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

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? 

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

Give us the child for eight years and it will be a Bolshevist forever.

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

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