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

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

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

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

All that we know is nothing can be known. 

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

That which is evil is soon learned.