37 Scholarship Quotes

The total number of Dirichlet's publications is not large: jewels are not weighed on a grocery scale.

I have rarely read anything which has interested me more, though I have not read as yet more than a quarter of the book proper. From quotations which I had seen, I had a high notion of Aristotle's merits, but I had not the most remote notion what a wonderful man he was. Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods, though in very different ways, but they were mere schoolboys to old Aristotle.

If any pale student, glued to his desk, here seek an apology for a way of life whose natural fruits is that pallid and emasculate scholarship of which New England has had too many examples, it will be far better that this sketch had not been written. For the student there is, in its season, no better place than the saddle, and no better companion than the rifle or the oar.

The true test of any scholar's work is not what his contemporaries say, but what happens to his work in the next 25 or 50 years. And the thing that I will really be proud of is if some of the work I have done is still cited in the text books long after I am gone.

I consider as lovers of books not those who keep their books hidden in their store-chests and never handle them, but those who, by nightly as well as daily use thumb them, batter them, wear them out, who fill out all the margins with annotations of many kinds, and who prefer the marks of a fault they have erased to a neat copy full of faults.

People often become scholars for the same reason they become soldiers: simply because they are unfit for any other station. Their right hand has to earn them a livelihood; one might say they lie down like bears in winter and seek sustenance from their paws.

Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: Every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him.

Deign on the passing world to turn thine eyes, And pause a while from learning to be wise. There mark what ills the scholar's life assail - Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail.

Good scholars struggle to understand the world in an integral way (pedants bite off tiny bits and worry them to death). These visions of reality [:] demand our respect, for they are an intellectual's only birthright. They are often entirely wrong and always flawed in serious ways, but they must be understood honorably and not subjected to mayhem by the excision of patches.

There yet remains but one concluding tale, And then this chronicle of mine is ended- Fulfilled, the duty God ordained to me, A sinner. Not without purpose did the Lord Put me to witness much for many years And educate me in the love of books. One day some indefatigable monk Will find my conscientious, unsigned work; Like me, he will light up his ikon-lamp And, shaking from the scroll the age-old dust, He will transcribe these tales in all their truth.

I love to read the dedications of old books written in monarchies-for they invariably honor some (usually insignificant) knight or duke with fulsome words of sycophantic insincerity, praising him as the light of the universe (in hopes, no doubt, for a few ducats to support future work); this old practice makes me feel like such an honest and upright man, by comparison, when I put a positive spin, perhaps ever so slightly exaggerated, on a grant proposal.

Philologists, who chase A panting syllable through time and space, Start it at home, and hunt it in the dark To Gaul, to Greece, and into Noah's ark.

Of studie took he most cure and most hede. Noght o word spak he more than was nede, And that was seyd in forme and reverence, And short and quik, and ful of hy sentence. Souninge in moral vertu was his speche, And gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche.

Le savant digne de ce nom, le geometre surtout, eprouve en face de son ?uvre la meme impression que l'artiste; sa jouissance est aussi grande et de meme nature.

Le calme et le silence necessaires au savant ont je ne sais quoi de doux, d'enivrant comme l'amour. L'exercice de la pensee, la recherche des idees, les contemplations tranquilles de la science nous prodiguent d'ineffables delices, indescriptibles comme tout ce qui participe de l'intelligence, dont les phenomenes sont invisibles a nos sens exterieurs.

And when you have democracy and an open society and debate, automatically you will see the real [Islamic] scholars coming up.

Scholarship has yielded to the irresistible pull that science exerts on our minds by its self-confidence and the promise of certified knowledge. But, to repeat, the objects of culture are not analyzable, not graspable by the geometric mind. Great works of art are great by virtue of being syntheses of the world; they qualify as art by fusing form and contents into an indivisible whole; what they offer is not 'discourse about,' nor a cipher to be decoded, but a prolonged incitement to finesse. So it is paradoxical that our way of introducing young minds to such works should be the way of scholarship.

One man stands head and shoulders above his contemporary scholars: head and shoulders, some hold, above the Middle Ages: John Scotus Erigena.

He was a learned man, of immense reading, but is much blamed for his unfaithfull quotations.

Future historians will include the no-temple argument of the 1990s as a remarkable case study in their surveys of academic fraud and politicized scholarship.

Scholars of the highest class, when they hear about the Tao, take it and practice it earnestly. Scholars of the middle class, when they hear of it, take it half earnestly. Scholars of the lowest class, when they hear of it, laugh at it. Without the laughter, there would be no Tao.

Very few people, including authors willing to commit to paper, ever really read primary sources-certainly not in necessary depth and comtemplation, and often not at all. [:] When writers close themselves off to the documents of scholarship, and then rely only on seeing or asking, they become conduits and sieves rather than thinkers. When, on the other hand, you study the great works of predecessors engaged in the same struggle, you enter a dialogue with human history and the rich variety of our own intellectual traditions. You insert yourself, and your own organizing powers, into this history-and you become an acive agent, not merely a 'reporter.'

In return for this great gift that I could not repay in a thousand lifetimes, at least I can promise that, although I have frequently advanced wrong, or even stupid, arguments (in the light of later discoveries), at least I have never been lazy, and have never betrayed your trust by cutting corners or relying on superficial secondary sources. I have always based these essays upon original works in their original languages (with only two exceptions, when Fracastoro's elegant Latin verse and Beringer's foppish Latin pseudocomplexities eluded my imperfect knowledge of this previously universal scientific tongue).

Maxime tamen curavit notitiam historiae fabularis usque ad ineptias atque derisum; nam et grammaticos, quod genus hominum praecipue, ut diximus, appetebat, eius modi fere quaestionibus experiebatur: 'Quae mater Hecubae, quod Achilli nomen inter virgines fuisset, quid Sirenes cantare sint solitae.'

Wilson was not, in the academic sense, a scholar or historian. He was an enormous reader, one of those readers who are perpetually on the scent from book to book. He was the old-style man of letters, but galvanized and with the iron of purpose in him.

There may be millions of fine thoughts, and the account of the experience on which they are based, all encased within stone walls of acceptable architectural form; but if the scholar can get at only one a week by diligent search, his syntheses are not likely to keep up with the current scene.

Abraham ibn Ezra, that restless, versatile Spaniard who wrote on almost every subject which could interest the medieval mind

Herodotus says, 'Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects'.

'Have you pen and ink, Master Doctor?' 'A scholar is never without them, your Majesty,' answered Doctor Cornelius.

It is more of a job to interpret the interpretations than to interpret the things, and there are more books about books than about any other subject: we do nothing but write glosses about each other.

David Lindholm & Peter Svard, Sigmund Ringeck's Knightly Art of the Longsword, Paladin Press (2003), ISBN 1-58160-410-6