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. 

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

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

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

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

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

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

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.

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

That which is evil is soon learned. 

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.

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