A professor can never better distinguish himself in his work than by encouraging a clever pupil, for the true discoverers are among them, as comets amongst the stars.
Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) Swedish botanist, zoologist, taxonomist, physician [Carl von Linné, Carolus Linnæus]
Quoted in Theodor Magnus Fries, Linnaeus, ch. 10 “Pupils” (1903) [ed./tr. B. J. Jackson (1923)]
(Source)
Quotations about:
academic
Note not all quotations have been tagged, so Search may find additional quotes on this topic.
If poetry is like an orgasm, an academic can be likened to someone who studies the passion-stains on the bedsheets.
Irving Layton (1912-2006) Romanian-Canadian poet [b. Israel Pincu Lazarovitch]
“Obs II,” The Whole Bloody Bird (1969)
(Source)
The elevation of the mind ought to be the principal end of all our studies.
Edmund Burke (1729-1797) Anglo-Irish statesman, orator, philosopher
A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, 1.19 (1756)
I began my talk by saying that I had not written my plays for purposes of discussion. At once, I felt a ripple of panic run through the hall. I suddenly realised why. To everyone present, discussion was the whole point of drama. That was why the faculty had been endowed — that was why all those buildings had been put up! I had undermined the entire reason for their existence.
Tom Stoppard (b. 1937) Czech-English playwright and screenwriter
In Kenneth Tynan, “Tom Stoppard,” The New Yorker (19 Dec 1977)
An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) English novelist, essayist and critic
(Attributed)
The first found reference is after Huxley's death, and it's most likely based on a variant by someone else. More discussion here.
Writers the most learned, the most accurate in details, and the soundest in tendency, frequently fall into a habit which can neither be cured nor pardoned — the habit of making history into the proof of their theories.
John Dalberg, Lord Acton (1834-1902) British historian
“The History of Freedom in Antiquity,” Speech, Bridgenorth Institute (28 Feb 1877)
(Source)
A Scholar is a man with this inconvenience, that when you ask him his opinion on any matter, he must go home and look up his manuscripts to know.
