Rewards and punishment are the lowest form of education.

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 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.

That which is evil is soon learned. 

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

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

Knowledge is an ancient error reflecting on its youth. 

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

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

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