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. 

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 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.

Rewards and punishment are the lowest form of education.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.