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

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.

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.

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.

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

Repetition is the mother of education.

That which is evil is soon learned. 

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.

Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.

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

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

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.