Quotes for my students

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

One of my teachers in high school would put an amusing quote from some famous old shmuck in one of the top corners of the blackboards every day. I’m teaching my first class this fall, starting in two weeks, and I’ve decided to make this part of my daily routine. First, a minor bit of amusement can make the class more lively, and it gives the students some added motivation to show up on a daily basis. Second, if the quote is thought-provoking, it might jump-start some mental activity. Now I need you folks to supply the quotes, according to the following rules:

  1. Quotes about math are good. So are quotes about education. But any category will be considered as long as it’s witty.

  2. No toilet humor, nothing obscene, no double entendres. I’m trying to gain their respect, not lose it.

  3. Nothing offensive to members of any race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, political party, or ethnic group. I’m hoping to keep this job for awhile.

  4. Nothing cynical or depressing. Typically college students experience enough pressure towards depression and alcoholism without my encouragement.

Sample quotes to give you an idea of what I’m looking for:

“The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit.” - Somerset Maugham

“Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.” - G. K. Chesterton

“History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.” - Kurt Vonnegut

2

Try my sig line in this Thread. :slight_smile:

3

Heh. I do the same thing in my classroom. It seems some students only show up to see what the “Thought For The Day” is that day. I got most of the list I cycle through from http://www.taglinesgalore.com/. All sorts of thoughts, from silly to sublime.

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‘An expert is like a eunuch in a harem - someone who knows all about it but can’t do anything about it.’ Dean Acheson

‘If at first you don’t succeed, you are running about average.’ M. Alderson

‘Give me chastity and self-restraint - but do not give me them yet.’ St. Augustine

‘Facts without theory are trivia. Theory without facts is bullshit.’

‘The less people know about how laws and sausages are made, the better they’ll sleep.’ Bismarck

‘If everything seems to be coming your way, you’re probably in the wrong lane.’

‘Don’t put off till tomorrow what you can put off until the day after tomorrow.’ E. Bulen

These all came from ‘The Official Explanations’ by Paul Dickson. Very enjoyable book.

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“Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school.” - Albert Einstein

“Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.” - Barry LePatner

(save this one for after you’ve been doing your quote of the day for a while)

“I always have a quotation for everything - it saves original thinking.” - Dorothy Sayers

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"Most of what passes for Western education is total, phony bullshit, as everyone knows. --Ram Dass

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I’ve always liked Oscar Wilde’s wit. Here’s a couple of his remarks:

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

In this world there are two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. The last is much the worst.

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.

One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing.

8

The Quotations Page has all sorts of interesting quotes too. Here’s their

[Quote of the Day]
(Quotes of the Day - The Quotations Page) page. They also have a Motivational Quote of the Day page. And, you can look quotes up by subject…they only have 12 listed under mathematics.

They have all kinds of interesting and fun quotes. You can also save the ones you like to your own page if you register (it’s free).

A few I like, not necessarily appropriate for your class.

Hell, there are no rules here-- we’re trying to accomplish something.
Thomas A. Edison (1847 - 1931)

I have not lost my mind - it’s backed up on disk somewhere.
Unknown

Nothing endures but change.
Heraclitus (540 BC - 480 BC)

Never confuse movement with action.
Ernest Hemingway (1899 - 1961)

The thing I hate about an argument is that it always interrupts a discussion.
G. K. Chesterton (1874 - 1936)

Good luck!

GT

9

My English teacher during my Senior year of high school did the same kind of thing. However, since our class was AP, with LOTS of intelligence and imagination, several of us started sneaking into class before she got there (it was right after lunch) and writing our own quotes on the board. Some were ones we had read somewhere, but others were ones that we made up. One guy in particular was really good at making up “quotes,” which he signed with his pseudonym. It became a real challenge to come up with “quotes,” and the teacher really helped encourage it.

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“Today’s today. Tomorrow, we may be ourselves gone down the drain of Eternity.” & “There is one thing alone that stands the brunt of life throughout its course: A quiet conscience.”
(Euripides)

Glascow’s Law: “There’s something wrong if you’re always right.” (Arnold Glascow, in Forbes magazine 3/15/77)

The First Law of Wing-Walking: “Never leave hold of what you’ve got until you’ve got hold of something else.” (Donald Herzberg)
The last two are from The Book of Rules by Paul Dickson.

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Now I have to know, were you in Mrs. Repass’ class at Paul Laurence Dunbar High School in Lexington, Ky? If so, what year did you graduate?

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These are all from WikiQuote

Tom Lehrer:

“Base Eight is just like base ten really - if you’re missing two fingers.”

“It is a sobering thought, for example, that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years.”

“I don’t like people to get the idea that I have to do this for a living. I mean, it isn’t as though I had to do this, you know, I could be making, oh, 3000 dollars a year just teaching.”

“I feel that if a person can’t communicate, the very least he can do is to shut up.”

Richard Feynman:

“On the infrequent occasions when I have been called upon in a formal place to play the bongo drums the introducer never seems to find it necessary to mention that I also do theoretical physics.”

“If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn’t have been worth the Nobel Prize.”

“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”

“Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars — mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is ‘mere’. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?”

Karl Friedrich Gauss:
“You have no idea how much poetry there is in a table of logarithms.”

“There is no branch of mathematics, however abstract, which may not some day be applied to phenomena of the real world.” ~ Nikolai Lobachevsky

“A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.” --Paul Erdös

“It is impossible to be a mathematician without being a poet in soul.” – Sofia Kovalevskaya

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And another:

“Equations are the devil’s sentences.” -Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report Tuesday February 7, 2006

Yes, I wrote it down.

Hello, my name is TypoKnig, and I am a nerd!
<AA meeting>Hi, Typo!</AA meeting>

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I often like to browse Brainy Quote and find lots of good stuff

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*Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world. *
Archimedes
Hit Submit too soon

16

I always liked:

“War doesn’t determine who’s right, it only determines who’s left. . .”

Tripler
I had a bunch of 'em but now I can’t find them. :mad:

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I was going to post a bunch of quotes from this site, but it got rather extremely enormously long. So just a few for flavor …

“Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.”

  • Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
    “I’m living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart.”
  • e e cummings (1894-1962)
    “In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.”
  • Jan L.A. van de Snepscheut
    “Black holes are where God divided by zero.”
  • Steven Wright
    “I have an existential map; it has ‘you are here’ written all over it.”
  • Steven Wright
    “Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
  • Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
    “You got to be careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there.”
  • Yogi Berra
    “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”
  • Mark Twain (1835-1910)
    “Learning is what most adults will do for a living in the 21st century.”
  • Perelman
    “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”
  • Thomas Watson (1874-1956), Chairman of IBM, 1943
    “I think it would be a good idea.”
  • Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948), when asked what he thought of Western civilization
    “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.”
  • Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977
    “640K ought to be enough for anybody.”
  • Bill Gates (1955-), in 1981
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My favorites from Dorothy Parker, shamelessly acquired from quotationspage.com because I don’t memorize quotations:

“A little bad taste is like a nice dash of paprika.”

“Brevity is the soul of lingerie.”

“If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it too.”

And my absolute favorite:

“I might repeat to myself slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound–if I can remember any of the damn things.”

19

Am I the first one who thought immediately of Douglas Adams?

“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”

“You live and learn. At any rate, you live.”

“A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.”

“It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.”

“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”

“A learning experience is one of those things that says, ‘You know that thing you just did? Don’t do that.’”

I think some of those were his characters, but honestly - the man was a genius.

~Tasha

20

I’ve been reading Cat’s Cradle. From memory:

Maturity is simply a bitter disappointment for which there is no remedy.