19th-century Academic Quotes

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

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.

Elisha Scott Loomis

Money is power, money is force, money will do good as harm. In the hands of good men and women it could accomplish, and it has accomplished, good.

Russell Conwell

The early ascendancy of leisure as a means of reputability is traceable to the archaic distinction between noble and ignoble employments. Leisure is honourable and becomes imperative partly because it shows exemption from ignoble labour.

Thorstein Veblen

Everything ahead of us is dangerous. There isn't a power the President has asked for that isn't dangerous. But there isn't a power or a combination of powers he has asked for so dangerous as continuing to do nothing.

Wallace Brett Donham

The true object of religion is to bind mankind together, and to bind them all to God. If we see that in the name of religion, men, instead of promoting peace on earth and good-will among men, are trying to show their antagonism and animosity towards each other, then certainly we must stand forward with our voice of protest, and say that religion is defeating its own legitimate object.

Keshub Chunder Sen

If we are to have such a discipline we must have standards, and to get our standards under existing conditions we must have criticism.

Remember that when an employee enters your office he is in a strange land. He feels the atmosphere of authority; he is constrained and hesitant. Make him feel at ease.

My patriotism is of the kind which is outraged by the notion that the United States never was a great nation until in a petty three months' campaign it knocked to pieces a poor, decrepit, bankrupt old state like Spain. To hold such an opinion as that is to abandon all American standards, to put shame and scorn on all that our ancestors tried to build up here, and to go over to the standards of which Spain is a representative.

William Graham Sumner

We should never allow ourselves to be bullied by an either-or. There is often the possibility of something better than either of these two alternatives.

Mary Parker Follett

The destiny of the world is determined less by the battles that are lost and won than by the stories it loves and believes in.

Harold Clarke Goddard

Gentlemen of the old régime in the South would say, "A woman's name should appear in print but twice—when she marries and when she dies."

Arthur W. Calhoun

It is a principle of our nature that feelings once excited turn readily from the object by which they are excited to some other object which may for the time being take possession of the mind.

Matthew Simpson

Theories are more common than achievements in the history of education.

Richard Livingstone

The problem is not that of the sickness of an acquisitive society; it is that of the acquisitiveness of a sick society.

Last night, among his fellow roughs,
He jested, quaffed, and swore;
A drunken private of the Buffs,
Who never looked before.
Today, beneath the foeman's frown,
He stands in Elgin's place,
Ambassador from Britain's crown,
And type of all her race.

Francis Hastings Doyle

In undertaking the conquest of self it is of the utmost importance to form strong bonds of habit between ideas and conduct.

The only way to hasten the kingdom is to hasten growth; to hasten work, and that, too, along the very lines in which the "resounding loom of time" is weaving in its various-colored threads.

The potential possibilities of any child are the most intriguing and stimulating in all creation.

Ray Lyman Wilbur

Nothing is more certain than that worlds on worlds, and spheres on spheres, stretch behind and beyond the actually seen.

Edward Carpenter

The medical investigator must often fish in troubled waters; and sometimes he cannot find again the promising fishing ground he has once visited, because unexpected fog prevents him from seeing the intersecting bearings of his desired ground.

Charles William Eliot

Unsatisfied desire is the characteristic feature of human life. That is the common fact out of which both pessimism and optimism are constructed. Dwell on the impossibility of ever getting a state of complete and permanent satisfaction with what you have, and you become a pessimist. Dwell on the opportunity for endless growth and conquest which this same fact makes possible, and you become an optimist.

William De Witt Hyde

In an examination those who do not wish to know ask questions of those who cannot tell.

Walter Raleigh (professor)

We know, and we feel, that the vast business of our redemption, arranged in the councils of the far-back eternity, and acted out amid the wonderings and throbbings of the universe, could not have been that stupendous transaction which gave God glory by giving sinners safety, if the inspired account brought its dimensions within the compass of a human arithmetic, or denned its issues by the lines of a human demarcation.

While the Christian apostles preached their ideal in the open, the Talmud hides; and its two appendages, the Kahal and Freemasonry, are even more invisible. The three of them use, in order to remain in the dark, a scabrous and accursed means, namely the lie. In other words, the lie is the basis of the system used by Jews, to whom one can say.. 'You speak, therefore you be.' But the lie has a mortal enemy, namely the truth. For truth is the distinctive trait of Christianity.

Nicolae Paulescu