Scholars And Scholarship

(253 votes)   Scholarship except by accident is never the measure of a person's power.

Josiah Gilbert Holland
1819-1881, American Author

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(121 votes)   A mere scholar, a mere ass.

Robert Burton
1576-1640, British Clergyman, Scholar

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(117 votes)   The ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has led either to sheer irrelevancy, the famous knowing of more and more about less and less, or to the development of a pseudo-scholarship which actually destroys its object.

Hannah Arendt
1906-1975, German-born American Political Philosopher

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(109 votes)   A great scholar is seldom a great philosopher.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
1749-1832, German Poet, Dramatist, Novelist

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(108 votes)   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.

Georg C. Lichtenberg
1742-1799, German Physicist, Satirist

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

Samuel Johnson
1709-1784, British Author

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(79 votes)   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
1709-1784, British Author

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

James Russell Lowell
1819-1891, American Poet, Critic, Editor

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(66 votes)   He was a rake among scholars, and a scholar among rakes.

Thomas B. Macaulay
1800-1859, American Essayist and Historian

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

Henry David Thoreau
1817-1862, American Essayist, Poet, Naturalist

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(60 votes)   I cannot forgive a scholar his homeless despondency.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
1803-1882, American Poet, Essayist

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(60 votes)   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
1871-1909, Irish Poet, Dramatist

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(59 votes)   One cannot demand of a scholar that he show himself a scholar everywhere in society, but the whole tenor of his behavior must none the less betray the thinker, he must always be instructive, his way of judging a thing must even in the smallest matters be such that people can see what it will amount to when, quietly and self-collected, he puts this power to scholarly use.

Georg C. Lichtenberg
1742-1799, German Physicist, Satirist

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(52 votes)   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
c.1466-1536, Dutch Humanist

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(49 votes)   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
1908-1974, British Scientist, Author

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