“When you want to teach children to think, you begin by treating them seriously when they are little, giving them responsibilities, talking to them candidly, providing privacy and solitude for them, and making them readers and thinkers of significant thoughts from the beginning. That's if you want to teach them to think.”

“Wisdom is not wisdom when it is derived from books alone.”

“Why not whip the teacher when the pupil misbehaves?”

“I am persuaded that this method [for calculating the volume of a sphere] will be of no little service to mathematics. For I foresee that once it is understood and established, it will be used to discover other theorems which have not yet occurred to me, by other mathematicians, now living or yet unborn.”

“If you can't say anything nice, then don't say anything at all.”

“It is one thing to show a man that he is in an error, and another to put him in possession of the truth.”

“Only that education deserves emphatically to be termed cultivation of the mind which teaches young people how to begin to think.”