Samuel Johnson - Rudyard Kipling - William Shakespeare - George F Kennan - Confucius - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - William Godwin - Ahmad Jamal - Thomas Babington Macaulay - Friedrich Nietzsche - Chaim Potok - Malcolm Bradbury - Daniel Defoe - Thomas de Quincey - Horace - James Lowell - W B Yeats -
There mark what ills the scholar’s life assail,
Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail. Samuel Johnson, The Vanity of Human Wishes
One learns more from a good scholar in a rage than from a score of lucid and laborious drudges. Rudyard Kipling, Something of Myself, 1937
He was a scholar, and a ripe and good one;
Exceeding wise, fair-spoken, and persuading:
Loft and sour to them that loved him not;
But, to those men that sought him, sweet as summer. William Shakespeare, Henry VIII IV ii 51
The very concept of history implies the scholar and the reader. Without a generation of civilized people to study history, to preserve its records, to absorb its lessons and relate them to its own problems, history, too, would lose its meaning. George F Kennan
A scholar who cherishes the love of comfort is not fit to be deemed a scholar. Confucius, attributions inc. Lao Tzu
The mind of the scholar, if he would leave it large and liberal, should come in contact with other minds. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The diligent scholar is he that loves himself, and desires to have reason to applaud and love himself. William Godwin
I would like to be a scholar in whatever I do; a scholar is never finished, he is always seeking and I am always seeking. Ahmad Jamal
He was a rake among scholars, and a scholar among rakes. Thomas Babington Macaulay
They’re so cold, these scholars!
May lightning strike their food
so that their mouths learn how
to eat fire! Friedrich Nietzsche
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. Chaim Potok, In the Beginning
Genitals are a great distraction to scholarship. Malcolm Bradbury
We must distinguish between a man of polite learning and a meer schollar: the first is a gentleman and what a gentleman should be; the last is a meer bookcase, a bundle of letters, a head stufft with the jargon of languages, a man that understands every body but is understood by no body. Daniel Defoe The Compleat English Gentleman
Not one who depends simply on an infinite memory, but also on an infinite and electrical power of combination; bringing together from the four winds, like the angel of the resurrection, what else were dust from dead men’s bones, into the unity of breathing life. Thomas de Quincey, Joan of Arc, 1947
So that, you know, I was eager to distinguish the straight from the crooked, and to hunt for truth in the groves of Academe. Horace
True scholarship consists in knowing not what things exist, but what they mean; it is not memory but judgement. James Russell Lowell, The First Need of American Culture
Bald heads forgetful of their sins,
Old, learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines
That young men, tossing on their beds,
Rhymed out in love’s despair
To flatter beauty’s ignorant ear.
They’ll cough in the ink to the world’s end;
Wear out the carpet with their shoes
Earning respect; have no strange friend;
If they have sinned nobody knows.
Lord, what would they say
Should their Catullus walk that way? W B Yeats, The Wild Swans at Coole, The Scholars