University Quotes

“Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.”
― Leonardo da Vinci

“A university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library.”
― Shelby Foote

“But we're a university! We have to have a library!" said Ridcully. "It adds tone. What sort of people would we be if we didn't go into the library?"

"Students," said Senior Wrangler morosely.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent

“University can teach you skill and give you opportunity, but it can't teach you sense, nor give you understanding. Sense and understanding are produced within one's soul.”
― C. JoyBell C.

“There are times when wisdom cannot be found in the chambers of parliament or the halls of academia but at the unpretentious setting of the kitchen table.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri

“University, he said quietly. It sounded like a dream; it tasted like damnation.”
― Nora Sakavic, The Foxhole Court

“University's like this little world, a bubble of time separate from everything before and everything after.”
― Mhairi McFarlane, You Had Me At Hello

“What we have witnessed in our own time is the death of universities as centres of critique. Since Margaret Thatcher, the role of academia has been to service the status quo, not challenge it in the name of justice, tradition, imagination, human welfare, the free play of the mind or alternative visions of the future. We will not change this simply by increasing state funding of the humanities as opposed to slashing it to nothing. We will change it by insisting that a critical reflection on human values and principles should be central to everything that goes on in universities, not just to the study of Rembrandt or Rimbaud.”
― Terry Eagleton

“Literature offers the thrill of minds of great clarity wrestling with the endless problems and delights of being human. To engage with them is to engage with oneself, and the lasting rewards are not confined to specific career paths.”
― Jonathan Stroud

“What else can I do? Once you've gone this far you aren't fit for anything else. Something happens to your mind. You're overqualified, overspecialized, and everybody knows it. Nobody in any other game would be crazy enough to hire me. I wouldn't even make a good ditch-digger, I'd start tearing apart the sewer-system, trying to pick-axe and unearth all those chthonic symbols - pipes, valves, cloacal conduits... No, no. I'll have to be a slave in the paper-mines for all time.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman

“Every beginner possesses a great potential to be an expert in his or her chosen field.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!

“At first I was glad for the help. My freshmen English class, "Mythology and Archetypal Experience," confounded me.

I didn't understand why we couldn't just read books without forcing contorted interpretations on then”
― Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

“Do not give them a candle to light the way, teach them how to make fire instead. That is the meaning of enlightenment.”
― Kamand Kojouri

“If then a practical end must be assigned to a University course, I say it is that of training good members of society... It is the education which gives a man a clear, conscious view of their own opinions and judgements, a truth in developing them, an eloquence in expressing them, and a force in urging them. It teaches him to see things as they are, to go right to the point, to disentangle a skein of thought to detect what is sophistical and to discard what is irrelevant.”
― John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University

“The humanities should constitute the core of any university worth the name.”
― Terry Eagleton

“Life is still better than University. In school, your teacher is the fruit picker and you are the open fruit basket. Then you take those fruits and make cakes and pies. But life is going to give you the chance to go out there and pick those fruits yourself. Then you can eat them, or make them into something else; any which way, your own hands picked them!”
― C. JoyBell C.

“Unseen University was much bigger on the inside. Thousands of years as the leading establishment of practical magic in a world where dimensions were largely a matter of chance in any case had left it bulging in places where it shouldn't have places. There were rooms containing rooms which, if you entered them, turned out to contain the room you'd started with, which can be a problem if you are in a conga line.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent

“lectures broke into one's day and were clearly a terrible waste of time, necessary no doubt if you were reading law or medicine or some other vocational subject, but in the case of English, the natural thing to do was talk a lot, listen to music, drink coffee and wine, read books, and go to plays, perhaps be in plays…”
― Stephen Fry, The Fry Chronicles

“Oxford is very pretty, but I don't like to be dead.”
― T.S. Eliot

“Sooner or later, all talk among foreigners in Pyongyang turns to one imponderable subject. Do the locals really believe what they are told, and do they truly revere Fat Man and Little Boy? I have been a visiting writer in several authoritarian and totalitarian states, and usually the question answers itself. Someone in a café makes an offhand remark. A piece of ironic graffiti is scrawled in the men's room. Some group at the university issues some improvised leaflet. The glacier begins to melt; a joke makes the rounds and the apparently immovable regime suddenly looks vulnerable and absurd. But it's almost impossible to convey the extent to which North Korea just isn't like that. South Koreans who met with long-lost family members after the June rapprochement were thunderstruck at the way their shabby and thin northern relatives extolled Fat Man and Little Boy. Of course, they had been handpicked, but they stuck to their line.

There's a possible reason for the existence of this level of denial, which is backed up by an indescribable degree of surveillance and indoctrination. A North Korean citizen who decided that it was all a lie and a waste would have to face the fact that his life had been a lie and a waste also. The scenes of hysterical grief when Fat Man died were not all feigned; there might be a collective nervous breakdown if it was suddenly announced that the Great Leader had been a verbose and arrogant fraud. Picture, if you will, the abrupt deprogramming of more than 20 million Moonies or Jonestowners, who are suddenly informed that it was all a cruel joke and there's no longer anybody to tell them what to do. There wouldn't be enough Kool-Aid to go round. I often wondered how my guides kept straight faces. The streetlights are turned out all over Pyongyang—which is the most favored city in the country—every night. And the most prominent building on the skyline, in a town committed to hysterical architectural excess, is the Ryugyong Hotel. It's 105 floors high, and from a distance looks like a grotesquely enlarged version of the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco (or like a vast and cumbersome missile on a launchpad). The crane at its summit hasn't moved in years; it's a grandiose and incomplete ruin in the making. 'Under construction,' say the guides without a trace of irony. I suppose they just keep two sets of mental books and live with the contradiction for now.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

“An aptitude test established architecture as an alternative [career]. But what decided the matter for [Teddy Cruz] was the sight of a fourth-year architecture student sitting at his desk at a window, drawing and nursing a cup of coffee as rain fell outside. 'I don't know, I just liked the idea of having this relationship to the paper and the adventure of imagining the spaces. That was the first image that captured me.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics

“In feudal times the aristocracy had sent their sons to university, conferring superiority on the institution. Nowadays it was the other way round: the university conferred superiority on the man.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“Where do you find a stomach on a Thursday afternoon in Reno? "Chinatown?" suggests someone. "Costco?" "Butcher Boys." Tracy pulls his phone from a pocket. "Hello, I'm from the university" - the catchall preamble for unorthodox inquiries.”
― Mary Roach, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

“My priority is not about grades. I seek yearn for knowledge, skills and wisdom.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita, Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind

“In the Islamic world itself also there is a great crisis in he modern established universities precisely because the systems from the West have been transplanted into that world without a close integration between the humanities, which should be drawn totally from Islamic sources, the religious disciplines and the sciences which have been imported from the West.”
― Seyyed Hossein Nasr, A Young Muslim's Guide to the Modern World

“Might not too much investment in teaching Shelley mean falling behind our economic competitors? But there is no university without humane inquiry, which means that universities and advanced capitalism are fundamentally incompatible. And the political implications of that run far deeper than the question of student fees.”
― Terry Eagleton

“Seekers of wisdom, seekers of life.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita, Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind

“People in this city are manufactured and canned, raised for the sole purpose of taking tests and making money, The eighteen-year-old me went through the high-grade production line and was processed in three years, despite the fear that I was pure carrion inside.”
― Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile

“I remember how excited I was to work for the Ivy League. By the time I left, I would not advise anyone to work for them.”
― Steven Magee

“As a manager in the Ivy League, I discovered that the upper management team were seriously undermining my ability to manage my own staff. It was so bad that I eventually left. I now advise people not to work for the Ivy League.”
― Steven Magee