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

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.

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

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? 

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

Give us the child for eight years and it will be a Bolshevist forever.

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

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

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 whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

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

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.

I am an old scholar, better-looking now than when I was young. That’s what sitting on your ass does to your face.