I never really paid a whole lot of attention to Mister Rogers until recently. When my circle of friends and colleagues talked about the show, they referred to it with such love and fond memories. Of course, I knew nothing about it and could not add any of my experiences. This was a North American show and, since Mister Rogers’ Neighbourhood was not aired in the Caribbean, I was clueless.
While doing some reading about the show, I realized that Fred McFeely Rogers (1928-2003) was very intuitive. Through his interactive television series, the persona, Mister Rogers, shared some very valuable thoughts over the years that we can all relate to in our lives, especially as educators.
In this article, I am going to highlight eleven quotes that I deemed to be most relatable for educators.
- “Some days, doing ‘the best we can’ may still fall short of what we would like to be able to do, but life isn’t perfect on any front-and doing what we can with what we have is the most we should expect of ourselves or anyone else.”
- “Mutual caring relationships require kindness and patience, tolerance, optimism, joy in the other’s achievements, confidence in oneself, and the ability to give without undue thought of gain.”
- “There are three ways to ultimate success: The first way is to be kind. The second way is to be kind. The third way is to be kind.”
- “Who you are inside is what helps you make and do everything in life.”
- “Anyone who does anything to help a child in his life is a hero. “
- “One of the greatest gifts you can give anybody is the gift of your honest self. I also believe that kids can spot a phony a mile away.”
- “As human beings, our job in life is to help people realize how rare and valuable each one of us really is, that each of us has something that no one else has- or ever will have- something inside that is unique to all time. It’s our job to encourage each other to discover that uniqueness and to provide ways of developing its expression.”
- “If you could only sense how important you are to the lives of those you meet; how important you can be to the people you may never even dream of. There is something of yourself that you leave at every meeting with another person.”
- “In times of stress, the best thing we can do for each other is to listen with our ears and our hearts and to be assured that our questions are just as important as our answers.”
- “Little by little we human beings are confronted with situations that give us more and more clues that we are not perfect. “
- “We all have different gifts, so we all have different ways of saying to the world who we are.”
Do you have any favourite Mr. Rogers quotes? Feel free to share them in the comments.
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