top of page
"I don't really consider myself to be a teacher, although I understand that others do. There's a certain restriction or reduction in that stereotype that doesn't ring true. Especially the underlying assumption that I know something that others don't, and my job is to give them what I know. That's simply not true."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Education quotes

"Trying to educate the dumb with a dumb teacher is nothing but washing the dirty clothes in a dirty water!"

"They spent the first three years of school getting you to pretend stuff and then the rest of it marking you down if you did the same thing."

"Ask yourself how many people you have met who grumbled at a thing as incurable, and how many who attacked it as curable? How many people we have heard abuse the British elementary schools, as they would abuse the British climate? How few have we met who realized that British education can be altered, but British weather cannot?...For a thousand that regret compulsory education, where is the hundred, or the ten, or the one, who would repeal compulsory education? At the beginning of our epoch men talked with equal ease about Reform and Repeal. Now everybody talks about reform; nobody talks about repeal."

"This is what a real teacher does: she opens the gates of our minds to the possibilities of the soul."
Explore more quotes by Darrell Calkins

"The trick is in genuinely appreciating the elements of apparent resistance while you are engaging them. Not to oppose or remove them as much as to creatively fold them into one's linear line of movement, exploiting them and making the necessary adjustments as you go."

"My take on personal evolution is largely about the spirit of connecting and disconnecting things, relating to what I call "the gap or time and space between things. It is also about becoming practical in all this, developing the power and precision to simply bring the grand ideas home, to compress the paradigm of perception/choice/action/result into a single gesture."

"In my work, I try to create situations in which we take ideas, information, experiences and qualities to a pragmatic arena. Then within those, to relearn or experiment with how we respond to internal and external variables. There's no point to understanding something but remaining incapable of applying it. I think real knowledge and understanding is experiential, and the easiest way to access those is through our physical being."

"Transformation, on the other hand, is creating beauty from horror or destruction (or, for beginners, an actually pleasant evening with the usual family problems)."

"One of the great images to come down to us through Zen Buddhism is the encounter between an enlightened master and an advanced apprentice during the course of a shared meal. The apprentice, becoming fed up with the stress and waiting and the master's apparent disregard for him, demands an explanation without complication of exactly how to become enlightened. The master asks, "Have you finished your rice? "Yes, says the apprentice. "Then go wash your bowl."

"Well-being, or wholeness, implies integrity and harmony between all existing elements, providing freedom for the whole."

"Whether or not we personally do impact some ultimate evolution beyond ourselves, we can definitely influence what happens today. To choose to waste a day, or a lifetime, is opposed to the essential spirit of life, expressed, sacrificed for, and upheld through every perceivable interaction in nature. It's also opposed to every human expression of spirit throughout history. We know to live up to our potential, to fulfill the trust of creation by moving forward, even if we don't believe it or feel like it or know why."

"In the quest for a functional and direct interaction between imagination and reality, and the evolution of them both, there is in place a natural resistance, which I have referred to as Creative Resistance, because it demands just that: creativity. Much of this calls for redefining, or refining, one's relationship with time, and all the qualities and skills that will only come from engaging time more creatively and effectively. As such, part of the bargain is about acquiescing to a rhythm that is subtler and has more definite purpose to it than one's subjective preferences."

"Truth, or mystery basically, seeks the expression of itself. That is, evolution exists to create more mystery, not to answer or end the existing mysteries. This is why with every "truth revealed, or every answer given, all that actually occurs is the creation of yet a more complex and mysterious question."

"Forgiveness is really about absolution: to set free. But if you look carefully at the dynamic, the one you're setting free is yourself."
bottom of page