Knowledge is an ancient error reflecting on its youth. 

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

Rewards and punishment are the lowest form of education.

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

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

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. 

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.

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

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.

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.

Education has become a prisoner of contemporaneity. It is the past, not the dizzy present, that is the best door to the future.