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

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

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.

Rewards and punishment are the lowest form of education.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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