"And so too, it seems, one should make a return to one's teachers, for their worth cannot be measured against money, and they can get no honor which will balance their services, but it is still perhaps enough, as with the gods and with one's parents, to give them what one can." --Aristotle, Ethics.

". . . it is said close acquaintances used to copy Plato's stoop, Aristotle's lisp, and King Alexander's twisted neck as well as the harshness of his voice in conversation. In fact, some people unconsciously acquire most of their peculiarities from the traits or the lives of others." --Plutarch, How to Tell a Friend From a Flatterer.

"Why then [Socrates] said, when the multitude are seated together in assembly or in courtrooms or theaters or camps or any other public gathering of a croud, and with loud uproar censure some of the things that are said and done and approve others, both in excess, with full-throated clamor and clapping of hands, and thereto the rocks and the region round about re-echoing double the din of the censure and the praise? In such case how do you think the young man's heart, as the saying is, is moved within him? What private teaching do you think will hold out and not rather be swept away by the torrent of censure and applause, and borne off on its current, so he will affirm the same things that they do to be honorable and base, and will do as they do, and be even such as they?" --Plato, Republic, Book VI

". . . [Nettleship] had very little desire to propagate his own opinions; he wished chiefly to help others to think, and to bring their minds into contact with those of great men. . . . Habitual intercourse with the great minds kept him constantly aware of the difference between their powers and his." --A.C. Bradley, Philosophical Remains of Richard Lewis Nettleship.

"A man educates himself; and the best work teachers can do, is to inspire the love of mental exercise and a living faith in the power of labor to develop faculties, and to open worlds of use and delight which are infinite, and which each individual must rediscover for himself." --John L. Spalding [Bishop of Peoria], Education and the HigherLife

"It is occasionally said that a good student needs no teachers and that all he does need is a library and leisure. Neither the poor nor the good student needs bad teachers or bored ones; he is better off without them. But he is very fortunate indeed if he can look back on his college days and enumerate half a dozen men who, by their passion for ideas, their clarity about them, their love for the communication of them, their exemplification in their own being of intellectual discipline and candor, have given a meaning to facts that, even with leisure and libraries, he would not have been as likely to find by himself. . . nobody has quite succeeded in putting into print the bitter-sweet pleasures of teaching, the joys of making things clear and making them vivid, or appearing to do so, to the receptive, or apparently receptive, young. No one has yet translated into words the curious emotion that comes form seeing what happens afterwards in the way of hard-boiled success-hunting or success-having to the finer-tempered among the youths one has taught." --Irwin Edman, Philosopher's Holiday

"People are generally better persuaded by reasons which they themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others." -- Blaise Pascal

"This is a variation on the principle well known to schoolteachers, that human beings are able to learn almost anything, but willing to learn almost nothing unless they can make what they learn into part of their own lives." --Gilbert Highet

"Now the dialogue has this advantage over the essay, that in a measure it preserves in dead words the living spirit of free inquiry. The 'gad-fly' to which Socrates likened himself is still at work stinging the sluggish intellect into activity . . . that is, whatever thoughts [the reader] gets are his own, and however meager, if no more than knowledge of ignorance, are worth more than the any number of opinions bought from the Sophists, or borrowed from the poets, and therefore insecurely held, and likely to be blown away by every fresh wind of doctrine." Charles M. Bakewell, ed.'s Introduction to Plato, The Republic.

Prospero:
. . . but this swift businesss I must uneasy make, lest too light winning
Make the prize light.

--William Shakespeare, The Tempest

"Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose. And it's an unreliable guide to the future. . . When we look back at the last twenty years it is obvious that a number of large companies were so set in their ways that they did not adjust properly and lost out as a result. " Bill Gates

"But I regard myself, not as speaking to please Emerson's admirers, nor as speaking to please myself; but rather, I repeat, as communing with Time and Nature concerning the productions of this beautiful and rare spirit, and as resigning what of him is by their unalterable decree touched with caducity, in order the better to mark and secure that in him which is immortal." --Matthew Arnold [about Ralph Waldo Emerson.]

". . . the sincere and single-minded student ought to regard flowery and dainty subject matter as the pasturage of drones who practise the popular lecture; these he should leave alone and use all diligence to sound the deep meaning of words and the intention of the speaker, drawing from it what is useful and profitable, and remembering that he has not come to a theater music-hall, but to a school and classroom with the purpose of amending his life by what is said there. . . .towards philosophers of the right sort . . . seriousness and jest in them, nod, or smile, or frown, may yield a return which is profitable for those who have acquired the habit of patient attention." Plutarch, On Listening to Lectures.

"Like other masters of the period, he accepted no fee. Carolus-Duran did his students the honor of teaching them, and they did him the honor of learning. . . Carolus' own studies had led him to this principle: "Express the maximum by means of the minimum." Carter Ratliff, ed., John Singer Sargent

"If a philosopher must teach, it was once suggested, it might be better if he taught something else than philosophy. It might be best if he did not teach at all and took instead an easy job taking in umbrellas in the museum. For in the classroom one's ideas harden into doctrines, one's insights into routines, one's doubts coagulate into neat, expoundable pseudo-clarities." Irwin Edman, Philosopher's Holiday

Hermes: 'As for Nineveh, ferryman, it is already gone and there is not a trace of it left now; you couldn't even say where it was. . . . cities die as well as men, ferrymen, and what is more even whole rivers.' 'What folly,' Charon replies, 'to grieve over gold and cities and rivers and countryside. . . . as for this plain, it will be tilled by one race after another, and many a time will they turn the trophy out of the depths with a plow.'" --Lucian, Charon, Or The Inspectors.