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.

It is a greater advantage to be honestly educated than honorably born.

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

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

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.

Give us the child for eight years and it will be a Bolshevist forever.

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

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.

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

That which is evil is soon learned.