A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Repetition is the mother of education.

That which is evil is soon learned. 

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

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 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.