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

All that we know is nothing can be known. 

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.

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

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

Repetition is the mother of education.

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.

Rewards and punishment are the lowest form of education.

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

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

What harm is there in getting knowledge and learning, were it from a sot, a pot, a fool, a winter mitten, or an old slipper? 

That which is evil is soon learned. 

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.