Scholarship Quotes

I will go wherever the truth leads me. It is secular scholarship, Rebbe; it is not the scholarship of tradition. In secular scholarship there are no boundaries and no permanently fixed views.Lurie, if the Torah cannot go out into your world of scholarship and return stronger, then we are all fools and charlatans. I have faith in the Torah. I am not afraid of truth.

Chaim Potok

He was a rake among scholars, and a scholar among rakes.

Thomas Babington Macaulay

I'm a good scholar when it comes to reading but a blotting kind of writer when you give me a pen.

J. M. Synge

A mere scholar, a mere ass.

Robert Burton

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

Samuel Johnson

I am not able to instruct you. I can only tell that I have chosen wrong. I have passed my time in study without experience; in the attainment of sciences which can, for the most part, be but remotely useful to mankind. I have purchased knowledge at the expense of all the common comforts of life: I have missed the endearing elegance of female friendship, and the happy commerce of domestic tenderness.

Samuel Johnson

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.

Catherine Drinker Bowen

Gloom and solemnity are entirely out of place in even the most rigorous study of an art originally intended to make glad the heart of man.

Ezra Pound

And let a scholar all earth's volumes carry, he will be but a walking dictionary: a mere articulate clock.

George Chapman

I cannot forgive a scholar his homeless despondency.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances. He plies the slow, unhonored, and unpaid task of observation. He is the world's eye.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

They're so cold, these scholars!May lightning strike their foodso that their mouths learn howto eat fire!

Friedrich Nietzsche

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.

Jacob Bronowski

The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly.

Henry David Thoreau

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

Ambrose Bierce

A great scholar is seldom a great philosopher.

Johann von Goethe

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

James Russell Lowell

He has the common feeling of his profession. He enjoys a statement twice as much if it appears in fine print, and anything that turns up in a footnote... takes on the character of divine revelation.

Margaret Halsey

When nature exceeds culture, we have the rustic. When culture exceeds nature then we the pedant.

Confucius

People who use their erudition to write for a learned minority... don't seem to me favored by fortune but rather to be pitied for their continuous self-torture. They add, change, remove, lay aside, take up, rephrase, show to their friends, keep for nine years and are never satisfied. And their futile reward, a word of praise from a handful of people, they win at such a cost -- so many late nights, such loss of sleep, sweetest of all things, and so much sweat and anguish... their health deteriorates, their looks are destroyed, they suffer partial or total blindness, poverty, ill-will, denial of pleasure, premature old age and early death.

Desiderius Erasmus