Scholars Quotes

“An intellectual? Yes. And never deny it. An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I like this, because I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and the watched. "Can they be brought together?" This is a practical question. We must get down to it. "I despise intelligence" really means: "I cannot bear my doubts.”
― Albert Camus

“It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.”
― Albert Camus, Neither Victims Nor Executioners

“Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art. ”
― Susan Sontag

“Academia is the death of cinema. It is the very opposite of passion. Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates.”
― Werner Herzog

“The most intriguing people you will encounter in this life are the people who had insights about you, that you didn't know about yourself.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“They're so cold, these scholars!
May lightning strike their food
so that their mouths learn how
to eat fire!”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“The only ethical principle which has made science possible is that the truth shall be told all the time. If we do not penalize false statements made in error, we open up the way for false statements by intention. And a false statement of fact, made deliberately, is the most serious crime a scientist can commit.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

“An intellectual snob is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of The Lone Ranger. ”
― Dan Rather

“To make a deliberate falsification for personal gain is the last, worst depth to which either scholar or artist can descend in work or life.

(Letter to Muriel St. Clare Byrne, 8 September 1935)”
― Dorothy L Sayers, The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers 1899-1936: The Making of a Detective Novelist

“Heroes and scholars represent the opposite extremes... The scholar struggles for the benefit of all humanity, sometimes to reduce physical effort, sometimes to reduce pain, and sometimes to postpone death, or at least render it more bearable. In contrast, the patriot sacrifices a rather substantial part of humanity for the sake of his own prestige. His statue is always erected on a pedestal of ruins and corpses... In contrast, all humanity crowns a scholar, love forms the pedestal of his statues, and his triumphs defy the desecration of time and the judgment of history.”
― Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Advice for a Young Investigator

“Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is possible that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never had much temptation to be human beings.”
― George Orwell

“You scholars, you're in communication with the devil.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Black Tulip

“The Scholars
"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 Nazi and Soviet regimes turned people into numbers, some of which we can only estimate, some of which we can reconstruct with fair precision. It is for us as scholars to seek those numbers and to put them into perspective. It is for us as humanists to turn the numbers back into people. If we cannot do that, then Hitler and Stalin have shaped not only our world, but our humanity.”
― Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

“Could I get mansions covering ten thousand miles, I'd house all the poor scholars and make them beam with smiles”
― Fu Du

“Scholars don't have blood flowing in their veins," said Hamlet. "When they're wounded, they bleed logic, and when all of it is gone, their brains die, and they become ... soldiers.”
― Orson Scott Card, The Ghost Quartet

“Every country has a cultural legacy and religious practices for reasons that I don’t believe fall under the category of superstition, something that a religious scholar should understand.”
― Santosh Kalwar

“It is a wholly deplorable state of affairs when specialists in any discipline talk only to each other, and accordingly I have sought to write a book which will communicate some of the fruits of research in a manner which will make them accessible to all.”
― Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity

“No one who cannot rejoice in the discovery of his own mistakes deserves to be called a scholar.”
― Donald Foster

“Lastly, and doubtless always, but particularly at the end of the last century, certain scholars considered that since the appearances on our scale were finally the only important ones for us, there was no point in seeking what might exist in an inaccessible domain. I find it very difficult to understand this point of view since what is inaccessible today may become accessible tomorrow (as has happened by the invention of the microscope), and also because coherent assumptions on what is still invisible may increase our understanding of the visible.”
― Jean Baptiste Perrin

“To feel history through the things it left behind. But to do that is not to be with the living... It's dead. All of it. That's the real task of a scholar, to become a necromancer... so many of us forget the true purpose is to reanimate the thing. Even, sometimes, at the cost of animating ourselves.”
― Katy Hays, The Cloisters

“She was, after all, a woman scholar in a country whose word for madness derived from the word for a womb.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“Academia doesn't pay well, unfortunately.”
― C.J. Archer

“I take as a parable traffic with books. The scholar, who really does nothing but ‘trundle’ books − the philologist at a modest assessment about 200 a day − finally loses altogether the ability to think for himself. If he does not trundle he does not think. He replies to a stimulus (− a thought he has read) when he thinks − finally he does nothing but react. The scholar expends his entire strength in affirmation and denial, in criticizing what has already been thought − he himself no longer thinks…”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“It is not acceptable for a scholar to say, "You have shown me convincing evidence that my claim is wrong, but I still feel that my claim is right, so I'm sticking with it." When scholars cannot rebut or reconcile disconfirming evidence, they must drop their claims”
― Greg Lukianoff & Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure

“...invention is not a virtue that scholars hold in high regard because it is not a virtue that they tend to possess.

(The Brightest Heaven of Invention)”
― Alan Jacobs, Wayfaring: Essays Pleasant and Unpleasant

“«Ah, caro Pérez, l’erudito è per sua natura un ladruncolo: glielo dico io, io, io che lo sono. Noi eruditi passiamo il tempo a rubarci l’un l’altro le nostre piccole ideuzze e a impedire che un antagonista ci superi». «Si capisce: chi possiede un magazzino si preoccupa dei suoi articoli assai più di chi possiede una fabbrica; bisogna difendere l’acqua del pozzo, non quella della fonte».”
― Miguel de Unamuno, Niebla

“One lesson is that to be second is not to be secondary or inferior; likewise, to be first is not to be originary or authoritative. Yet, as we shall see, disparaging opinions on adaptation as a secondary mode—belated and therefore derivative—persist. One aim of this book is to challenge that denigration.”
― Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation

“Wisdom is not confined to ancient tomes, but a living essence that thrives in everyday moments.
It doesn't dwell solely in the minds of scholars, but also in the whispers of the nature and the laughter of children.
Like a hidden treasure, wisdom reveals itself not just in profound declarations but in the subtleties of a well-lived life, where lessons are learned from the simplest of stories and the quietest of reflections.”
― Monika Ajay Kaul

“Intercourse with a woman is not allowed unless she attains the age of nine years regardless whether the marriage is permanent or temporary. There is, however, no objection in other enjoyments like like touching lasciviously, hugging and rubbing the thighs, even with a suckling infant.”
― سید روح الله خمینی