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

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

All that we know is nothing can be known. 

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

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

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.

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.

Repetition is the mother of education.

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

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.