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

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? 

Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.

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

All that we know is nothing can be known. 

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.

Knowledge is an ancient error reflecting on its youth. 

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

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.

Rewards and punishment are the lowest form of education.

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.

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

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.