The exquisite art of idleness, one of the most important things that any University can teach.
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish Poet, Playwright
Universities are of course hostile to geniuses, which, seeing and using ways of their own, discredit the routine: as churches and monasteries persecute youthful saints.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher
The medieval university looked backwards; it professed to be a storehouse of old knowledge. The modern university looks forward, and is a factory of new knowledge.
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95) English Biologist
It might be said now that I have the best of both worlds: a Harvard education and a Yale degree.
—John F. Kennedy (1917–63) American Head of State, Journalist
This place is the Devil, or at least his principal residence, they call it the University, but any other appellation would have suited it much better, for study is the last pursuit of the society; the Master eats, drinks, and sleeps, the Fellows drink, dispute and pun, the employments of the undergraduates you will probably conjecture without my description.
—Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron) (1788–1824) English Romantic Poet
A college is a place where pebbles are polished and diamonds dimmed.
—Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–99) American Lawyer, Orator, Agnostic
College-bred is a four-year loaf, using dad’s dough, Coming out half-baked, with a lot of crust.
—Unknown
If we help an educated man’s daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war?—not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English Novelist
In spite of the roaring of the young lions at the Union, and the screaming of the rabbits in the home of the vivisect, in spite of Keble College, and the tramways, and the sporting prints, Oxford still remains the most beautiful thing in England, and nowhere else are life and art so exquisitely blended, so perfectly made one.
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish Poet, Playwright
One of the benefits of a college education is to show the boy its little avail.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher
While formal schooling is an important advantage, it is not a guarantee of success nor is its absence a fatal handicap.
—Ray Kroc (1902–84) American Entrepreneur, Businessperson
Let’s not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.
—H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) American Journalist, Literary Critic
I am told that today rather more than 60 per cent of the men who go to university go on a Government grant. This is a new class that has entered upon the scene. It is the white-collar proletariat. They do not go to university to acquire culture but to get a job, and when they have got one, scamp it. They have no manners and are woefully unable to deal with any social predicament. Their idea of a celebration is to go to a public house and drink six beers. They are mean, malicious and envious . They are scum.
—W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) British Novelist, Short-Story Writer, Playwright
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
—John Ciardi (1916–86) American Poet, Teacher, Etymologist, Translator
The men—the undergraduates of Yale and Princeton are cleaner, healthier, better-looking, better dressed, wealthier and more attractive than any undergraduate body in the country.
—Unknown
Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.
—George Santayana (1863–1952) Spanish-American Poet, Philosopher
Scratch a Yale man with both hands and you’ll be lucky to find a coast-guard. Usually you find nothing at all.
—Unknown
College isn’t the place to go for ideas.
—Helen Keller (1880–1968) American Author
The race of prophets is extinct. Europe is becoming set in its ways, slowly embalming itself beneath the wrappings of its borders, its factories, its law-courts and its universities. The frozen Mind cracks between the mineral staves which close upon it. The fault lies with your moldy systems, your logic of 2 + 2 = 4. The fault lies with you, Chancellors, caught in the net of syllogisms. You manufacture engineers, magistrates, doctors, who know nothing of the true mysteries of the body or the cosmic laws of existence. False scholars blind outside this world, philosophers who pretend to reconstruct the mind. The least act of spontaneous creation is a more complex and revealing world than any metaphysics.
—Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) French Actor, Drama Theorist
Within the university… you can study without waiting for any efficient or immediate result. You may search, just for the sake of searching, and try for the sake of trying. So there is a possibility of what I would call playing. It’s perhaps the only place within society where play is possible to such an extent.
—Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) French Philosopher, Literary Theorist
I am willing to admit that some people might live there for years, or even a lifetime, so protected that they never sense the sweet stench of corruption that is all around them—the keen, thin scent of decay that pervades everything and accuses with a terrible accusation the superficial youthfulness, the abounding undergraduate noise, that fills those ancient buildings.
—Thomas Merton (1915–68) American Trappist Monk
The greatest gift that Oxford gives her sons is, I truly believe, a genial irreverence toward learning, and from that irreverence love may spring.
—Robertson Davies (1913–95) Canadian Novelist, Playwright, Essayist
Oxford is—Oxford: not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to love it rather than to love one another.
—E. M. Forster (1879–1970) English Novelist, Short Story Writer, Essayist
Master and Doctor are my titles; for ten years now, without repose, I held my erudite recitals and led my pupils by the nose.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German Poet
Looking back over a decade one sees the ideal of a university become a myth, a vision, a meadow lark among the smoke stacks. Yet perhaps it is there at Princeton, only more elusive than under the skies of the Prussian Rhineland or Oxfordshire; or perhaps some men come upon it suddenly and possess it, while others wander forever outside. Even these seek in vain through middle age for any corner of the republic that preserves so much of what is fair, gracious, charming and honorable in American life.
—Unknown
‘Tis well enough for a servant to be bred at an University. But the education is a little too pedantic for a gentleman.
—William Congreve (1670–1729) English Playwright, Poet
A thorough knowledge of the Bible is worth more than a college education.
—Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American Head of State, Political leader, Historian, Explorer
I was a modest, good-humored boy. It is Oxford that has made me insufferable.
—Max Beerbohm (1872–1956) British Essayist, Caricaturist, Novelist
Apparently, the most difficult feat for a Cambridge male is to accept a woman not merely as feeling, not merely as thinking, but as managing a complex, vital interweaving of both.
—Sylvia Plath (1932–63) American Poet, Novelist
To be sure, nothing is more important to the integrity of the universities than a rigorously enforced divorce from war-oriented research and all connected enterprises.
—Hannah Arendt (1906–75) German-American Philosopher, Political Theorist
They teach anything in universities today. You can major in mud pies.
—Orson Welles (1915–85) American Film Director, Actor
I often think how much easier the world would have been to manage if Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini had been at Oxford.
—E. F. L. Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax (1881–1959) British Politician, Political leader
Remote and ineffectual don.
—Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) British Historian, Poet, Critic
In university they don’t tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.
—Doris Lessing (1919–2013) British Novelist, Poet
I wonder anybody does anything at Oxford but dream and remember, the place is so beautiful. One almost expects the people to sing instead of speaking. It is all like an opera.
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) Irish Poet, Dramatist
Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!
—Matthew Arnold (1822–88) English Poet, Critic
They were evidently small men, all wind and quibbles, flinging out their chuffy grain to us with far less interest than a farm-wife feels as she scatters corn to her fowls.
—D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930) English Novelist, Playwright, Poet, Essayist, Literary Critic
The colleges, while they provide us with libraries, furnish no professors of books; and I think no chair is so much needed.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher