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

90. Yesterday I was clever, so I changed the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself. —Rumi

91. It is as impossible to withhold education from the receptive mind as it is impossible to force it upon the unreasoning. —Agnes Repplierg

92. The more I live, the more I learn. The more I learn, the more I realize, the less I know. —Michel Legrand

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

94. Education is for improving the lives of others and for leaving your community and world better than you found it. —Marian Wright Edelman

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

96. When you learn, teach. When you get, give. —Maya Angelou

97. You are always a student, never a master. You have to keep moving forward. –Conrad Hall

98. Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous. —Confucius

99. Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him. —Maya Angelou

100. Education is a continual process, it’s like a bicycle… If you don’t pedal you don’t go forward. –George Weah

101. Children have to be educated, but they have also to be left to educate themselves. —Ernest Dimnet

102. I don't think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.—Abraham Lincoln

103. The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think — rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with thoughts of other men. —Bill Beattie

104. Making mistakes simply means you are learning faster. —Weston H. Agor

105. I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught. —Winston Churchill

106. Every student can learn, just not on the same day, or the same way. –George Evans

107. Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself. —John Dewey

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

109. Take the attitude of a student, never be too big to ask questions, never know too much to learn something new. —Og Mandino

110. Man can learn nothing except by going from the known to the unknown. —Claude Bernard

111. You aren’t learning anything when you’re talking. –Lyndon B. Johnson

112. Learning is not the product of teaching. Learning is the product of the activity of learners. —John Holt

113. “What did you learn?” is always first and best question. —Oprah Winfrey

114.Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change. –Stephen Hawking

115. It is not that I’m so smart. But I stay with the questions much longer. –Albert Einstein

116. Many highly intelligent people are poor thinkers. Many people of average intelligence are skilled thinkers. The power of the car is separate from the way the car is driven. —Edward De Bono

117. With every mistake we must surely be learning. —George Harrison

118. Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all. —Aristotle

119. They cannot stop me. I will get my education, if it is in the home, school, or anyplace. —Malala Yousafzai

120. If you think education is expensive, try estimating the cost of ignorance. —Howard Gardner

121. The learning process continues until the day you die. —Kirk Douglas

122. Learning never exhausts the mind. ―Leonardo da Vinci

123. Learning is a treasure that will follow its owner everywhere. —Chinese Proverb

124. The quieter you become, the more you can hear. –Buddha

125. Develop a passion for learning. If you do, you will never cease to grow. —Anthony J. D’Angelo

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