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

My own experience is that a certain kind of genius among students is best brought out in bed.

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

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

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

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

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.

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.

The period of a [Persian] boy’s education is between the ages of five and twenty, and he is taught three things only: to ride, to use the bow, and to speak the truth.

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.

Rewards and punishment are the lowest form of education.

Repetition is the mother of education.

The Romans would never have found time to conquer the world if they had been obliged first to learn Latin.