Scholars And Scholarship Quotes

In the same way that we need statesmen to spare us the abjection of exercising power, we need scholars to spare us the abjection of learning.

I cannot forgive a scholar his homeless despondency.

A mere scholar, a mere ass.

Scholarship except by accident is never the measure of a person's power.

A reading machine, always wound up and going, he mastered whatever was not worth the knowing.

The professors laugh at themselves, they laugh at life; they long ago abjured the bitch-goddess Success, and the best of them will fight for his scholastic ideals with a courage and persistence that would shame a soldier. The professor is not afraid of words like truth; in fact he is not afraid of words at all.

By the worldly standards of public life, all scholars in their work are of course oddly virtuous. They do not make wild claims, they do not cheat, they do not try to persuade at any cost, they appeal neither to prejudice nor to authority, they are often frank about their ignorance, their disputes are fairly decorous, they do not confuse what is being argued with race, politics, sex or age, they listen patiently to the young and to the old who both know everything. These are the general virtues of scholarship, and they are peculiarly the virtues of science.

There mark what ills the scholar's life assail, toil, envy, want, and patron.

Erudition. Dust shaken out of a book into an empty skull.

One cannot demand of a scholar that he show himself a scholar everywhere in society, but the whole tenor of his behavior must none the less betray the thinker, he must always be instructive, his way of judging a thing must even in the smallest matters be such that people can see what it will amount to when, quietly and self-collected, he puts this power to scholarly use.