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? 

Knowledge is an ancient error reflecting on its youth. 

Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.

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. 

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

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

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

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

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

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.

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

All that we know is nothing can be known.