Knowledge is an ancient error reflecting on its youth. 

The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you. 

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

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

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

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

Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.

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.

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

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.

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? 

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.

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.