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

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

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? 

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

The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

All that we know is nothing can be known. 

Knowledge is an ancient error reflecting on its youth.