This collection of preschool quotes will remind you to show kindness to young children – and don’t forget their preschool teachers!

Preschool, daycare, early childhood education – whatever you may call it, this set of early learning experiences can shape a child’s whole life.

Ask any kindergarten teacher and they will tell you, it’s easy to tell in September which children in their class have been to preschool and which ones haven’t. 

How has preschool influenced your life or those around you?

Preschool prepares children for what will come later in life, but most importantly cares for them right then and there.

Meanwhile, preschool teachers are often undervalued for the role they play in children’s early development and the foundation they lay for our smallest friends and family members to become good, strong, happy people.

Below is our collection of inspirational, wise, and insightful preschool quotes and sayings, collected from a variety of sources over the years.

Also check out these first day of school quotes on the beauty of earning an education.

Preschool Quotes About How Learning Happens

1.) “Children are not things to be molded, but are people to be unfolded.” – Jess Lair

2.) “Kids don’t remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are.” – Jim Henson

3.) “Play gives children a chance to practice what they are learning.” – Fred Rogers

4.) “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” – William Butler Yeats

5.) “Play is the exultation of the possible.” – Martin Buber

If you’re enjoying these quotes, make sure to read our collection of education quotes about learning and success.

6.) “When children pretend, they’re using their imaginations to move beyond the bounds of reality. A stick can be a magic wand. A sock can be a puppet. A small child can be a superhero.” – Fred Rogers

7.) “The important thing is not so much that every child should be taught as that every child should be given the wish to learn.” – John Lubbock

8.) “By education I mean an all-round drawing out of the best in the child and man; body, mind and spirit.” – Mahatma Gandhi

9.) “The greatest gifts you can give your children are the roots of responsibility and the wings of independence.” – Denis Waitley

10.) “You cannot make people learn. You can only provide the right conditions for learning to happen.” – Vince Gowmon

11.) “Teaching is not about answering questions but about raising questions – opening doors for them in places that they could not imagine.” – Yawar Baig

12.) “Love is the supreme form of communication. In the hierarchy of needs, love stands as the supreme developing agent of the humanity of the person. As such, the teaching of love should be the central core of all early childhood curriculum with all other subjects growing naturally out of such teaching.” – Ashley Montagu
If you’re enjoying these quotes, make sure to read our collection of Childhood quotes to connect with your inner child.

Quotes About Preschool Children and Play

13.) “If children feel safe, they can take risks, ask questions, make mistakes, learn to trust, share their feelings, and grow.” – Alfie Kohn.

14.) “Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.” – Oscar Wilde

15.) “Play is our brain’s favorite way of learning.” – Diane Ackerman

16.) “Children need the freedom and time to play. Play is not a luxury. Play is a necessity.” – Kay Redfield Jamison

17.) “Do not keep children to their studies by compulsion but by play.” – Plato

18.) “The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct.” – Carl Jung

19.) “Children learn as they play. Most importantly, in play children learn how to learn.” – O. Fred Donaldson

20.) “The playing adult steps sideward into another reality; the playing child advances forward to new stages of mastery.” – Erik H. Erikson

21.) “Let the child be the scriptwriter, the director and the actor in his own play.” – Magda Gerber

22.) “Children have real understanding only of that which they invent themselves.” – Jean Piaget
If you’re enjoying these quotes, make sure to check out our collection of children quotes that will fill your heart with love and laughter.

23.) “Since the jobs that our preschoolers will do probably don’t exist yet, our priority is to teach them the skills to adapt and inquire and question and cooperate…life skills. So much more useful than rigid concepts such as the alphabet.” – Caroline Bellouse

Quotes About Preschool Teachers

24.) “Teaching is an instinctual art, mindful of potential, craving of realizations, a pausing, seamless process.” – A. Bartlett Giamatti

25.) “The teacher’s task is to initiate the learning process and then get out of the way.” – John Warren

26.) “A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.” – Henry B. Adams

27.) “In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day’s work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years.” – Jacques Barzun

28.) “When you get, give. When you learn, teach.” – Maya Angelou

29.) “Free the child’s potential, and you will transform him into the world.” – Maria Montessori

30.) “Teachers are people who start things they never see finished, and for which they never get thanks until it is too late.” – Max Forman

31.) “It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.” – Albert Einstein

32.) “Effective teaching may be the hardest job there is.” – William Glasser

33.) “Education … is a painful, continual, and difficult work to be done in kindness, by watching, by warning … by praise, but above all, by example.” – John Ruskin

34.) “Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.” – Jacques Barzun

35.) “Teaching is the only major occupation…for which we have not developed tools that make an average person capable of competence and performance. In teaching we rely on the naturals, the ones who somehow know how to teach.” – Peter Drucker

36.) “Teachers are expected to reach unattainable goals with inadequate tools. The miracle is that at times they accomplish this impossible task.” – Haim Ginott

37.) “Teaching is the greatest act of optimism.” – Colleen Wilcox

38.) “The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery.” – Mark Van Doren

39.) “The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards; curiosity itself can be vivid and wholesome only in proportion as the mind is contented and happy.” – Anatole France
If you’re enjoying these quotes, make sure to read our collection of curiosity quotes that will inspire you to learn more about the world around you.

40.) “The work of education is divided between the teacher and the environment.” – Maria Montessori

Quotes About Preschool Children

41.) “We worry about what a child will become tomorrow, yet we forget that he is someone today.” – Stacia Tauscher

42.) “A child must know that he is a miracle, that since the beginning of the world there hasn’t been, and until the end of the world there will not be, another child like him.” – Pablo Casals

43.) “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken adults.” – Frederick Douglass

44.) “To take children seriously is to value them for who they are right now rather than adults-in-the-making.” – Alfie Kohn

45.) “Every day, in a hundred small ways, our children ask, ‘Do you hear me? Do you see me? Do I matter?’ Their behavior often reflects our response.” – L.R. Knost

46.) “A person’s a person, no matter how small.” – Dr. Seuss

47.) “The best way to make children good is to make them happy.” – Oscar Wilde

48.) “Remember: everyone in the classroom has a story that leads to misbehavior or defiance. Nine times out of ten, the story behind the misbehavior won’t make you angry. It will break your heart.” – Annette Breaux

49.) “Children are a great comfort to us in our old age, and they help us reach it faster too.” – Unknown

50.) “Children seldom misquote. In fact, they usually repeat word for word what you shouldn’t have said.” – Unknown

51.) “Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see.” – John F. Kennedy

52.) “The soul is healed by being with children.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

53.) “A child can teach an adult three things: to be happy for no reason, to always be busy with something, and to know how to demand with all his might that which he desires.” – Paulo Coelho

54.) “Encouraging a child means that one or more of the following critical life messages are coming through, either by word or by action: I believe in you, I trust you, I know you can handle this, you are listened to, you are cared for, you are very important to me.” – Barbara Coloroso

Don’t go without reading these quotes for kids of all ages about success, life, and happiness.

More preschool quotes

55. “When we raise our children to Shine, the future becomes brighter!” – Brigette Foresman

56. “The journey through the preschool years helps children to move from dependence to interdependence to independence.” – Deepa Bhushan

57. “All children are born to grow, to develop, to live, to love, and to articulate their needs and feelings for their self-protection.” – Alice Miller

58. “Too close supervision stifles the mental growth of children.” – Abhijit Naskar

59. “Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.” – Margaret Mead

60. “No man should bring children into the world who is unwilling to persevere to the end in their nature and education.” – Plato

61. “Children are good learners. The first learn to act what they hear and see.” – Lailah Gifty Akita

62. “The function of a child is to live his/her own life, not the life that his/her anxious parents think he/she should live, nor a life according to the purpose of the educators who think they know best.” – A.S. Neill

63. “Teaching kids how to feed themselves and how to live in a community responsibly is the center of an education.” – Alice Waters

64. “Our children are only as brilliant as we allow them to be.” – Eric Micha’el Leventhal

Preschool quotes that remind us they’re important

65. “Preschool children are virtuosos of imagination.”  -Benjamin Spock

66.” A child’s sense of reality vs. fantasy can be a bit blurred at the preschool age.”  -Eva Amurri

67. “Play is the highest form of research.” – Albert Einstein

68. “They may forget what you said, but they will not forget how you made them feel.” – Carl Buechner

69. “Children are not a distraction from more important work. They are the most important work.” – C.S. Lewis

70. “If a child can’t learn the way we teach, maybe we should teach the way they learn.” –Ignacio Estrada

71. “If we want our children to move mountains, we first have to let them get out of their chairs.” -Nicolette Sowder

72. “…my object is to show that the chief function of the child–his business in the world during the first six or seven years of his life–is to find out all he can, about whatever comes under his notice, by means of his five senses…”  -Charlotte Mason

73. “Be patient with kids, they are just beginners.”  -Author Unknown 

74. “Play is really the work of childhood.”  -Fred Rogers

75. “Art for toddlers and preschoolers is rarely about beauty. it’s all about exploration and personal expression.” – Heather Shumaker

How can your child benefit from experiencing preschool?

Whether preschool was a part of your life or not, your child or other young children can help develop a solid foundation for long-term development by attending preschool on a part-time or full-time basis.

Many families choose to send their children to preschool at least part-time even if there is a family member who can stay home with them.

In preschool, children learn how to learn; they learn how to love themselves and others; they learn to cooperate and coexist peacefully.

Next time you meet a preschool teacher, be sure to thank them for their role in creating a better world by improving the lives of its youngest inhabitants.

What’s your biggest takeaway from these preschool quotes and sayings? Do you have any other favorite quotes to add? Let us know in the comment section below.

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