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

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

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.

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.

The Romans would never have found time to conquer the world if they had been obliged first to learn Latin. 

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

My own experience is that a certain kind of genius among students is best brought out in bed.

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

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

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.

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.