“A mere scholar, a mere ass.”
“A great scholar is seldom a great philosopher.”
“I cannot forgive a scholar his homeless despondency.”
“He was a rake among scholars, and a scholar among rakes.”
“Erudition. Dust shaken out of a book into an empty skull.”
“Scholarship except by accident is never the measure of a person's power.”
“There mark what ills the scholar's life assail, toil, envy, want, and patron.”
“A scholar is like a book written in a dead language. It is not every one that can read in it.”
“A reading machine, always wound up and going, he mastered whatever was not worth the knowing.”
“When nature exceeds culture, we have the rustic. When culture exceeds nature then we the pedant.”
“I'm a good scholar when it comes to reading but a blotting kind of writer when you give me a pen.”
“The learner always begins by finding fault, but the scholar sees the positive merit in everything.”
“The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly.”
“And let a scholar all earth's volumes carry, he will be but a walking dictionary: a mere articulate clock.”
“I am an old scholar, better-looking now than when I was young. That's what sitting on your ass does to your face.”
“Gloom and solemnity are entirely out of place in even the most rigorous study of an art originally intended to make glad the heart of man.”
“In the same way that we need statesmen to spare us the abjection of exercising power, we need scholars to spare us the abjection of learning.”
“The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances. He plies the slow, unhonored, and unpaid task of observation. He is the world's eye.”
“He has the common feeling of his profession. He enjoys a statement twice as much if it appears in fine print, and anything that turns up in a footnote... takes on the character of divine revelation.”
“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.”
“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.”
“The professors laugh at themselves, they laugh at life; they long ago abjured the bitch-goddess Success, and the best of them will fight for his scholastic ideals with a courage and persistence that would shame a soldier. The professor is not afraid of words like truth; in fact he is not afraid of words at all.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”