Robert B. Parker Quotes

Throughout my college years, I'd watch my sister squeal every Christmas as she unwrapped another 'Buffy' DVD set. I didn't know much about the series, but I was filled with that obnoxious self-importance that comes from having decided to be an Academic Who Reads Serious Things.

The liberal professions, and in a wider sense the well-to-do classes, are certainly those with the liveliest taste for knowledge and the most active intellectual life.

A lot of high-level scientists are in fact people of almost universal interest.

I arrived from Harvard, where I had studied philosophy and the history of ideas, with a bias toward literature and formal thought.

Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.

The university is our culture's assertion that what is made by the mind has value and can convey values.

I was quite academic, quite geeky when I was a kid. I was more interested in going to school than I was in becoming a film star or something.

A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking.

I don't think academic writing ever was wonderful. However, science used to be much less specialized.

I like being surrounded by students and intellectuals.

If God had meant Harvard professors to appear in People magazine, She wouldn't have invented The New York Review of Books.

He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.

Academia is a rarified culture, especially an Ivy League academic background.

Cherish the interests of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them.

In some ways I've gone to Cash and Carter graduate school.

Athletics weren't really in the cards in my family - books, not body.

The part of my education that has had the deepest influence wasn't any particular essay or even a specific class, it was how I was able to apply everything I learned in the library to certain situations in my life. . . The library takes me away from my everyday life and allows me to see other places and learn to understand other people unlike myself.

The love of retirement has in all ages adhered closely to those minds which have been most enlarged by knowledge, or elevated by genius. Those who enjoyed everything generally supposed to confer happiness have been forced to seek it in the shades of privacy.

Don't believe those lies about intellectual people. They're only written to soothe the majority.

Science is expanding, and with it our vision of the universe. although this new and constantly changing view may not always give us comfort, it does have the virtue of truth according to our most effective resources for acquiring knowledge. No philosophy, moral outlook, or religion can be inconsistent with the findings of science and hope to endure among educated people.

Many people have accused me of having a romantic view, whereas I personally I feel sorry for those who have lost romance in their lives.

I'm not saying that all college students are subhuman - I'm just saying that if you aim to spend a few years mastering the art of pomposity, these are places where you can be taught by undisputed experts.

I liked the education. I liked people learning things all around me and I liked going to people's classes.

To a true-blue professor of literature in an American university, literature is not something that a plain human being, living today, painfully sits down to produce. No; it is something dead.

Whereas she wished more of the population were better educated, she also believed that education was largely wasted on the majority of the people she met.