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

Anyone who has passed through the regular gradations of a classical education, and is not made a fool by it, may consider himself as having had a very narrow escape.

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

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

All that we know is nothing can be known. 

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. 

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.

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

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

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.

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

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