All that we know is nothing can be known. 

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

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

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.

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

In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards.

Knowledge is an ancient error reflecting on its youth. 

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

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

Rewards and punishment are the lowest form of education.

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

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.

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