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.

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.

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

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. 

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

Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.

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

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

Knowledge is an ancient error reflecting on its youth. 

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

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

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.

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