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200+ Top Homeschool Quotes

Needing some motivation and inspiration for your homeschool? Check out this huge list of homeschool quotes.

I love a good quote. Even compiling this list was a huge inspiration! Not only do these quotes affirm my choice to homeschool, they remind me that success and failure are part of the process, and that providing my kids with the best education is worth all the time and effort.

Enjoy! (Don’t forget to grab your FREE printable at the end!)

200+ Top Homeschool Quotes

1.”Once upon a time, all children were homeschooled. They were not sent away from home each day to a place just for children but lived, learned, worked, and played in the real world, alongside adults and other children of all ages.” -Rachel Gathercole.

2. “Homeschooling allows you the freedom to step off the highway of learning and take a more scenic route along a dirt road.” -Tamara Chilver

3. “The most important work you will ever do will be within the walls of your own home.” -Harold B. Lee

4. “There is no education but self-education.” -Charlotte Mason

5. “Education is not the filling of a bucket but the lighting of a fire.” –W.B.Yeats

6. “Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.” –John Dewey

7. “When one teaches, two learn.” –Robert Heinlein

8. “Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.” –Albert Einstein

9. “Educating a child is a natural process. Homeschooling is nothing more than an extension of parenting.” –John Taylor Gatto

10. “There is no school equal to a decent home and no teacher equal to a virtuous parent.” -Gandhi

11. “Any child who can spend an hour or two a day, or more if he wants, with adults that he likes, who are interested in the world and like to talk about it, will on most days learn far more from their talk than he would learn in a week of school.” –John Holt

12. “Don’t let schooling interfere with your education.” –Mark Twain

13. “When the atmosphere encourages learning, the learning is inevitable.” –Elizabeth Foss

14. “Thank goodness I was never sent to school: it would have rubbed off some of the originality.” –Beatrix Potter

15. “I learned most, not from those who taught me but from those who talked with me.” -St. Augustine

16. “How could youth better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?” -Henry Thoreau

17. “The capacity to learn is a gift; the ability to learn is a skill; the willingness to learn is a choice.” -Brian Herbert

18. “Children learn from anything and everything they see. They learn wherever they are, not just in special learning places.” -John Holt

19. “I always wanted to be a hero–to sacrifice my life in a big way one time–and yet, God has required my sacrifice to be thousands of days, over many years, with one more kiss, one more story, one more meal.” -Sally Clarkson

20. “The home is the chief school of human virtues.” -William Channing 

21. “Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune.-Jim Rohn 

22. “When we are connected, when we feel heard, when we feel like we aren’t being force fed an education… that’s when real, passionate, fiery learning takes place. -Jessica Pilton 

23. “The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.” Sydney J. Harris

24. Don’t worry that children never listen to you; worry that they are always watching you. -Robert Fulghum 

25. “All men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education.” -Sir Walter Scott 

26. “One cannot help but wonder how many excellent minds have been inhibited, perhaps thwarted altogether by the one-size-fits-all system.” -Jackie Orsi

27. “I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays and have things arranged for them that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas.” -Agatha Christie 

28. “The home is the first and most effective place to learn the lessons of life: truth, honor, virtue, self control, the value of education, honest work, and the purpose and privilege of life. Nothing can take the place of home in rearing and teaching children, and no other success can compensate for failure in the home.” -David O.McKay 

29. “We can get too easily bogged down in the academic part of homeschooling, a relatively minor part of the whole, which is to raise competent, caring, literate, happy people.”  -Diane Flynn Keith 

30. “Homeschooling is about growing and learning, not about being perfect.” -Kathy Oaks

31. “Once I realized we didn’t need to recreate the traditional classroom, and that we could customize our kids’ education, I discovered a new type of freedom.” -Kent Larson

32. “A lifestyle of learning begins at home – with parents who create a context that is welcoming of children as they are and that offers them happy experiences, accessible tools, and parental involvement.” –Julie Bogart

33. “Meaningful learning happens when our children wrestle directly with great ideas – not as a result of our repackaging those great ideas, but when they interact with the ideas themselves.” –Sarah Mackenzie

34. “A school should not be a preparation for life. A school should be life.” -Elbert Hubbard 

35. “Homeschooling is not a race … You will not get behind, nor do you have to live with guilt that you feel the need to catch up.” -Tamara Chilver 

36. “Education is every day and everywhere, the only thing you have to pay is attention.”   -Tim Fargo

37. “Homeschoolers disprove the common idea that parents and siblings cannot be good friends.” –Rebbecca Devitt

38. “Education begins at home, and I applaud the parents who recognize that they – not someone else – must take responsibility to ensure their children are well educated.” -Ernest Istook

39. “Don’t worry about socialization. Wherever people congregate, there is going to be interaction, socialization.” Where is it written that it needs to be in schools?  -Mary Kay Clark

40. “There’s nothing that stamps out the true love of learning more quickly than standardised testing and benchmarking.”- Grace Koelma

41. “Give your child a single valuable idea, and you have done more for his education than if you had laid upon his mind the burden of bushels of information.” -Charlotte Mason 

42. “The idea is to educate, not follow anyone’s schedule about when something should be studied.” -Ray Drouillard

43. “The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil. It is not for you to choose what he shall know, what he shall do. It is chosen and foreordained and he only holds the key to his own secret.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson 

44. “Unschooling is creating an environment in which children can learn easily and naturally all of the time.” – Sandra Dodd

45. “I never teach my pupils, I only provide the conditions in which they can learn.” – Albert Einstein 

46. “The first real lesson I learned as a homeschool teacher is that … it’s the students that lead the way.” -Patti Armstrong. 

47. “Self-education is the only possible education; the rest is mere veneer laid on the surface of a child’s nature.” -Charlotte Mason. 

48. “Recipe for genius: More of family and less of school, more of parents and less of peers, more creative freedom and less formal lessons.” -Raymond S. Moore. 

49. “All the world is my school.” -George Whitman 

50. “Homeschooling is a challenge, a commitment, and a lifestyle of love and devotion.” -Janet Tatman

51. “When you consider homeschooling, you must recognize that the fruit you hope to realize will likely take longer and be harder to grow than your anticipate. In many cases you must merely live in faith for the future results.” -Debra Bell

52. “Parents and families are the first and most important teachers.” -Richard W. Riley. 

53. “It’s not my credentials that qualify me to teach my child. It’s my God who made me qualified when I became a mom.” -Tamara L.Chilver

54. “The question is not,––how much does the youth know? when he has finished his education––but how much does he care? and about how many orders of things does he care? In fact, how large is the room in which he finds his feet set? and, therefore, how full is the life he has before him?” -Charlotte Mason 

55. “Our rapidly moving, information-based society badly needs people who know how to find facts rather than memorize them, and who know how to cope with change in creative ways. You don’t learn those things in school.” -Wendy Priesnitz 

56. “There is no neutral education. Education is either for domestication or for freedom.” -Joao Coutinho 

57. “Do not train children in learning by force and harshness, but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.” -Plato 

58. “Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.” -Oscar Wilde 

59. We discovered that education is not something which the teacher does, but that it is a natural process which develops spontaneously in the human being.” -Maria Montessori 

60. “Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.” -C.S.Lewis

Homeschool Quotes about Learning

61. “The souls of children are waiting for the call of knowledge to awaken them to delightful living.” -Charlotte mason

62. “Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.” -Benjamin Franklin

63. “What a child digs for becomes his own possession.” – Charlotte Mason

64. “Being a student is easy. Learning requires actual work.” – William Crawford

65. “You’ll never know everything about anything, especially something you love.” -Julia Child

66. “Commit yourself to lifelong learning. The most valuable asset you’ll ever have is your mind and what you put into it.” -Albert Einstein

67. “Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.” -Henry Ford

68. “Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life.” -Charlotte Mason

69. “Develop a passion for learning. If you do, you will never cease to grow.” -Anthony J. D’Angelo

70. “You don’t understand anything until you learn it more than one way.” -Marvin Minsky

71. “Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.” -E. M. Forster

72. “A moment’s insight is sometimes worth a life’s experience.” -Oliver Wendell Holmes

73. “Learning is not attained by chance. It must be sought for with ardour and attended with diligence.” –Abigail Adams

74. “You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over.” -Richard Branson

75. “Change is the end result of all true learning.” -Leo Buscaglia

76. “…the more we do for a child the less he will do for himself. If we give him watered-down material, many explanations, much questioning, if we over-moralize, depend on the work book to work the mind, what thinking is left for the child to do?” –Karen Andreola

77. “A ‘genius’ is often merely a talented person who has done all of his or her homework.” -Thomas Edison

78. “It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.” –Harry S Truman

79. “He who learns but does not think, is lost! He who thinks but does not learn is in great danger.” –Confucius

Homeschool Quotes about Nature Study

80. “Never be indoors when you can rightfully be without.” – Charlotte Mason

81. “The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful.” – Henri Poincare

82. “Deism is the belief that nature and God are one and the same thing. If you study nature, you’re getting insights about God.” – Bruce Lipton

83. “I go to nature every day for inspiration in the day’s work.”-Frank Lloyd Wright

84. “Earth laughs in flowers.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

 85. “Encourage your child to have muddy, grassy or sandy feet by the end of each day, that’s the childhood they deserve.” – Penny Whitehouse

86.  “Let the children be free; encourage them;
let them run outside when it is raining;
let them remove their shoes when they find a puddle of water;
and when the grass of the meadows is wet with dew…”
– Maria Montessori

87. “Let Nature be your teacher.” – William Wordsworth

88. “There is something of the marvelous in all things of nature.”  -Aristotle

89. I begin to see an object when I cease to understand it.”  -Henry David Thoreau

90. “We are meant to be naturalists, each one in his own degree, and is inexcusable to live in a world so full of marvels of plant and animal life and to care for none of these things.” -Charlotte Mason 

91. “Nature gives to every time and season some beauties of its own.” – Charles Dickens

92. “Now I see the secret of making the best persons, it is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.” -Walt Whitman

93. “There’s nothing wrong with having a tree as a friend.” -Bob Ross

94. “Of all the paths you take in life, make sure a few of them are dirt.” -John Muir

95. “We could have never loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it.” -George Eliot

96. “We must teach our children to smell the earth, to taste the rain, to touch the wind, to see things grow, to hear the sun rise and night fall – to care.” -John Cleal.

97. “Teaching children about the natural world should be seen as one of the most important events in their lives.” – Thomas Berry

98. “The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside” –Anne Frank

99. “In the woods we return to reason and faith.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson

Homeschool Quotes about Reading

100. “The idea that fast reading is good reading is a twentieth-century weed, springing out of the stony farmland cultivated by the computer manufacturers.” -Susan Wise Bauer

101. “Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.” – Margaret Fuller

102. “Reading is an exercise in empathy; an exercise in walking in someone else’s shoes for a while.” – Malorie Blackman

103. “I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.” – Robert Louis Stevenson

104. “Once you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you.” – Louis L’Amour

105. “If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

106. “Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.” – Henry David Thoreau

107. “I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.” – C.S. Lewis

108. “Students who read the most, also read the best, achieve the most, and stay in school the longest. Conversely, those who don’t read much cannot get better at it.” -Jim Trelease

109. “Children should have the joy of living in far lands, in other persons, at other times — a delightful double existence; and this joy they will find, for the most part, in their storybooks.” – Charlotte Mason

110. “There are many little ways to enlarge your world.  Love of books is the best of all.” -Jacqueline Kennedy

111. “It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.” –Oscar Wilde

112. “I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson

113. “If a book is well written, I always find it too short.” -Jane Austen

114. “Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers.” -Harry Truman

115. “The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.” -Rene Descartes

116. “Children are made readers on the laps of their parents.”  -Emilie Buchwald

117. “All I have learned, I learned from books.” -Abraham Lincoln

118. “Fill your house with stacks of books, in all the crannies and all the nooks.”  -Dr. Seuss

119. “If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” -Albert Einstein

Homeschool Quotes about Math

120. “Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.” -Albert Einstein

121. “What is mathematics? It is only a systematic effort of solving puzzles posed by nature.” -Shakuntala Devi

122. “Mathematics is the music of reason.” -James Joseph Sylvester

123. “God used beautiful mathematics in creating the world.” -Paul Dirac

124. “If a man’s wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics.” -Francis Bacon

125. “It’s fine to work on any problem, so long as it generates interesting mathematics along the way – even if you don’t solve it at the end of the day. -Andrew Wiles

126. “It is the duty of all teachers, and of teachers of mathematics, in particular, to expose their students to problems much more than to facts.” -Paul Halmos

127. “Mathematics is on the artistic side a creation of new rhythms, orders, designs, harmonies, and on the knowledge side, is a systematic study of various rhythms, orders.” -William L. Schaaf

128. “All mathematicians share a sense of amazement over the infinite depth and mysterious beauty and usefulness of mathematics.” -Martin Gardner

129. “The only way to learn mathematics is to do mathematics.” -Paul Halmos

130. “Wherever there is number, there is beauty.” –Proclus

131. “Nature is written in mathematical language.” -Galileo Galilei

132. “It is clear that the chief end of mathematical study must be to make the students think.” -John Wesley Young

133. “The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings.” -Eric Hoffer

134. “Just because we can’t find a solution it doesn’t mean that there isn’t one.” -Andrew Wiles

135. “Not everything that counts can be counted. Not everything that can be counted counts.” -Albert Einstein

136. “What sciences can there be more noble, more excellent, more useful for people, more admirably high and demonstrative, than mathematics?” –Benjamin Franklin

137. “Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton asked why.” -Bernard Baruch

138. “One of the endlessly alluring aspects of mathematics is that its thorniest paradoxes have a way of blooming into beautiful theories.” -Philip J Davis

139. “Mathematics is a language.” -Josiah Willard Gibbs

Homeschool Quotes about Character

140. “The formation of habits is education and the education is the formation of habits.” -Charlotte Mason 

141. “The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.” –Martin Luther King Jr. 

142. “Education commences at the mother’s knee, and every word spoken within hearsay of little children tends toward the formation of character.” -Hosea Ballou

143. “The prosperity of a country depends, not on the abundance of its revenues, nor on the strength of its fortifications, nor on the beauty of its public buildings; but it consists in the number of its cultivated citizens, in its men of education, enlightenment and character.” –Martin Luther

144. “A child gets moral notions from the fairy tales he delights in, as do his elders from tale and verse.” -Charlotte Mason 

145. “Any system of education…which limits instruction to the arts and sciences and rejects the aids of religion in forming the characters of citizens, is essentially defective.” –Noah Webster

146. It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” -Aristotle

147. “How we behave toward and around our children has much more influence on their character than if we only tell them about how they should or should not behave.”-Russell Kolts 

148. “The best index to a person’s character is how he treats people who can’t do him any good, and how he treats people who can’t fight back.” -Abigail Van Buren

149. “Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.” –Helen Keller 

150. “Knowledge has outstripped character development, and the young today are given an education rather than an upbringing.” -Ilya Ehrenburg

151. “What a man’s mind can create, man’s character should control.” –Thomas Edison 

152. “Character is simply habit long continued.” –Plutarch 

153. “We do not list “humility” among our school subjects or put it on a transcript, but that is actually the little secret of classical education. The things that make it truly classical, truly worthwhile to pursue, aren’t school subjects at all, but principles that add depth and cohesion to everything we study in all areas of the curriculum.” -Karen Glass

154. “Good character is not formed in a week or a month. It is created little by little, day by day. Protracted and patient effort is needed to develop good character.”  -Heraclitus

155. “The mother who takes pains to endow her children with good habits secures for herself smooth and easy days.” -Charlotte Mason 

156. “Unless knowledge is transformed into wisdom, and wisdom is expressed in character; education is a wasteful process.” -Sai Baba

157. “The knowledge of God is the principal knowledge.” -Charlotte Mason 

158. “Character, in the long run, is the decisive factor in the life of an individual and of nations alike.” -Theodore Roosevelt

Homeschool Quotes about Imagination and Play

159. “Imagination does not stir at the suggestion of the feeble, much-diluted stuff that is too often put into children’s hands.” -Charlotte Mason

160. “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” -Albert Einstein

161. “We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.” -George Bernard Shaw 

162. Children learn as they play. Most importantly, in play children learn how to learn. -O. Fred Donaldson 

163. Play is the only way the highest intelligence of humankind can unfold. -Joseph Chilton Pearce

164. “Everything you can imagine is real.” –Pablo Picasso

165. “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” -Albert Einstein

166. “The world is full of magic things patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” -William Butler Yeats 

167. “Wonder is the beginning of wisdom.” –Socrates

168. “Always be on the lookout for the presence of wonder.” – E.B. White 

169. “My best teachers were not the ones who knew all the answers, but those who were deeply excited by the questions they could not answer.” -Brian Greene 

170. Play gives children a chance to practice what they are learning. -Fred Rogers

 171. “All people need a place where their roots can grow deep and they always feel like they belong and have a loving refuge. And all people need a place that gives wings to their dreams, nurturing possibilities of who they might become.” –Sally Clarkson

172. “A single dream is more powerful than a thousand realities.” –J. R. R. Tolkien

173. Children have always learned and created places for themselves through play. -Donna R. Barnes 

174. If we want our kids to have happy, productive, moral lives, we must allow more time for play, not less. -Peter Gray

175. “Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined we would have to defend children’s right to play. -Nancy Carlsson-Paige

176. “Risky play is really important for kids—all kids—because it teaches hazard assessment, it teaches delayed gratification, it teaches resilience, it teaches confidence. When kids get outside and practice bravery, they learn valuable life lessons.” -Caroline Paul

 177. “Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.” –George Bernard Shaw

I78. “It is a happy talent to know how to play.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson

Homeschool Quotes for Motivation

179. “The way to develop self-confidence is to do the thing you fear and get a record of successful experiences behind you.” –William Jennings Bryan 

180. “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson

181. “If you hear a voice within you say ‘you cannot paint,’ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.” –Vincent van Gogh

 182. “It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.” -Sir Edmund Hillary 

183. “We talk of lost ideals, but perhaps they are not lost, only changed; when our ideal for ourselves and for our children becomes limited to prosperity and comfort, we get these, very likely, for ourselves and for them, but we get no more.” -Charlotte Mason 

184. “Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.” –Dale Carnegie 

185. “You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.” -William Faulkner 

186. “The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack in will.” -Vince Lombardi 

187. “It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses, we must plant more roses.” –George Eliot 

188. “You can have anything you want if you want it badly enough. You can be anything you want to be, do anything you set out to accomplish if you hold to that desire with singleness of purpose.”  -Abraham Lincoln

189. Never underestimate the determination of a kid who is time-rich and cash-poor.” – Cory Doctorow 

190. “If we all did the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.” – Thomas Alva Edison 

191. “Never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense.” –Winston Churchill 

192. “Don’t let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.”  -John Wooden 

193. “A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.”  -Albert Einstein 

194. “You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.” -Zig Ziglar

195. “Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated.”  –Robert Collier 

196. “The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.” –Eleanor Roosevelt 

197. “A man’s mind, stretched by new ideas, may never return to its original dimensions.” -Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

198. “Of the joyous motives of our school life, the love of knowledge is the only abiding one; the only one which determines the scale, so to speak, upon which the person will hereafter live.” -Charlotte Mason

199. “From the moment we take our first breaths, our days are numbered, so how we live matters. The decisions we make—the important ones and, yes, the mundane ones too—they all matter. Everyday decisions add up to form the life we live and the legacy we leave behind.” -Sally Clarkson

200. “What matters: being open to the varying abilities of our kids and standing with them as they grow. All we have are love and trying.” -Julie Bogart

201.“The secret to successful homeschooling is faithfulness – consistency if you rather.”  –Pam Barnhill

202. “It only takes a second to do better.” -Sandra Dodd

Free Printable Charlotte Mason Quote

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