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
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
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
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, Diplomat
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
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
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
A thorough knowledge of the Bible is worth more than a college education.
—Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American Historian, Political Leader, Explorer
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
College isn’t the place to go for ideas.
—Helen Keller (1880–1968) American Author
A college is a place where pebbles are polished and diamonds dimmed.
—Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–99) American Lawyer, Orator, Agnostic
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
Remote and ineffectual don.
—Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) British Historian, Poet, Critic
I was a modest, good-humored boy. It is Oxford that has made me insufferable.
—Max Beerbohm (1872–1956) British Essayist, Caricaturist, Novelist
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
Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.
—George Santayana (1863–1952) Spanish-American Poet, Philosopher
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
Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!
—Matthew Arnold (1822–88) English Poet, Critic
Socrates gave no diplomas or degrees, and would have subjected any disciple who demanded one to a disconcerting catechism on the nature of true knowledge.
—G. M. Trevelyan (1876–1962) English Modern Historian
Scratch a Yale man with both hands and you’ll be lucky to find a coast-guard. Usually you find nothing at all.
—Unknown
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
They teach anything in universities today. You can major in mud pies.
—Orson Welles (1915–85) American Film Director, Actor
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
One of the benefits of a college education is to show the boy its little avail.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher
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
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
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
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, 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
Towery city and branching between towers; Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmed, lark-charmed, rook-racked, river-rounded.
—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89) British Jesuit Priest, Poet
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