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

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

In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad. 

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.

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.

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.

That which is evil is soon learned. 

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

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

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

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