Happy National Teacher Day, which falls on May 9 this year!

Teachers deserve thanks and praise every day of the year, but this is a special opportunity to recognize the incredible impact that a great teacher can have on your life, inside and outside the classroom.

Read on for some of the most moving quotes on teachers, the art of teaching, and the importance of education.

1. “The dream begins, most of the time, with a teacher who believes in you, who tugs and pushes and leads you on to the next plateau, sometimes poking you with a sharp stick called truth.” —Dan Rather

2. “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” —William Butler Yeats

3. “Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.” —John Dewey

4. “The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.” —William Ward

5. “I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. It might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.” —John Steinbeck

6. “I am not a teacher, but an awakener.” —Robert Frost

7. “I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think.” —Socrates

8. “Education breeds confidence. Confidence breeds hope. Hope breeds peace.” —Confucius

9. “Let us remember: one book, one pen, one child and one teacher can change the world.” —Malala Yousafzai

10. “I never teach my pupils. I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn.” —Albert Einstein

11. “The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.” —Pablo Picasso

12. “A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.” —Henry Brooks Adams

13. “Teachers teach because they care. Teaching young people is what they do best. It requires long hours, patience, and care.” —Horace Mann

14. “The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery.” —Mark Van Doren

15. “Better than a thousand days of diligent study is one day with a great teacher.” —Japanese proverb

16. “Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young.” —Henry Ford

17. “One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.” —Carl Jung

18. “In a completely rational society, the best of us would be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for something less.” —Lee Iacocca

19. “Teachers, I believe, are the most responsible and important members of society because their professional efforts affect the fate of the earth.” —Helen Caldicott

20. “When you study great teachers…you will learn much more from their caring and hard work than from their style.” —William Glasser

21. “You can’t stop a teacher when they want to do something. They just do it.” —J.D. Salinger

22. “The test of a good teacher is not how many questions he can ask his pupils that they will answer readily, but how many questions he inspires them to ask him which he finds it hard to answer.” —Alice Wellington Rollins

23. “It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.” —Albert Einstein

24. “What we learn with pleasure we never forget.” —Alfred Mercier

25. “Anyone who does anything to help a child in his life is a hero to me.” —Fred Rogers

26. “To teach is to learn twice over.” —Joseph Joubert

27. “The older I got, the smarter my teachers became.” —Ally Carter

28. “The average teacher explains complexity; the gifted teacher reveals simplicity.” —Robert Brault

29. “It shouldn’t matter how slowly some children learn as long as we are encouraging them not to stop.” —Robert John Meehan

30. “Whoever first coined the phrase ‘you’re the wind beneath my wings’ most assuredly was reflecting on the sublime influence of a very special teacher.” —Frank Trujillo

31. “The greatest good you can do for another is not just share your riches, but reveal to them their own.” —Benjamin Disraeli

32. “Your heart is slightly bigger than the average human heart, but that’s because you’re a teacher.” —Aaron Bacall

33. “Great teachers empathize with kids, respect them, and believe that each one has something special that can be built upon.” —Ann Lieberman

34. “What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.” —Pericles

35. “Teaching is the greatest act of optimism.” — Colleen Wilcox

36. “As teachers we spend little time focusing on what has been accomplished; we focus mainly on what remains to be done.” —Robert John Meehan

37. “Good teaching is more a giving of right questions than a giving of right answers.” —Josef Albers

38. “The essence of teaching is to make learning contagious, to have one idea spark another.” —Marva Collins

39. “Don’t struggle to be a better teacher than everybody else. Simply be a better teacher than you ever thought you could be.” —Robert John Meehan

40. “Those that know, do. Those that understand, teach.” —Aristotle

41. “The great teacher is not the man who supplies the most facts, but the one in whose presence we become different people.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

42. “To stimulate life, leaving it then free to develop, to unfold, herein lies the first task of the teacher.” —Maria Montessori

43. “Great teachers have high expectations for their students, but higher expectations for themselves.” —Todd Whitaker

44. “The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind.” —Kahlil Gibran

45. “There are two kinds of teachers: the kind that fill you with so much quail shot that you can’t move, and the kind that just gives you a little prod behind and you jump to the skies.” —Robert Frost

46. “No man can be a good teacher unless he has feelings of warm affection toward his pupils and a genuine desire to impart to them what he believes to be of value.” —Bertrand Russell

47. “A teacher is a compass that activates the magnets of curiosity, knowledge, and wisdom.” —Ever Garrison

48. “The road to freedom, here and everywhere, begins in the classroom.” —Hubert H. Humphrey

49. “Who dares to teach must never cease to learn.” —John Cotton Dana

50. “I am almost overwhelmed by the courage and dedication of teachers.” —Sylvia Solomon