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

Repetition is the mother of education.

Rewards and punishment are the lowest form of education.

I am an old scholar, better-looking now than when I was young. That’s what sitting on your ass does to your face.

The ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has led either to sheer irrelevancy, the famous knowing of more and more about less and less, or to the development of a pseudo-scholarship which actually destroys its object.

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

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

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.

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.

Knowledge is an ancient error reflecting on its youth. 

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.

Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing—the rest is mere sheep herding.

In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad.