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

A school without grades must have been concocted by someone who was drunk on nonalcoholic wine.

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

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? 

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

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.

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.

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.

All that we know is nothing can be known. 

Knowledge is an ancient error reflecting on its youth. 

Rewards and punishment are the lowest form of education.

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