Knowledge is an ancient error reflecting on its youth. 

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

Education has become a prisoner of contemporaneity. It is the past, not the dizzy present, that is the best door to the future.

A school without grades must have been concocted by someone who was drunk on nonalcoholic wine.

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

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

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? 

Rewards and punishment are the lowest form of education.

All that we know is nothing can be known. 

Repetition is the mother of education.

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.

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