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

All that we know is nothing can be known. 

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.

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

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.

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

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

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 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.

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

Repetition is the mother of education.

Knowledge is an ancient error reflecting on its youth.