Laughter keeps you healthy. You can survive by seeing the humor in everything. Thumb your nose at sadness; turn the tables on tragedy.
BEL KAUFMANNever mind the cream; it will always rise to the top. It’s the skim milk that needs good teachers.
More Bel Kaufman Quotes
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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.
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Time collapses and expands like an erratic accordion.
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To the outside world, of course, this job is a cinch: 9 to 3, five days a week, two months’ summer vacation with pay, all legal holidays, prestige and respect.
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Education can’t make us all leaders, but it can teach us which leader to follow.
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Love is the ultimate giving, an expression of one’s best self.
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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.
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One of my students had written wistfully of a dream-school that would have “windows with trees in them.
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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.
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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.
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To the young, cliches seem freshly minted.
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Mythology is studied in the school system because most of us come from it.
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Children are the true connoisseurs. What’s precious to them has no price, only value.
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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!
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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.
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“Let it be a challenge to you” means you’re stuck with it; “interpersonal relationships” is a fight between kids; “ancillary civic agencies for supportive discipline” means call the cops.
BEL KAUFMAN