Inspirational Quotes

Education

"Do not try to satisfy your vanity by teaching a great many things. Awaken people's curiosity. It is enough to open minds, do not overload them. Put there just a spark. If there is some good inflammable stuff, it will catch fire."

― Anatole France

"Education is not the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire."

― William Butler Yeats

“The best teachers are those who show you where to look but don’t tell you what to see.”

― Alexandra K. Trenfor

“Must we always teach our children with books? Let them look at the mountains and the stars above. Let them look at the beauty of the waters and the trees and flowers on Earth. Then they will begin to think, and to think is the beginning of real education.”

― David Polis

“What makes us human, I think, is an ability to ask questions, a consequence of our sophisticated spoken language.”

― Jane Goodall

There is no such thing as a weird human being. It’s just that some people require more understanding than others.

― Tom Robbins

“Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think.”

― Albert Einstein

“If we surrendered to the Earth’s intelligence, we could rise up rooted, like trees… The future of education is in the outdoors.”

― Rainer Maria Rilke

“I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element in the classroom. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. As a teacher, I possess the power to make a student’s life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated and a person humanized or dehumanized.”

― Haim Ginott

“People may not remember exactly what you did, or what you said, but they will always remember how you made them feel.”

― Maya Angelou

“Teachers who find their kids’ ideas fascinating are just better teachers than teachers who find the subject matter fascinating.”

― Philip Sadler, Director of Science Education, Harvard

Senses

“Ever wonder why you have two nostrils? Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley did. They fitted undergraduates with taped-over goggles, earmuffs, and work gloves to block other senses, then set them loose in a field. Most of the students could follow a 30-foot-long trail of chocolate perfume and even changed direction precisely where the invisible path took a turn. The subjects were able to smell better with two functioning nostrils, which researchers likened to hearing in stereo. And they found themselves zigzagging, a technique employed by dogs as they track. “We found that not only are humans capable of scent tracking,” said study researcher Noam Sobel, “but they spontaneously mimic the tracking pattern of [other] mammals.”

“In 2009, researchers at Madrid’s University of Alcalá de Henares showed how people, like bats, could identify objects without needing to see them, through the echoes of human tongue clicks. According to the lead researcher, echoes are also perceived through vibrations in ears, tongue, and bones—a refined sense learned through trial and error by some blind people and even sighted individuals. It’s all about hearing a world that exists beyond what we normally mistake for silence.”

“What else can we do that we’ve forgotten?”

— From The Hybrid Mind, by Richard Louv

Challenge

To those who have struggled with them, the mountains reveal beauties they will not disclose to those who make no effort. That is the reward the mountains give to effort. And it is because they have so much to give and give it so lavishly to those who will wrestle with them that men love the mountains and go back to them again and again…. The mountains reserve their choice gifts for those who stand upon their summits.

― Sir Francis Youngblood

The trick is what one emphasizes.

We either make ourselves miserable

Or we make ourselves strong.

The amount of work is the same….

― Carlos Castaneda

To venture causes anxiety, but not to venture to lose one’s self… and to venture in the highest is precisely to become conscious of one’s self.

― Soren Kierkegaard

The truth is that part of the essence of mountain climbing is to push oneself to one’s limits. Inevitably this involves risk, otherwise they would not be one’s limits. This is not to say that you deliberately try something you know you can’t do. But you do deliberately try something which you are not sure you can do.

― Woodrow Wilson Sayre

Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.

― Helen Keller

"Be like a tree in pursuit of your cause. Stand firm, grip hard, thrust upward, bend to the winds of heaven, and learn tranquility."

― Richard St. Barbe Baker

Science

"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not “Eureka!” but “That’s funny …”

― Isaac Asimov

“Science kills credulity and superstition, but to the well-balanced mind it enhances the feeling of wonder, of veneration, and of kinship which we feel in the presence of the miraculous universe.”

― John Burroughs, Accepting the Universe: Essays in Naturalism

“Every kid starts out as a natural-born scientist, and then we beat it out of them. A few trickle through the system with their wonder and enthusiasm for science intact.“

― Carl Sagan

“One thing is for certain: the more profoundly baffled you have been in your life, the more open your mind becomes to new ideas.”

― Neil deGrasse Tyson

Curiosity and Wonder

“Hands-on experience at the critical time, not systematic knowledge, is what counts in the making of a naturalist. Better to be an untutored savage for a while, not to know the names or anatomical detail. Better to spend stretches of time just searching and dreaming.”

― Edward O. Wilson

“The beginning of knowledge is the discovery of something we do not understand.”

― Frank Herbert

“Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different.”

― Albert Szent-Györgyi

“Let me keep my mind on my work, which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.”

― Mary Oliver

“Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose”

― Zora Neal Hurston

“The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.”

― Dorothy Parker

“Think and wonder, wonder and think.”

― Dr. Seuss

“To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand”

― Jose Ortega y Gasset

“Intelligence is not so much the capacity to learn as the capacity to wonder.”

― Oliver Wendell Holmes

“The world is full of magic things patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”

― John Keats

“Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.”

― Richard Feynman

Attention

“I see no more than you, but I have trained myself to notice what I see.”

― Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

“A useful definition of love is sustained compassionate attention. Each time students have an opportunity for sustained compassionate attention with a leaf, an insect, or a tree, they fall in love a little bit with the natural world.”

― John Muir Laws

“The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.”

― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The rare moment is not the moment when there is something worth looking at, but the moment when we are capable of seeing.”

― Joseph Wood Krutch

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes”

― Marcel Proust

“Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you’re no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn’t just a means to an end but a unique event in itself. This leaf has jagged edges. This rock looks loose. From this place the snow is less visible, even though closer. These are things you should notice anyway. To live only for some future goal is shallow. It’s the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top."

― Robert M. Pirsig

“Instructions for living a life.

Pay attention.

Be astonished.

Tell about it.”

― Mary Oliver

"Silence is not a thing we make; it is something into which we enter. It is always there. . . . All we can make is noise."

— Mother Maribel of Wantage

“In an age of acceleration, nothing is more exhilarating than to go slow. In an age of distraction, nothing is more luxurious than to pay attention…”

— Pico Iyer

Nature

"Everything in nature invites us constantly to be what we are."

― Gretel Ehrlich

"The woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those who sang best."

― John James Audubon

“Human relations and communion with nature are the ultimate sources of happiness and beauty.”

― Rene Dubos

“No greater challenge faces us than to preserve some places of quiet and beauty for the sanity of mankind.”

― Sigurd F. Olson

“I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order.”

― John Burroughs

“Listen! The wind is rising, and the air is wild with leaves,

We have had our summer evenings, now for October eves!”

― Humbert Wolfe

“Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower”

― Albert Camus

When despair for the world grows in me,

And I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and Lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water,

and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things,

Who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.

I come into the presence of still water,

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

Waiting with their light.

For a time, I rest in the grace of the world, and am Free.

― Wendell Berry

"We are rooted to the air through our lungs, and to the soil through our stomachs. We are walking trees and floating plants."

― John Burroughs

“No one will protect what they don’t care about; and no one will care about what they have never experienced”

― David Attenborough

Sense of Place

"Let's just wander here and there, like leaves floating in the autumn air, and look at common little things - stones on the beach - flowers turning into berries. From the winds we'll catch a bit of that wondrous feeling that comes - not from seeing - but from being part of nature.

― Gwen Frostic

"The Earth reminded us of a Christmas tree ornament hanging in the blackness of space. As we got farther and farther away it diminished in size. Finally it shrank to the size of a marble, the most beautiful marble you could imagine. That beautiful, warm living object looked so fragile, so delicate, that if you touched it with a finger it would crumble and fall apart."

― James Irwin, U.S. Astronaut

“To learn something new, take the path that you took yesterday.”

― John Burroughs

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

― T. S. Eliot

"And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling, by which we arrive at the ground at our feet and learn to be at home."

― Wendell Berry