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

The desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it.

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

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. 

Repetition is the mother of education.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.