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.

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.

All that we know is nothing can be known. 

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

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

In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad. 

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

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

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 not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.

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.

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