Archive

Quotes

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

—E.M. Forster, 1951

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

—Laurence Sterne, 1760

Repetition is the mother of education.

—Jean Paul, 1807

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

—W.H. Auden, 1947

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.

—Herodotus, c. 440 BC

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

—Mark Twain, 1897

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

—Allen Ginsberg, 1981

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

—George Bernard Shaw, 1903

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

—Camille Paglia, 1992

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

—Ezra Pound, 1934

Rewards and punishment are the lowest form of education.

—Zhuangzi, c. 286 BC

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

—Erasmus, 1518

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.

—Jochanan ben Zakkai, c. 75