19th-century Academic Quotes

Thorstein Veblen
Edvard Westermarck
William Graham Sumner
Edward Carpenter
Charles William Eliot
Elton Mayo
George Ticknor

Advertising as the printed form of selling would seem... ultimately to be justified in so far as it serves as a means of increasing legitimate human wants, as an agency of fair and economic competition in the distribution of goods, and as a stimulant to social progress.

Woman: I am surprised that you are not fighting to defend civilization.
Garrod: Madam, I am the civilization they are fighting to defend.

One ceases to be lonely only in recollection; perhaps that is why people read history.

Nothing is easier than to collect the opinions of celebrated men for or against any branch of human learning.

David Lester Richardson
David Lester Richardson
I seem to see a great university, great in endowment, in land, in buildings, in equipment, but greater still, second to none, in its practical idealism, and its social usefulness.

Robert Clarkson Clothier
Robert Clarkson Clothier
The radical deficiency of imagist verse, as such, is in its lack of general ideas. Much of it might have been written by an infinitely sensitive decapitated frog. It is hemisphereless poetry.

If we could produce one or two more Madame Curies, that would accomplish far more for the advancement of women than any amount of agitation, argument and legislation.

If there are no general moral truths, the object of I scientific ethics cannot be to fix rules for human conduct, the aim of all science being the discovery of some truth.

Edvard Westermarck
Edvard Westermarck
In science... law has to do not with what ought to be, but with what is; scientific laws are facts reduced to formulae, statements of the habits of things, so to speak.

Science does not regard its currently established truths as final: religion everywhere and in all centuries has followed the trend toward crystallization of belief.

A soul eager for new mastery and ever looking forward cares little to dwell upon the past.

Sir Frederick Pollock, 3rd Baronet
Sir Frederick Pollock, 3rd Baronet
In the use of this method (of infinities) the pupil must be awake and thinking, for when the infinite is employed in an argument by the unskilled, the conclusion is often most absurd.

It is true that the torch of science grows brighter with each passing year, and shoots its rays deeper into the enveloping darkness, but mystery is ever with it. Science proposes more questions than it solves.

It does not seem to me as if I were living in the country in which I was born.

George Ticknor
George Ticknor
For God's sake, stop researching for a while and begin to think.

It is the moral element contained in it that alone gives value and dignity to a religion, and only in so far as its teachings serve to stimulate and purify our moral aspirations does it deserve to retain its ascendency over mankind.

Felix Adler (professor)
Felix Adler (professor)
To understand any living thing, you must, so to say, creep within and feel the beating of its heart.

We cherish too, the Poppy red
That grows on fields where valor led,
It seems to signal to the skies
That blood of heroes never dies.

It is difficult, almost impossible, to find the book from which something either valuable or amusing may not be found, if the proper alembic be applied.

Keep off your thoughts from things that are past and done; for thinking of the past wakes regret and pain.

The most intelligent hearers are those who enjoy most heartily the simplest preaching. It is not they who clamor for superlatively intellectual or aesthetic sermons. Daniel Webster used to complain of some of the preaching to which he listened. "In the house of God" he wanted to meditate "upon the simple varieties, and the undoubted facts of religion;" not upon mysteries and abstractions.

Austin Phelps
Austin Phelps
The library is the proper workshop of professors and students alike.

I do not know of any divine commands. I do know of most important human ones. I do not know the needs of a god or of another world.... I do know that women make shirts for seventy cents a dozen in this one. I do know that the needs of humanity and this world are infinite unending constant and immediate. They will take all our time our strength our love and our thoughts; and our work here will be only then begun.

Helen H. Gardener
Helen H. Gardener
In every artist we can perceive a man with both a message and a method. His message may be innate in him, but his method he has to acquire from others.

Brander Matthews
Brander Matthews
There is one way, and only one, of correctly reading a Latin hexameter. There may be three or four ways of reading an English blank verse line. I venture to say that no two mortals ever read aloud any given long passage of verse with precisely the same rhythms.