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.

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

It is a greater advantage to be honestly educated than honorably born.

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

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

That which is evil is soon learned. 

All that we know is nothing can be known. 

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.

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

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

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. 

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

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.