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

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

Knowledge is an ancient error reflecting on its youth. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence university education.