Famous Quotes about Colleges and Universities (50 Quotations)

In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.

It is dangerous sending a young man who is beautiful to Oxford.

It might be said now that I have the best of both worlds: a Harvard education and a Yale degree.

Let's not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.

Looking back over a decade one sees the ideal of a university become a myth, a vision, a meadow lark among the smoke stacks. Yet perhaps it is there at Princeton, only more elusive than under the skies of the Prussian Rhineland or Oxfordshire; or perhaps some men come upon it suddenly and possess it, while others wander forever outside. Even these seek in vain through middle age for any corner of the republic that preserves so much of what is fair, gracious, charming and honorable in American life.

Master and Doctor are my titles; for ten years now, without repose, I held my erudite recitals and led my pupils by the nose.

One of the benefits of a college education is to show the boy its little avail.

Our major universities are now stuck with an army of pedestrian, toadying careerists, Fifties types who wave around Sixties banners to conceal their record of ruthless, beaver-like tunneling to the top.

Oxford is — Oxford: not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to love it rather than to love one another.

Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.

Remote and ineffectual don.

Scratch a Yale man with both hands and you'll be lucky to find a coast-guard. Usually you find nothing at all.

Socrates gave no diplomas or degrees, and would have subjected any disciple who demanded one to a disconcerting catechism on the nature of true knowledge.

The colleges, while they provide us with libraries, furnish no professors of books; and I think no chair is so much needed.

The exquisite art of idleness, one of the most important things that any University can teach.

The greatest gift that Oxford gives her sons is, I truly believe, a genial irreverence toward learning, and from that irreverence love may spring.

The medieval university looked backwards; it professed to be a storehouse of old knowledge. The modern university looks forward, and is a factory of new knowledge.

The men — the undergraduates of Yale and Princeton are cleaner, healthier, better-looking, better dressed, wealthier and more attractive than any undergraduate body in the country.

The most important function of the university in an age of reason is to protect reason from itself.

The race of prophets is extinct. Europe is becoming set in its ways, slowly embalming itself beneath the wrappings of its borders, its factories, its law-courts and its universities. The frozen Mind cracks between the mineral staves which close upon it. The fault lies with your moldy systems, your logic of 2 + 2 = 4. The fault lies with you, Chancellors, caught in the net of syllogisms. You manufacture engineers, magistrates, doctors, who know nothing of the true mysteries of the body or the cosmic laws of existence. False scholars blind outside this world, philosophers who pretend to reconstruct the mind. The least act of spontaneous creation is a more complex and revealing world than any metaphysics.