Life is surely given us for higher purposes than to gather what our ancestors have wisely thrown away, and to learn what is of no value but because it has been forgotten.

Two evils, of almost equal weight, may befall the man of erudition: never to be listened to, and to be listened to always.

The ordinary man is ruined by the flesh lusting against the spirit; the scholar by the spirit lusting too much against the flesh.

The mind of the scholar, if you would have it large and liberal, should come in contact with other minds. It is better that his armor should be somewhat bruised by rude encounters even, than hang for ever rusting on the wall.

Don't appear so scholarly, pray. Humanize your talk, and speak to be understood. Do you think a Greek name gives more weight to your reasons?

Everything that's prose isn't verse and everything that isn't verse is prose. Now you see what it is to be a scholar!

Difficulty is a coin the learned make use of like jugglers, to conceal the inanity of their art.

This is ever the test of the scholar: whether he allows intellectual fastidiousness to stand between him and the great issues of his time.

Abraham Lincoln was on the side of the social scientists when he said, "God must have loved the people of lower and middle socioeconomic status, because he made such a multiplicity of them."

The range of human knowledge today is so great that we're all specialists and the distance between specializations has become so great that anyone who seeks to wander freely among them almost has to forego closeness with the people around him.