Scholar Quotes

“Someday I must read this scholar Everyone. He seems to have written so much--all of it wrong.”
― Tamora Pierce, Emperor Mage

“The old man was peering intently at the shelves. 'I'll have to admit that he's a very competent scholar.'
Isn't he just a librarian?' Garion asked, 'somebody who looks after books?'
That's where all the rest of scholarship starts, Garion. All the books in the world won't help you if they're just piled up in a heap.”
― David Eddings, King of the Murgos

“يظن الغمر أن الكتب تهدى ... ... أخاً فهم لإدراك العلوم
وما يدرى الجهول بأن فيها ... ... غوامض حيرت عقل الفهيم
إذا رمت العلوم بغير شيخ ... ... ضللت عن الصراط المستقيم
وتلتبس الأمور عليك حتى ... ... تصير أضل من 'توما الحكيم”
― أبو حيان التوحيدي

“A Sanskrit word appeared in the paragraph: ANTEVASIN. It means, ‘one who lives at the border.’ In ancient times, this was a literal description. It indicated a person who had left the bustling center of worldly life to go live at the edge of the forest where the spiritual masters dwelled. The antevasin was not of the villager’s anymore-not a householder with a conventional life. But neither was he yet a transcendent-not one of those sages who live deep in the unexplored woods, fully realized. The antevasin was an in-betweener. He was a border-dweller. He lived in sight of both worlds, but he looked toward the unknown. And he was a scholar.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“Well now," the scholar went on, "I'm just an old fuddy-duddy who could use a tan, so you needn't grant my opinion any authority, but I consider the queendom lucky that a handful of Milliners and their children lived incognito among the population during Redd's tyranny.”
― Frank Beddor, Seeing Redd

“Choose a leader who will invest in building bridges, not walls. Books, not weapons. Morality, not corruption. Intellectualism and wisdom, not ignorance.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“There's no crying in the rank book.”
― William Morton

“You are a religious and a scholar; what the fuck?”
― M.F. Moonzajer

“The problem arises when a society respects its scholars lesser and lesser and replaces intellectualism with anti-intellectualism. Such society forces the most intellectual members of its, toward alienation and instead develops populism and irrationalism and then calls it anti-elitism. On the other hand, scholars, due to being undermined by the society, find any effort hopeless and isolate themselves into their work. For a scholar, personally, nothing changes because the scholar always is a scholar no matter having someone to share the knowledge with or not, but the true problem forms in the most ordinary sections of the society, which eventually creates an opportunity for propaganda, conspiracy theories, rhetoric, and bogus.”
― Kambiz Shabankare

“I'd rather have ten soldiers to guard than a single scholar.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Black Tulip

“A scholar is committed to building on knowledge that others have gathered, correcting it, confirming it, enlarging it. ”
― Parker Palmer

“A great thinker does not necessarily have to discover a master idea but has to rediscover and to affirm a true but forgotten, ignored or misunderstood master idea and interpret it in all the diverse aspects of thought not previously done, in a powerful and consistent way, despite surrounding ignorance and opposition. This criterion we think would include all prophets and their true followers among the Muslim scholars. He is both a great and original thinker who brings new meanings and interpretations to old ideas, thereby providing both continuity and originality to the important intellectual and cultural problems of his time and through it, of mankind. Thus the brilliant interpretations of scholars and sages like al-Ghazali and Mulla Sadra then, and Iqbal and al-Attas now, deserve to be recognized and acknowledged as manifesting certain qualities of greatness and originality.”
― Wan Mohd Nor Wan Daud, Filsafat dan Praktik Pendidikan Islam Syed M. Naquib Al-Attas

“Inexperience people think that books will lead the one of intellect to understanding. But the ignoramus doesn't know that in these books are ambiguos that will confuse even the most intelligent of people. If you try to learn this knowledge without a teacher you will go astray and affairs will become so confusing to you that you will be more astray than Toma*, the physician.

*توما الحكيم”
― Abū Hayyān al-Tawhīdī

“There's very little authentic study of the humanities remaining. My research assistant came to me two years ago saying she'd been in a seminar in which the teacher spent two hours saying that Walt Whitman was a racist. This isn't even good nonsense. It's insufferable.”
― Harold Bloom

“Approaching the Start of Civil Exams

Perhaps I was once a young Chinese scholar
approaching the start of civil exams,
my mind grown weary and sad from seclusion
with books on syntax and poetic style.

All that I knew were the mist-covered mountains
and sweet white blossoms of mountain apples
that grew in the valleys of my province.

But I had been gone over six years
busy with studies in the Heavenly City
empty and thin despite my work.

I showed my verses to an older poet
who told me a truth I longed to believe:
all knowledge is futile and barren
which does not open the love of your friends.”
― Jim Chapson

“Am I a fraud, then, or a scholar? I am both, of course, as we all are. Half of what I know I do not believe. Half of what I believe I cannot prove. For the rest, I hope to muddle through and my mistakes go without comment.”
― Nick Harkaway, Gnomon

“To be knowledgeable, sit before scholars; to be wise, sit before life.”
― Matshona Dhliwayo

“All kinds of people read poetry: revolutionaries, scholars, sentimentalists etc. But above all else, lovers read poetry. Why? Because we fell in love. And then we fell in love with love.”
― Kamand Kojouri

“This constant reference to genius is another characteristic of the pseudo-scholar. He loves mentioning genius, because the sound of the word exempts him from discovering its meaning.”
― E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

“Perhaps he even needs to have been a critic and a sceptic and a dogmatist and an historian, and in addition a poet and collector and traveller and puzzle-solver and moralist and seer and ‘free spirit’ and nearly all things, so that he can traverse the range of human values and value-feelings and be able to look with many kinds of eyes and consciences from the heights into every distance, from the depths into every height, from the corners into every wide expanse.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“To talk in public, to think in solitude, to read and to hear, to enquire and answer enquiries, is the business of a scholar. He wanders about the world without pomp or terror, and is neither known nor valued but by men like himself.”
― Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia

“When Richard created the Purple Gentian, the talent for ancient languages that had stunned his schoolmasters at Eton had come to his aid once again. While Sir Percy had pretended to be a fop, Richard bored the French into complacency with long lectures about antiquity. When Frenchmen demanded to know what he was doing in France, and Englishmen reproached him for fraternising with the enemy, Richard opened his eyes wide and proclaimed, ‘But a scholar is a citizen of the world!’ Then he quoted Greek at them. They usually didn’t ask again. Even Gaston Delaroche, the Assistant Minister of Police, who had sworn in blood to be avenged on the Purple Gentian and had the tenacity of…well, of Richard’s mother, had stopped snooping around Richard after being subjected to two particularly knotty passages from the Odyssey.”
― Lauren Willig, The Secret History of the Pink Carnation

“To pretend or simulate, as the scholar and conceptual oneself over all others that, uncovers the subconscious ignorance. Since the subconscious capacitates the sober prudence to the consciousness; otherwise, that fails to prevail.”
― Ehsan Sehgal

“It is a scholar's weakness, to run narrow and deep.”
― Jacqueline Carey, Kushiel's Avatar

“The scholarly, rational and constructive criticism on that place, proves its effectiveness, where the rays of instinct and vision entirely remove the jealousy from the heart and pride, from the mind. Otherwise, that both poisons, are the abstract of the ignorance, and on the level of knowledge and skill, even kill a scholar too.”
― Ehsan Sehgal

“A learned person learns the knowledge only from the worldly books that can be the inferior and inauthentic, but a scholar covers the perfect knowledge of the books, and vision and some extent from spiritualism that discusses the present, entity, and creative points, to guide the discourse and that happens with the perfection and beauty.”
― Ehsan Sehgal

“The intellectual scholars who keep saying 'this is wrong' and 'that is wrong', are neither scholars nor intellectuals. In reality, they are more ignorant than the layman.”
― Abhijit Naskar

“Lévi-Strauss is a very conservative man,' Foucault avowed. 'And sometimes he behaves very badly . He writes too many books, which keeps him enclosed in his study. Consequently, he doesn't know the world. Scholars make a great mistake in endeavoring to write and publish all they have to say. We should write only a few good books and leave it to our students to complete the tasks we have begun. Otherwise the scholar spends too little time int the world and does not get to know the world.”
― Simeon Wade, Foucault in California [A True Story—Wherein the Great French Philosopher Drops Acid in the Valley of Death]

“For the artists the humanists were the guarantors of their intellectual status, and the humanists themselves recognized the value of art as a mean of propaganda for the ideas on which their own intellectual supremacy is based.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art: Volume 2: Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque

“If you want to understand a people, learn their weapons. The way men kill one another says far more about a culture than any scholar’s ethnography.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Words of Radiance