60 Quotes About Education: Celebrating the International Day of Education

Liputan6.com, Jakarta - Every year on January 24, people around the world celebrate International Day of Education. The United Nations created this day to show how education can change lives and build peaceful societies. Many leaders and thinkers share powerful quotes about education on this special day. These words remind us why learning matters for everyone.

Education plays an important role in personal growth and social progress. It helps people gain skills, build confidence, and understand the world better. Education also supports better jobs, stronger communities, and informed decisions. Many quotes about education focus on its value and long-term impact. These quotes show how learning shapes character, opens opportunities, and supports understanding across cultures.

In this article, we will share some powerful quotes about education to celebrate the International Day of Education. We gathered these quotes from various sources, Friday (23/1/2026). These quotes will remind you why education matters for every one. Let's dive in.

1. "Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world." - Nelson Mandela

2. "To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society." - Theodore Roosevelt

3. "An investment in knowledge pays the best interest." - Benjamin Franklin

4. "The illiterate of the future will not be the person who cannot read. It will be the person who does not know how to learn." - Alvin Toffler

5. "Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." - William Butler Yeats

6. "The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next." - Abraham Lincoln

7. "The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future in life." - Plato

8. "The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn and change." - Carl Rogers

9. "Education is the movement from darkness to light." - Allan Bloom

10. "Education is learning what you didn't even know you didn't know." - Daniel J. Boorstin

11. "Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army." - Edward Everett

12. "Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another." - Gilbert K. Chesterton

13. "A liberally educated person meets new ideas with curiosity and fascination. An illiberally educated person meets new ideas with fear." - James Stockdale

14. "Education is the key to unlocking the world, a passport to freedom." - Oprah Winfrey

15. "Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today." - Malcolm X

16. "Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction." - Martin Luther King, Jr.

17. "Education is for improving the lives of others and for leaving your community and world better than you found it." - Marian Wright Edelman

18. "Education makes a people easy to lead but difficult to drive easy to govern, but impossible to enslave." - Henry Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux

19. "The foundation of every state is the education of its youth." - Diogenes

20. "Education is life itself." - John Dewey

1. "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.

2. "The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows." - Sydney J. Harris

3. "It must be remembered that the purpose of education is not to fill the minds of students with facts... it is to teach them to think." - Robert M. Hutchins

4. "The purpose of education is to replace an empty mind with an open one." - Malcolm Forbes

5. "The purpose of education is not to fill a vessel but to kindle a flame." - Alfred North Whitehead

6. "The purpose of education is to give to the body and to the soul all the beauty and all the perfection of which they are capable." - Plato

7. "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." - Maimonides

8. "The goal of education is the advancement of knowledge and the dissemination of truth." - John F. Kennedy

9. "The great aim of education is not knowledge but action." - Herbert Spencer

10. "The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done." - Jean Piaget

11. "The purpose of education...is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions." - James A. Baldwin

12. "The true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers." - Chris Hedges

13. "The purpose of education is to make the choices clear to people, not to make the choices for people." - Peter McWilliams

14. "Real education should educate us out of self into something far finer; into a selflessness which links us with all humanity." Nancy Astor

15. "Education is not to reform students or amuse them or to make them expert technicians. It is to unsettle their minds, widen their horizons, inflame their intellects, teach them to think straight, if possible." - Robert M. Hutchins

1. "Don't limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time." - Rabindranath Tagore

2. "The foundation of every state is the education of its youth." - Diogenes

3. "When educating the minds of our youth, we must not forget to educate their hearts." - Dalai Lama

4. "You educate a man; you educate a man. You educate a woman; you educate a generation." - Brigham Young

5. "Family education and order are some of the chief means of grace; if these are duly maintained, all the means of grace are likely to prosper and become effectual." - Jonathan Edwards

6. "Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right paths, but the final forming of a person's character lies in their own hands." - Anne Frank

7. "Free the child's potential, and you will transform him into the world." - Maria Montessori

8. "A child educated only at school is an uneducated child." - George Santayana

9. "Do not train children to learning by force and harshness, but direct them to it by what amuses their minds." - Plato

10. "Children must be taught how to think, not what to think." - Margaret Mead

1. "Learning is the beginning of wealth. Learning is the beginning of health. Learning is the beginning of spirituality. Searching and learning is where the miracle process all begins." - Jim Rohn

2. "The beautiful thing about learning is nobody can take it away from you." - B. B. King

3. "It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows." - Epictetus

4. "Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever." - Mahatma Gandhi

5. "He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying." - Friedrich Nietzsche

6. "You won't learn if you think you already know everything." - Robert Kiyosaki

7. "Learning is really about translating knowing what to do into doing what we know." - John G. Miller

8. "The capacity to learn is a gift; The ability to learn is a skill; The willingness to learn is a choice." - Brian Herbert

9. "Life can give everything to whoever tries to understand and is willing to receive new knowledge." - Pramoedya Ananta Toer

10. "Learn everything you can, anytime you can, from anyone you can - there will always come a time when you will be grateful you did." - Sarah Caldwell

11. "In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future." - Eric Hoffer

12. "Learning is a daily experience and a lifetime mission. I truly believe in the saying 'We work to become, not to acquire.'" - Bill Russell

13. "That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way." - Doris Lessing

14. "It is what we know already that often prevents us from learning." - Claude Bernard

15. "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