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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Repetition is the mother of education.

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? 

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.

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.