Very often we developed a better grasp of the subjects than the over worked teachers.

Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works.

Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

... that when you're buying books, you're optimistically thinking you're buying the time to read them. (Paraphrase of Schopenhauer)

A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razorstrap. A thing book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat.

His head was an hour-glass; it could stow an idea, but it had to do it a grain at a time, not the whole idea at once.

One must travel, to learn. Every day, now, old Scriptural phrases that never possessed any significance for me before, take to themselves a meaning.

Don't let school interfere with your education.

I don't see any use in finding out things and clogging up my head with them when I mayn't ever have any occasion to use 'em.

If you don't read the newspapers, you are uniformed. If you do read them, you are misinformed.

He lay down upon a sumptuous divan, and proceeded to instruct himself with honest zeal.

The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.