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

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

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.

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

Give us the child for eight years and it will be a Bolshevist forever.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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 whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

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