We spend so many hours of our lives in a school environment and it’s only natural that some of those hours will be tough to get through. Even the most motivated student or teacher can suffer from a blip in their enthusiasm.
That’s where inspirational quotes can help. A few quotes placed around the classroom on the walls or chalkboard can help to give us the inspiration we need to try that little bit harder.
They can remind us why we are studying or teaching and what our end goal is. There are so many great quotes out that that you can use to give yourself inspiration.
The 66 inspirational quotes in this article will help you regardless of whether you’re a student, a teacher, or a teacher looking to motivate their students.
We’ve divided the quotes into a few categories so you can quickly find the right quote for your needs.
General Inspirational Quotes
Let’s begin with some general quotes about education. You’ll find quotes here about why education is important for students and how it can help their lives.
1. “The man who does not read books has no advantage over the one who cannot read them.” – Mark Twain
2. “The beautiful thing about learning is that no one can take it away from you.” – B.B. King
3. “Education is not the learning of many facts, but the training of the mind to think.” – Albert Einstein
4, “If it doesn’t challenge you, it doesn’t change you.” – Fred DeVito
5. “Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today.” – Malcolm X
6. “You have to expect things of yourself before you can do them.” – Michael Jordan
7. “You can never be overdressed or overeducated.” – Oscar Wilde
8. “Let us remember: One book, one pen, one child, and one teacher can change the world.” – Malala Yousafzai
9. “A well-educated mind will always have more questions than answers.” – Helen Keller
10. “Education is the key to unlocking the world, a passport to freedom.” – Oprah Winfrey
11. “The mind once enlightened cannot again become dark.” – Thomas Paine
12. “Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don’t.” – Bill Nye
13. “The more I live, the more I learn. The more I learn, the more I realize, the less I know.” – Michel Legrand
14. “The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.” – Dorothy Parker
15. “Education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world.” – B.B. King
16. “You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.” – A.A. Milne
17. “Always do your best. What you plant now, you will harvest later.” – Og Mandino
18. “If you don’t understand, ask questions. If you’re uncomfortable about asking questions, say you are uncomfortable about asking questions and then ask anyway.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
19. “In a global economy, where the most valuable skill you can sell is your knowledge, a good education is no longer just a pathway to opportunity, it is a prerequisite.” – Barack Obama
20. “Education doesn’t make us smarter. It makes us whole.” – Jill Biden
21. “A sense of curiosity is nature’s original school of education.” – Smiley Blanton
22. “Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.” – Arthur Ashe
23. “Belonging starts with self-acceptance… Believing that you’re enough is what gives you the courage to be authentic, vulnerable, imperfect.” – Brene Brown
24. “Who questions much, shall learn much, and retain much.” – Francis Bacon
25. “With every book, you go back to school. You become a student. You become an investigative reporter. You spend a little time learning what it’s like to live in someone else’s shoes.” – John Irving
26. “Today a reader. Tomorrow a leader.” – Anonymous
27. “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” – Nelson Mandela
28. “In a world where you can be anything, be kind.” – Jennifer Dukes Lee
29. “You have to stay in school. You have to. You have to go to college. You have to get your degree. Because that’s the one thing people can’t take away from you is your education. And it is worth the investment.” – Michelle Obama
Inspirational Quotes About Failure
In this section, we have some inspirational quotes about failure and how to overcome any setbacks we face.
30. “Don’t let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.” – John Wooden
31. “If you fail to prepare, you prepare to fail.” – Mark Spitz
32. “Never let the fear of striking out stop you from playing the game.” – Babe Ruth
33. “You must do the things you think you cannot do.” – Eleanor Roosevelt
34. “A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.” – Albert Einstein
35. “Success is a poor teacher.” – Robert Kiyosaki
36. “Remember that failure is an event, not a person.” – Zig Ziglar
37. “You miss 100 percent of the shots you never take.” – Wayne Gretzky
38. “Whether you think you can, or think you can’t, you’re right.” – Henry Ford
39. “The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it. It’s that we aim too low and reach it.” – Michelangelo
Inspirational Quotes About Working Hard
The quotes in this section are focused on working hard and avoiding procrastination.
40. “Teachers can open the door, but you must enter it yourself.” – Chinese Proverb
41. “The expert in anything was once a beginner.” – Helen Hayes
42. “There are no shortcuts to any place worth going.” – Beverly Stills
43. “Genius is 10 percent inspiration, 90 percent perspiration.” – Thomas Edison
44. “It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.” – Albert Einstein
45. “The difference between try and triumph is a little umph.” – Marvin Phillips
46. “You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.” – Zig Ziglar
47. “The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.” – Walt Disney
48. “Progress not perfection” – Kimberly Snyder
49. “The best way to predict your future is to create it.” – Abraham Lincoln
50. “Procrastination makes easy things hard and hard things harder.” – Mason Cooley
51. “The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary.” – Vidal Sassoon
52. “Keep on going, and the chances are that you will stumble on something, perhaps when you are least expecting it. I never heard of anyone ever stumbling on something sitting down.” – Charles F. Kettering
53. “Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going.” – Jim Ryun
54. “Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated.” – R. Collier
55. “Success is no accident. It is hard work, perseverance, learning, studying, sacrifice, and most of all, love of what you are doing or learning to do.” – Pele
56. “I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.” – Thomas Jefferson
Inspirational Quotes For Teachers
Finally, this section has quotes aimed at teachers for those times when the teacher needs to be motivated instead of the students.
57. “The best teachers are those who show you where to look but don’t tell you what to see.” – Alexandra K. Trenfor
58. “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
59. “When educating the minds of our youth, we must not forget to educate their hearts.” – Dalai Lama
60. “Nine-tenths of education is encouragement.” – Anatole France
61. “Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.” – Margaret Mead
62. “Too often we give children answers to remember rather than problems to solve.” – Roger Lewin
63. “To teach is to learn twice.” – Joseph Joubert
64. “Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them to become what they are capable of becoming.” – Goethe
65. “When you educate one person you can change a life, when you educate many you can change the world.” – Shai Reshef
66. “A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.” – Henry B Adams
Final Thoughts
In this article, we listed the 66 best inspirational quotes for the classroom to try today. We divided the quotes into a few different sections so that the right quote for your scenario can be found more easily.
We have quotes to motivate students following failures and to help them when they’re struggling with procrastination. We also included a batch of quotes to help teachers find their inspiration as well.
We hope that whatever the reason why you need an inspirational quote for the classroom, there is a quote here for you.
Hi, my name is Helena Waters and I was a teacher for 40 years before retiring last year.
During my time as a teacher I dedicated the majority of it to making classrooms as fun as possible, with educational parties, fun activities, and low cost entertainment that made the children excited about learning.
I taught children of all ages, from preschoolers to high school students. Now, with the pandemic having uprooted everything that children once knew about school and learning, I think that the need for my ideas is bigger than ever.
That is why I created School Sparks, a place in which I can write down and share all of my ideas on how to get students excited about going to school again. I hope that you’ll find some useful within a school setting, even at home too!
