Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotations on Universities

I was a modest, good-humored boy. It is Oxford that has made me insufferable.
Max Beerbohm (1872–1956) British Essayist, Caricaturist, Novelist

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

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

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

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

One of the benefits of a college education is to show the boy its little avail.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher

College-bred is a four-year loaf, using dad’s dough, Coming out half-baked, with a lot of crust.
Unknown

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

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

The exquisite art of idleness, one of the most important things that any University can teach.
Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish Poet, Playwright

College isn’t the place to go for ideas.
Helen Keller (1880–1968) American Author

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

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

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 college is a place where pebbles are polished and diamonds dimmed.
Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–99) American Lawyer, Orator, Agnostic

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

Remote and ineffectual don.
Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) British Historian, Poet, Critic

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

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

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

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

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

‘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

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

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

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

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

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

Scratch a Yale man with both hands and you’ll be lucky to find a coast-guard. Usually you find nothing at all.
Unknown

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

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