Top 40 Bel Kaufman Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Education is not a product: mark, diploma, job, money-in that order; it is a process, a never-ending one.”

— Bel Kaufman

2. “Education can’t make us all leaders, but it can teach us which leader to follow.”

— Bel Kaufman

3. “Children are the true connoisseurs. What’s precious to them has no price, only value.”

— Bel Kaufman

4. “Laughter keeps you healthy. You can survive by seeing the humor in everything. Thumb your nose at sadness; turn the tables on tragedy. You can’t laugh and be angry, you can’t laugh and feel sad, you can’t laugh and feel envious.”

— Bel Kaufman

5. “Never mind the cream; it will always rise to the top. It’s the skim milk that needs good teachers.”

— Bel Kaufman

6. “And that’s it; that’s why I want to teach; that’s the one and only compensation: to make a permanent difference in the life of a child.”

— Bel Kaufman

7. “I’ll never retire as long as I live – that’s like retiring from life! I’ll never stop writing, teaching, lecturing. If you’re in good health, living is exciting on its own.”

— Bel Kaufman

8. “When giving comes directly from the heart, it can never disappoint or embarrass.”

— Bel Kaufman

9. “Learning is a process of mutual discovery for teacher and pupil. Keep an open mind to their unexpected responses.”

— Bel Kaufman

10. “To the young, cliches seem freshly minted.”

— Bel Kaufman

11. “Time collapses and expands like an erratic accordion...”

— Bel Kaufman

12. “The heart has its reasons; it’s the mind that’s suspect.”

— Bel Kaufman

13. “The preciousness of every moment is emphasized with every tick of the clock. Isn’t it a magnificent day today?”

— Bel Kaufman

14. “I so enjoy being old because for the first time I don’t have to do anything-work, teach, study. I feel very good about myself-and at my age I can say no to anything now if I don’t want to do it. What a liberating word.”

— Bel Kaufman

15. “But if there is such a thing as social commitment in literature, I think it must manifest itself in a reader’s awareness of the human condition, in the writer’s touching some common nerve ending. I think this kind of social commitment, like a lady’s slip, should be there but it must not show.”

— Bel Kaufman

16. “Love is the ultimate giving, an expression of one’s best self.”

— Bel Kaufman

17. “Appreciation is appreciated.”

— Bel Kaufman

18. “After the prescribed length of time and number of meals consumed and digested in unison, they felt they had sufficient community of interests to marry.”

— Bel Kaufman

19. “Mythology is studied in the school system because most of us come from it.”

— Bel Kaufman

20. “The Bible says, “A soft answer turneth away wrath.”

— Bel Kaufman

21. “I want to point the way to something that should forever lure them, when the TV set is broken and the movie is over and the school bell has rung for the last time.”

— Bel Kaufman

22. “There is a need for closeness, yet we can’t get too close. The teacher-pupil relationship is a kind of tightrope to be walked. I know how carefully I must choose a word, a gesture. I understand the delicate balance between friendliness and familiarity, dignity and aloofness.”

— Bel Kaufman

23. “Funny, how once you touched off a memory, it was like pulling out a stitch – all the others kept unraveling.”

— Bel Kaufman

24. “In August they had a bad fright. Her lawyer had suggested that – in view of the circumstances – they drop the divorce. This filled them both with profound dread; at the thought of staying married, of sinking back into the deadly boredom of their pre-divorce days, they felt nothing but horror. They realized more than ever that marriage for them was unthinkable.”

— Bel Kaufman

25. “A teacher is frequently the only adult in the pupil’s environment who treats him with respect.”

— Bel Kaufman

26. “Recently at a party I saw a man rise from his seat each time a woman entered the room. I smiled my encouragement: “You were well brought up,” I said. “No,” he replied, “I learned by myself.”

— Bel Kaufman

27. “I feel no different than I felt at 99, 98 or 97. Just because you live a long time, you get all this attention. Just because you survived? Of course, I survived a lot.”

— Bel Kaufman

28. “Without love, the art of love is mere acrobatics. Without love, the art of giving is mere etiquette.”

— Bel Kaufman

29. “The books we are required to teach frequently have nothing to do with anything except the fact that they have always been taught, or that there is an oversupply of them, or that some committee or other was asked to come up with some titles.”

— Bel Kaufman

30. “Mr. Philpotts, did you enjoy your life?” “Why, no, I wouldn’t say – ” “How then,” asked the chief, “do you expect to enjoy your afterlife? What do you know of happiness? What experience have you had in that line?”

— Bel Kaufman

31. “I like the word OLD. Not senior, that’s for proms. Older? Older than whom? ‘Old’ is honorable and ripe.”

— Bel Kaufman

32. “I am writing this during my lunch period, because I need to reach towards the outside world of sanity, because I am overwhelmed by the sheer weight of the clerical work still to be done, and because at this hour of the morning normal ladies are still sleeping.”

— Bel Kaufman

33. “And if this wasn’t the happiness she had once so fiercely demanded, at least she had come to terms with life. That was probably as close to happiness as you could get.”

— Bel Kaufman

34. “I don’t lose time playing verbal games, trying to remember what I forgot. “I don’t remember your name,” says one octogenarian to another. “Tell me what it is.” The second one pauses: “How soon do you have to know?” he asks.”

— Bel Kaufman

35. “People ate bread made of the shells of peas because there was no flour.”

— Bel Kaufman

36. “That I was a writer was further proof of God’s far-sightedness; she was convinced that by some magic of propinquity she would acquire a mastery of the English language.”

— Bel Kaufman

37. “If a teacher wants to know something why doesn’t she look it up herself instead of making we students do it? We benefit ourselves more by listening to her, after all she’s the teacher!”

— Bel Kaufman

38. “I had used my sense of humor; I had called it proportion, perspective. But perspective is distance.”

— Bel Kaufman

39. “Her disappointment was minor compared to her astonishment. “Again I didn’t win? But last year I didn’t win also!”

— Bel Kaufman

40. “Teachers try to make us feel lower than themselves, maybe because this is because they feel lower than outside people. One teacher told me to get out of the room and never come back, which I did.”

— Bel Kaufman

41. “Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the eighteenth-century letter writer and biographer wrote: “Civility costs nothing and buys everything.”

— Bel Kaufman

42. “This is just the first day; you’ll get used to it. The rewards will come later, from the kids themselves–and from the unlikeliest ones.”

— Bel Kaufman

43. “To quote a noted Jewish humorist, Sholom Aleichem: “First comes health. You can always hang yourself later.” As.”

— Bel Kaufman

44. “You’re not God. Nothing is your fault, except, perhaps, poor teaching.”

— Bel Kaufman