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

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. 

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

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

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

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? 

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

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

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.

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

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.

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