Quotes About Scholarship

Let us not kid ourselves; let us remember that literature is of no use whatever, except in the very special case of somebody's wishing to become, of all things, a Professor of Literature.

Classiques (les). On est censé les connaître.

It is not difficult to pass for being learned. The secret is not to betray your ignorance.

A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas.

Many would have disliked to live, if possessed of the peculiar features of Arthur Jermyn, but he had been a poet and a scholar and had not minded.

The ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has led either to sheer irrelevancy, the famous knowing of more and more about less and less, or to the development of a pseudo-scholarship which actually destroys its object.

Simple forgeries from the viewpoint of scholarship appeared to receive the sanction of history itself when the whole marching reality of the movements stood behind them and pretended to draw from them the necessary inspiration for action.

I would be remiss if I left the impression that my life has been totally preoccupied with scholarly research.

We may affirm, then, that the main drift of the later Renaissance was away from a humanism that favored a free expansion toward a humanism that was in the highest degree disciplinary and selective.

My whole life was geared toward being a highly educated person.

I ran track in high school very competitively, and then ran it D-1 at Boston University. I ran there on an athletic scholarship and chose BU because they had both a good track program and an arts program.

I got interested in decathlon because a coach that I had was a big fan of Bruce Jenner, and he just saw the ability in me - but when it came down to it, I knew my best chance at a college scholarship would be in track and field.

I got into Temple University on a track scholarship.

A book is quite a beautiful thing, even more so learning. Together, however, all they amount to is called book-learning.

I have seldom seen much ostentation and much learning met together.

The use of thesis-writing is to train the mind, or to prove that the mind has been trained; the former purpose is, I trust, promoted, the evidences of the latter are scanty and occasional.

Truth must be dug up from the past and presented to the circle of scholastics in scientific form and then through stories and dramatizations that will permeate our educational system.

Prior to that, the things I had read about in my Buddhist studies seemed to me to be nothing but mythological ruminations and philosophical conjectures, elaborated by scholars with too much time on their hands. Now, for the first time, I realized that they were not just concocting speculations. They were trying to describe something that human beings actually experience. After a couple of weeks, the experience faded into a pleasant memory, but it left me with a permanent intellectual shift.

Scholarship was one thing, drudgery another. I very soon concluded that nothing would induce me to read, let alone make notes on, hundreds and hundreds of very, very, very boring books.

It is already apparent that the 'minimalist' view of the Bible as wholly fictitious and unhooked from historical reality, may be as much of a mistake as the biblical literalism it sought to supersede.

Culture is an instrument wielded by professors to manufacture professors who when their turn comes, will manufacture professors.

There is no great concurrence between learning and wisdom

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

I've often thought that my scruples about stealing books were the only thing that stood in the way of my being a really great scholar.