top of page

"A long time ago, there was no such thing as school, and children spent their days learning a trade, a phrase which here means "standing around doing tedious tasks under the instruction of a bossy adult." In time, however, people realized that the children could be allowed to sit, and the first school was invented."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Education quotes

"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."

"This is what a real teacher does: she opens the gates of our minds to the possibilities of the soul."

"Since we cannot know all there is to be known about anything, we ought to know a little about everything."

"If I show up at your house ten years from now and find nothing in your living room but The Readers Digest, nothing on your bedroom night table but the newest Dan Brown novel, and nothing in your bathroom but Jokes for the John, I'll chase you down to the end of your driveway and back, screaming 'Where are your books? You graduated college ten years ago, so how come there are no damn books in your house? Why are you living on the intellectual equivalent of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese?"

"It's hard for me to believe that people who read very little (or not at all in some cases) should presume to write and expect people to like what they have written."

"Everything has changed. . . except the way we think. The aim [of education] must be the training of independently acting and thinking individuals, who, however, see in the service of community their highest life problems."

"We ought to esteem it of the greatest importance that the fictions which children first hear should be adapted in the most perfect manner to the promotion of virtue."
Explore more quotes by Lemony Snicket


"One of the greatest myths in the world - & the phrase 'greatest myths' is just a fancy way of saying 'big fat lies' -- is that troublesome things get less & less troublesome if you do them more & more. People say this myth when they are teaching children to ride bicycles, for instance, as though falling off a bicycle & skinning your knee is less troublesome the fourteenth time you do it than it is the first time. The truth is that troublesome things tend to remain troublesome no matter how many times you do them, & that you should avoid doing them unless they are absolutely urgent."


"In an emergency, one often learns that one's companions can be of even less help in extraordinary circumstances than they are during an average evening."


"I'm jealous of your hooks," Kevin replied. "Having no hands is better than having two equally strong hands."Don't be ridiculous," one of the white-faced women replied. "Having a white face is worse than both of your situations."But you have a white face because you put makeup on," Colette said, as Sunny climbed back out of the trunk and knelt down in the snow. "You're putting powder on your face right now."


"The map is not the territory," Snicket's chaperon advises him. "That's an expression which means the world does not match the picture in our heads."


"A new experience can be extremely pleasurable, or extremely irritating, or somewhere in between, and you never know until you try it out."


"It is a curious thing, the death of a loved one. We all know that our time in this world is limited, and that eventually all of us will end up underneath some sheet, never to wake up. And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know. It is like walking up the stairs to your bedroom in the dark, and thinking there is one more stair than there is. Your foot falls down, through the air, and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise as you try and readjust the way you thought of things."


"We'll see what you find out," Stew said. "You'll find out what it feels like to be thrown from a speeding train to the rocky bottom of a drained sea. Except you won't really find out, because you'll be dead. Get it? What I mean is, it'll kill you when I throw you from this train so you'll be in no state to find out what it feels like. Get it? Due to your death by falling from a train."


"We both wanted to know each other's secrets, and we both wanted the other person to go first."


"My silence knot is tied up in my hair; as if to keep my love out of my eyes. I cannot speak to one for whom i care. A hatpin serves as part of my disguise. In the play, my role is baticeer; a word which here means "person who trains bats." The audience may feel a prick of fear, as if sharp pins are hidden in thier hats. My co-star lives on what we call a brae. His solitude might not be just an act. A piece of mail fails to arrive one day. This poignant melodrama's based on fact.The curtain falls just as the knot unties; the silence is broken by the one who dies."


"There was a bag of coffee beans beneath a harpoon gun and a frozen hunk of spinach, but there was no way to grind the beans into tiny pieces to make coffee. Near a picnic basket and a large bag of mushrooms was a jug of orange juice, but it had been close to one of the bullet holes in the trunk, and so had frozen completely solid in the cold. And after Sunny moved aside three chunks of cold cheese, a large can of water chestnuts, and an eggplant as big as herself, she finally found a small jar of boysenberry jam, and a loaf of bread she could use to make toast, although it was so cold it felt more like a log than a breakfast ingredient."
bottom of page