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

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

Knowledge is an ancient error reflecting on its youth. 

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.

Rewards and punishment are the lowest form of education.

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

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 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.

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

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

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.

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