The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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