Academic Life Quotes

It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it.

Jacob Bronowski

Inspirational, Education, Teacher

"'The Ascent of Man' ('Knowledge or Certainty')". Documentary TV Mini-Series, Episode 11, 1973.

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A scientist is a mimosa when he himself has made a mistake, and a roaring lion when he discovers a mistake of others.

Albert Einstein

Mistake, Memorable, Roaring

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The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'

Isaac Asimov

Inspirational, Funny, Motivational

"Betting On a Bass That Belts Them Out; Singing Fish Becomes Season’s Unlikely Hit" by Darragh Johnson, The Washington Post, July 30, 2000.

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Hell! there ain't no rules around here! We are tryin' to accomplish somep'n!

Albert Einstein

Goal, Innovation, Libertarian

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In science, the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs.

Francis Darwin

Business, Science, Men

Eugenics Review, Apr. 1914

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The academic life is wonderful. That's why people love to do research.

Michael Marmot

People, Research, Life Is

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In academic life, false ideas are merely false and useless ones can be fun to play with. In political life, false ideas can ruin the lives of millions and useless ones can waste precious resources. An intellectual's responsibility for his ideas is to follow their consequences wherever they may lead. A politician's responsibility is to master those consequences and prevent them from doing harm. Michael Ignatieff, a former professor at Harvard and contributing writer for the magazine, is a member of Canada's Parliament and deputy leader of the Liberal Party.

Michael Ignatieff

Fun, War, Party

"Getting Iraq Wrong". www.nytimes.com. August 5, 2007.

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In academic life you seek to state absolute truths; in politics you seek to accommodate truth to the facts around you.

Pierre Trudeau

Politics, Facts, States

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I put that part of myself into both Brendan and Evelyn [from The Thorn and the Blossom] - as well as some of my own anxieties about the academic life!

Theodora Goss

Anxiety, Wells, My Own

Source: www.bookequals.com

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Work is, after all, not a busy running back and forth in established grooves, though that is the essence of our modern business and academic life, but the supreme energy and disciplined curiosity required to cut new grooves.

Hugh Nibley

Life, Running, Business

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My first MFA was in poetry, and it was very much part of a professional trajectory leading to life as a professor. But in my second and third years at Harvard, I realized I didn't want an academic life.

Garth Greenwell

Years, Want, Firsts

Source: therumpus.net

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I'm not sure that I've ever been drawn to the academic life as such. Theology has been a matter of survival for me. If I have a carapace of academic presentability, it is thanks to the wonderful teachers I had.

James Alison

Teacher, Survival, Matter

Source: www.commonwealmagazine.org

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One of those disturbing tendencies in academic life is that there is a desire on the part of many in the name of open-mindedness to fall into a kind of relativistic denialism in which all positions are equally legitimate, all positions must be respected, and compromise must be entered into no matter what the starting point or reasonableness of the two parties.

Lawrence Summers

Fall, Party, Names

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You know what happiness is: 'Having a little more money than your colleagues.' And that's not so tough in academic life.

Paul Samuelson

Littles, Tough, More Money

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Music, to me, was - is - representative of everything I like most in life. It's beautiful and fun, but very rigorous. If you wanted to be good you had to work like crazy. It was a real relationship between effort and reward. My musical life experiences were just as important to me, in terms of forming my development, as my political experiences or my academic life.

William J. Clinton

Beautiful, Fun, Crazy

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Morris read through the letter. Was it a shade too fulsome? No, that was another law of academic life: it is impossible to be excessive in flattery of one's peers.

David Lodge

Law, Peers, Letters

1984 Small World, pt.3, ch.1.

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...if use is not an appropriate criterion for decision making in the academic life, what is? Love. ...The virtues of love as a criterion for choosing a college major...it is not pretentious. "Use" is pretentious because it claims to know something about the future that it doesn't really know. Love is immediate... [love] guarantees that you will work to your highest potential...it is part of who you are, and not just something you think, often wrongly, that you can use.

Leroy S Rouner

Teaching, College, Love Is

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Doctoral training is devoted almost entirely to learning to do research, even though most Ph.Ds who enter academic life spend far more time teaching than they do conducting experiments or writing books.

Derek Bok

Book, Teaching, Writing

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If history, philosophy and so on vanish from academic life, what they leave in their wake may be a technical training facility or corporate research institute. But it will not be a university in the classical sense of the term, and it would be deceptive to call it one.

Terry Eagleton

Philosophy, Training, Would Be

"The death of universities" by Terry Eagleton, www.theguardian.com. December 17, 2010.

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In the summer of 1965 I was invited to join Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio and returned to academic life as professor with the added responsibility of becoming also Department Chairman.

George Andrew Olah

Summer, Responsibility, Ohio

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