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

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

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.

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

Knowledge is an ancient error reflecting on its youth. 

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 Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you. 

All that we know is nothing can be known. 

Repetition is the mother of education.

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

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

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

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