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

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

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

That which is evil is soon learned. 

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

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.

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

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.

Repetition is the mother of education.

All that we know is nothing can be known. 

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

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

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.