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.

Rewards and punishment are the lowest form of education.

Knowledge is an ancient error reflecting on its youth. 

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

What harm is there in getting knowledge and learning, were it from a sot, a pot, a fool, a winter mitten, or an old slipper?