Bel Kaufman Quotes

Laughter keeps you healthy. You can survive by seeing the humor in everything. Thumb your nose at sadness; turn the tables on tragedy. You can’t laugh and be angry, you can’t laugh and feel sad, you can’t laugh and feel envious.

Education is not a product: mark, diploma, job, money-in that order; it is a process, a never-ending one.

Children are the true connoisseurs. What’s precious to them has no price, only value.

Education can't make us all leaders, but it can teach us which leader to follow.

The heart has its reasons; it's the mind that's suspect.

Learning is a process of mutual discovery for teacher and pupil. Keep an open mind to their unexpected responses.

Love is the ultimate giving, an expression of one's best self.

Never mind the cream; it will always rise to the top. It's the skim milk that needs good teachers.

I had used my sense of humor; I had called it proportion, perspective. But perspective is distance.

The preciousness of every moment is emphasized with every tick of the clock. Isn't it a magnificent day today?

I want to point the way to something that should forever lure them, when the TV set is broken and the movie is over and the school bell has rung for the last time.

I’ll never retire as long as I live—that’s like retiring from life! I’ll never stop writing, teaching, lecturing. If you’re in good health, living is exciting on its own.

And that's it; that's why I want to teach; that's the one and only compensation: to make a permanent difference in the life of a child.

Time collapses and expands like an erratic accordion.

When giving comes directly from the heart, it can never disappoint or embarrass.

People ate bread made of the shells of peas because there was no flour.

I like the word OLD. Not senior, that's for proms. Older? Older than whom? 'Old' is honorable and ripe

To the young, cliches seem freshly minted.

A teacher is frequently the only adult in the pupil's environment who treats him with respect.

To the outside world, of course, this job is a cinch: 9 to 3, five days a week, two months' summer vacation with pay, all legal holidays, prestige and respect. My mother, for example, has the pleasant notion that my day consists of nodding graciously to the rustle of starched curtsies and a chorus of respectful voices bidding me good morning.

Mythology is studied in the school system because most of us come from it.

Best marks go to cheaters and memorizers. Marks depend on memorizing and not on real knowledge. When you cram into your head for a test you may get a high mark but forget it the next day. That's not an education. I suggest just Good and Bad at the end of the term on report cards. Or maybe nothing. Frank Allen

If a teacher wants to know something why doesn't she look it up herself instead of making we students do it? We benefit ourselves more by listening to her, after all she's the teacher!

One of my students had written wistfully of a dream-school that would have "windows with trees in them.

Teachers try to make us feel lower than themselves, maybe because this is because they feel lower than outside people. One teacher told me to get out of the room and never come back, which I did.