Quotes to inspire and reflect

The mind of the scholar, if you would have it large and liberal, should come in contact with other minds. It is better that his armor should be somewhat bruised by rude encounters even, than hang for ever rusting on the wall.

The ordinary man is ruined by the flesh lusting against the spirit; the scholar by the spirit lusting too much against the flesh.

The humblest painter is a true scholar; and the best of scholars—the scholar of nature.

Learning is the knowledge of that which none but the learned know.

Economists, on the whole, think well of what they do themselves and much less well of what their professional colleagues do.

It is the vice of scholars to suppose that there is no knowledge in the world but that of books.

In truth man is made rather to eat ices than to pore over old texts.

The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances.

A scholar is a man with this inconvenience, that, when you ask him his opinion of any matter, he must go home and look up his manuscripts to know.

How we hate this solemn Ego that accompanies the learned, like a double, wherever he goes.

A great man will find a great subject, or which is the same thing, make any subject great.

When nature exceeds culture, we have the rustic. When culture exceeds nature, we have the pedant.

Things take indeed a wondrous turn / When learned men do stoop to learn.

We want a Society for the Suppression of Erudite Research and the Decent Burial of the Past. The ghosts of the dead past want quite as much laying as raising.

Erudition, n. Dust shaken out of a book into an empty skull.

To spend too much time in studies is sloth; to use them too much for ornament is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules is the humor of a scholar.

Learning is the property of those who fear to do disagreeable things.

The scapegoat has always had the mysterious power of unleashing man’s ferocious pleasure in torturing, corrupting, and befouling.

There never was a scandalous tale without some foundation.

A lie has no leg, but a scandal has wings.

From the satisfaction of desire there may arise, accompanying joy and as it were sheltering behind it, something not unlike despair.

The sovereign source of melancholy is repletion. Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us; our hour of triumph is what brings the void.

Satirists gain the applause of others through fear, not through love.

If satire is to be effective, the audience must be aware of the thing satirized.

Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled.

Satire is not a social dynamite. But it is a social indicator: it shows that new men are knocking at the door.

What is most contrary to salvation is not sin but habit.

Our health is our sound relation to external objects; our sympathy with external being.

Souls are not saved in bundles.

As life draws nearer to its end, I feel more and more clearly that it will not matter in the least, at the last day, what form of religion a man has professed—nay, that many who have never even heard of Christ, will in that day find themselves saved by His blood.

Sanctity and genius are as rebellious as vice.

It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.

Grace is indeed needed to turn a man into a saint; and he who doubts it does not know what a saint or a man is.

He [Gandhi] was not one of those saints who are marked out by their phenomenal piety from childhood onwards, nor one of the other kind who forsake the world after sensational debaucheries.

The happiest hour a sailor sees / Is when he’s down / At an inland town, / With his Nancy on his knees, yo ho! / And his arm around her waist!

I’m an alcoholic. I’m a drug addict. I’m homosexual. I’m a genius. Of course, I could be all four of these dubious things and still be a saint. But I shonuf ain’t no saint yet, nawsuh. v

Nowhere else than upon the sea do the days, weeks, and months fall away quicker into the past. They seem to be left astern as easily as the light air- bubbles in the swirls of the ship’s wake.

There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea.

Ports are necessities, like postage stamps or soap, / but they seldom seem to care what impressions they make.

Nothing so much enhances a good as to make sacrifices for it.

Only he can understand what a farm is, what a country is, who shall have sacrificed part of himself to his farm or country.

Sacrifice may be a Bower that virtue will pluck on its road, but it was not to gather this Bower that virtue set forth on its travels.

The very act of sacrifice magnifies the one who sacrifices himself to the point where his sacrifice is much more costly to humanity than would have been

Where else, in a non-totalitarian country, but in the political profession is the individual expected to sacrifice all—including his own career—for the national good?

Drown not thyself to save a drowning man.

Sabbath, n. A weekly festival having its origin in the fact that God made the world in six days and was arrested on the seventh.

Don’t you forget what’s divine in the Russian soul—and that’s resignation.

Ideas in modern Russia are machine-cut blocks coming in solid colors; the nuance is outlawed, the interval walled up, the curve grossly stepped.