That which is evil is soon learned. 

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

I wonder whether if I had an education I should have been more or less a fool than I am. 

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

All that we know is nothing can be known.