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

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

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

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. 

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

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 fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence university education.

Anyone who has a child should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he’ll escape.

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.

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.