A Dozen Inspiring Quotes for Educators
April 21, 2025
Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash
by Catharine Hannay, founder of MindfulTeachers.org
With all of the daily pressures of your work, it can be hard to see the big picture.
To keep things in perspective, here are a variety of thoughts on:
finding meaning through service, and
remembering the importance of what you’re doing even if you don’t see immediate results.
“Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.”
Robert Louis Stevenson
“Concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself.”
Thomas Merton, The Hidden Ground of Love
“It is important to distinguish work (a ‘job’) from vocation (a ‘calling’). It’s the difference between doing laundry and being an artist. […] What you do is not as important as how, for whom, and to what end you do it. […] Any task, no matter how trivial, can have great significance.”
Dennis Oakholm, Monk Habits for Everyday People
“We cannot measure our impact in numbers—we can only measure it a life at a time.”
Isabel Allende, The Wind Knows My Name, (author’s note), p. 257
“If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.”
Emily Dickinson
“Sometimes you don’t need to be super. Sometimes being a plain old hero is good enough to do the job.”
Eric Gansworth, “All the Falling Babies” in My Life: Growing Up Native in America, edited by IllumiNative
“All is well, all is well. Though everything is a mess, all is well.”
Anthony de Mello
“My heart is moved
by all I cannot save:
so much has been destroyed
I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age, perversely,
with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.”
Adrienne Rich
“Some days, doing ‘the best we can’ may still fall short of what we would like to be able to do, but life isn’t perfect—on any front—and doing what we can with what we have is the most we should expect of ourselves or anyone else.”
Fred Rogers, The World According to Mr. Rogers, p. 14
“In Ghana, once a British colony, where English remains the official but a secondary language, they have an interesting usage for the verb ‘try.’
If a Ghanaian does something particularly well, he is often told, ‘You tried.’
What might well be an insult in American English is high praise there, a recognition that purity of intention lies at the core of the achievement.”
Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd, Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction, p. 10)
“Courage does not always roar.
Sometimes courage is the quiet voice
at the end of the day saying
I will try again tomorrow”
“Hope is like a path in the countryside.
At first there is no path,
But if enough people walk
In the same direction,
The path appears.”
Lu Xun
“O snail
Climb Mount Fuji,
But slowly, slowly!”
Kobayashi Issa
Related Posts
There are many more quotations and resources on self-care and resilience here at MindfulTeachers.org, including the following posts: