Karl G. Maeser Quotes

No one can speak well, unless he thoroughly understands his subject.

What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that's really the essence of programming. By the time you've sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you've learned something about it yourself... The teacher usually learns more than the pupils. Isn't that true?

Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.

To teach is to learn twice.

There is a learning quality in all of our shows.

Communication is about being effective, not always about being proper.

I'm always telling my students that if they can't explain what they are doing, to their grandmothers, then they probably don't understand it themselves.

I always prided myself on at least trying to be literate and use the right words, and if the audience didn't get it, then they could go home and look it up.

Write to be understood, speak to be heard, read to grow.

My basic rule is to speak slowly and simply so that my audience has an opportunity to follow and think about what I am saying.

You can't love what you don't know much about. You can't convince, stimulate, hold the attention, teach, if you don't know what you're talking about.

Education is the instruction of the intellect in the laws of Nature.

Woe to him who teaches men faster than they can learn.

My goal is to make the viewer a little bit smarter.

People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.

In a manner of speaking. I certainly never want to lose my voice as an educator.

The teacher that I was for decades, and that I still am in a certain way, wondered what was meant by the word education. I was truly dumbfounded at the very thought of dealing with such an essential and extensive subject.

Educators take something simple and make it complicated. Communicators take something complicated and make it simple.

I willingly speak to those who know, but for those who do not know I forget.

I wash my hands of those who imagine chattering to be knowledge, silence to be ignorance, and affection to be art.

I like teaching and the contact with young minds keeps one on one's toes.

If you make yourself understood, you're always speaking well.

Making noise is easy; making stuff people understand is an easy thing to do.

A genius knows how to make himself easily understood without being obvious about it.

I think school is a place where thinking should be taught.