Academics are only useful when they try to be useless (say, as in mathematics and philosophy) and dangerous when they try to be useful.

In practice people who study philosophy too long become very odd birds, not to say thoroughly vicious; while even those who are the best of them are reduced by...[philosophy] to complete uselessness as members of society.

If Universities do not study useless subjects, who will?

An education that is devoid of ethics is empty and meaningless and will produce smart but reckless human beings.

No one can become really educated without having pursued some study in which he took no interest—for it is a part of education to interest ourselves in subjects for which we have no aptitude.

College students can become extremely skilled at a few specialties, but many never learn what to do with those skills in the wider world.

"Scholars who are worth anything at all never know what is call "a hard grind" or what "bitter study" means."

In one’s life, there are levels in the pursuit of study. In the lowest level, a person studies but nothing comes of it, and he feels that both he and others are unskillful. At this point he is worthless. In the middle level he is still useless but is aware of his own insufficiencies and can also see the insufficiencies of others. In a higher level he has pride concerning his own ability, rejoices in praise from others, and laments the lack of ability in his fellows. This man has worth. In the highest level a man has the look of knowing nothing.

Only two kinds of people can attain to self-knowledge: those who are not encumbered at all with learning, that is to say, whose minds are not over-crowded with thoughts borrowed from others; and those who, after studying all the scriptures and sciences, have come to realize that they know nothing. (162)

He that will teach himself in school, becomes a scholar to a fool.

He could teach his students nothing. He was only educating himself at their cost.

I begin to think that I have a genius for working like an ox over totally irrelevant subjects. … I am filled with an excruciating sense of never having gotten anywhere — but when I sit down and try to discover where it is I want to get, I’m at a loss. … The thought of growing into a professor gives me the creeps. A lifetime to be spent trying to kid myself and my pupils into believing that the thing that we are looking for is in books! I don’t know where it is — but I feel just now pretty sure that it isn’t in books.

This is the case with many learned persons; they have read themselves stupid.

Some people will never learn anything, for this reason, because they understand everything too soon.