Quotes About Ivory tower

The commonest ivory tower is that of the average man, the state of passivity towards experience.

If nothing is so useless as an "ivory tower" academic theory that goes unused, nothing is so very practical as the theory that works. At

There should be no grand, centralized choice made in the ivory tower. The minor cost-efficient advantage of the whole staff being trained in one method is far outweighed by the problems created—and the real cost, in ROI terms—by using the wrong process for the job.

Many live in the ivory tower called reality; they never venture on the open sea of thought.

None of the palaces in Hell come close to Lucifer's in size or beauty. Lucifer lives at the top of a literal ivory tower, miles high. You can't even see the top from the ground. The joke is that he built it that high so he can lean out the window and pound on Heaven's floor with a broom handle when he wants them to turn down the choir.

This is what scientists call a pragmatic statement. That is, it is not truth as known to the theoretician or the pure scientist in the ivory tower; it is a generalization useful to the troubleshooter dealing with actual events in the laboratory. (In this case, of course, the laboratory is the human head.)

I will not defend myself; those who judge me by the conduct of my life — my writings and actions — will bear witness that I cannot 'return' to an ivory tower I have never inhabited.

The quest of the handsome prince was complete. He had found his fair maiden and the world had its fairytale. In her ivory tower, Cinderella was unhappy, locked away from her friends, her family and the outside world.

That evening, after she'd run me through an exhaustive list of U.S. foreign policy errors that she insisted needed correcting, I suggested she might want to get out of the ivory tower and work with me for a spell.

Never have things of the spirit counted for so little. Never has hatred for everything great been so manifest – disdain for Beauty, execration of literature. I have always tried to live in an ivory tower, but a tide of shit is beating at its walls, threatening to undermine it.

It used to be that readers were relegated because they considered themselves far above society, and so the metaphor of the ivory tower developed. Now there's still this idea that the reader doesn't take part in the social game and in politics, the res publica, but for other reasons: he doesn't do it because he's not making any money.

They were an invisible mob inside an ivory tower. The calls themselves irritated rather than informed her. "They'd do mental masturbation," said Charity. "Mental masturbation is actually an important concept. It's when you talk in circles for an hour and reach no decision.

Determining the value of individual texts has been an ideological scuffle in literary criticism for centuries: but the environmental cost of printing them hauls this dispute from the ivory tower into day-to-day decision-making. Is it right to write? The publishing industry is slowly beginning to commit to using sustainably harvested trees.

Theoretical knowledge is not the exclusive domain of ivory tower intellectuals, but is, in fact, a crucial necessity of man's proper survival. Every bit of your mental contents is derived from some theory, and your success and happiness hinge on whether it is true or false, good or evil.

You feel humiliated, my young man, because thinking you understood so much so well, you suddenly find that many very apparent things were unknown to you. Thinking you were one of the Lords of the Galaxy; you suddenly find that you stand near to destruction. Naturally, you will resent the ivory tower in which you lived; the seclusion in which you were educated; the theories on which you were reared.

The ivory tower of the artist may be the only stronghold left for human values, cultural treasures, man's cult of beauty.

I'm the princess in an ivory tower, except every brick is made of history, and I built this prison myself.

It's about communication, no matter how impossibly hard your art is to understand and how much of an ivory tower or high horse you get on, it's still basically communication or why are you doing it?