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

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 not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.

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

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.

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

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

Knowledge is an ancient error reflecting on its youth. 

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? 

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

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.

Repetition is the mother of education.