All that we know is nothing can be known. 

Knowledge is an ancient error reflecting on its youth. 

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.

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.

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.

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

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

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

That which is evil is soon learned. 

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

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

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.