Quotes About Scholarship

Life without literary studies is death.

The goal of education is the advancement of knowledge and the dissemination of truth.

Whence is thy learning? Hath thy toilO'er books consumed the midnight oil?

History up to the Renaissance had been something that one composed. History after the Renaissance, informed by methods for work and investigation, was increasingly something that one did.

We also learn that this country and the Western world have no monopoly of goodness and truth and scholarship, we begin to appreciate the ingredients that are indispensable to making a better world. In a life of learning that is, perhaps, the greatest lesson of all.

I don't look to find an educated person in the ranks of university graduates, necessarily. Some of the most educated people I know have never been near a university.

Academics tend to have wonderfully infantile senses of humor.

It is far more seemly to have thy Studie full of Bookes, than thy Purse full of money.

The practice of education is the highest form of intellectual philanthropy.

There are few earthly things more beautiful than a university ... a place where those who hate ignorance may strive to know, where those who perceive truth may strive to make others see.

Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.

bright New York City students with a scientific bent; won a full scholarship to Cornell University; and ended up

A book for the general reader on an esoteric subject has to argue for its own interestingness by being interesting. And never argue for its own importance, which a work of scholarship may do. I consider the balancing act of "being accessible" a discipline rather than a limitation.

Aristotle may have been dull to read, but he was easy to memorize.

By 1400, the authority of Aristotle closed virtually every argument. Once a student learned his view on a subject, whether it was a fine point in logic or the number of planets or the functions of body organs, there was no point in going any further. Someone wanting to know how many udders a cow had would be pointed to the relevant passage in Aristotle instead of being sent out to a field to count for himself.

Greek science on Aristotle's terms, which had already fallen into decrepitude under the late Roman Empire, will take a long hiatus during the Middle Ages.

He dived deeper and deeper into his books; he had taken all obsolescence to be his province; in his disgust at the stupid usual questions, "Will it pay?" "What good is it?" and so forth, he would only read what was uncouth and useless.

Patriotism, when it wants to make itself felt in the domain of learning, is a dirty fellow who should be thrown out of doors.

An ordinary man can... surround himself with two thousand books... and thenceforward have at least one place in the world in which it is possible to be happy.

Much musing, little studying,—fair scholarship, an atmosphere of the classics, curious fancies, much perusing of pamphlets, light thoughts on heavy folios —these make the meditative poet, but not the technical and patient-headed scholar.

All my high school papers were written in the rare book room.

Apart from the intrinsic interest of the complex system of beliefs the Puritans carried with them, their lives give a clue to what it meant at the beginning to be American. And the level of scholarship dealing with them has reached a point where it can address the human condition itself.

I just have never got into reading.

I remember singing as a chorister in Peterborough Cathedral, having won a music scholarship to go to school there, and realising for the first time in my life what true excellence was.