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

“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

“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

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

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

“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

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

“If you fail an examination, it means you have not yet master the subject. With diligent study and understanding, you will succeed in passing the exams.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita, Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind

“If only we were all better educated. If then, higher education would at last be a journey for skill and knowledge rather than for power and status.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“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

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

“Everything is like a wall.
Said a scholar to the troll.
Bang your head to go on through.
Then you'll see, there is no queue.”
― Will Advise, Nothing is here...

“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

“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”
― أبو حيان التوحيدي

“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

“Whate'er I read to her. I'll plead for you
As for my patron, stand you so assured,
As firmly as yourself were in still place -
Yea, and perhaps with more successful words
Than you, unless you were a scholar, sir.
O this learning, what a thing it is!”
― William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew

“We all have so many functions, so many ways of existing. In my own vision of myself, I am a scholar who lives quietly, and pens his little tales, and dreams about a past that may or may not have existed. And that is true, as far as it goes. But I am also, in one of my capacities, like so many of the people you have chosen to associate with, a psychopomp. I escort the living to the world of the dead.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“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

“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

“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

“Those who are fortunate to be educated, must light the flame of fire.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita, Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind

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

“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

“I desire knowledge and wisdom.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita, Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind

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

“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

“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

“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