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

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. 

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. 

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

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.

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? 

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

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

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

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

Repetition is the mother of education.