Education has become a prisoner of contemporaneity. It is the past, not the dizzy present, that is the best door to the future.

If the heavens were all parchment, and the trees of the forest all pens, and every human being were a scribe, it would still be impossible to record all that I have learned from my teachers.

The desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it.

What harm is there in getting knowledge and learning, were it from a sot, a pot, a fool, a winter mitten, or an old slipper? 

It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.

Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.

A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence university education.

A school without grades must have been concocted by someone who was drunk on nonalcoholic wine.

I wonder whether if I had an education I should have been more or less a fool than I am. 

Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.

Anyone who has passed through the regular gradations of a classical education, and is not made a fool by it, may consider himself as having had a very narrow escape.

Anyone who has a child should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he’ll escape.

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.