Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Universities are only nurseries of prejudice, corruption, barbarism, and pedantry

In India, knowledge has always been considered more valuable than power, fame or riches. In our tradition, educational institutions are respected as temples of learning.

The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think

I would by no means wish a daughter of mine to be a progeny of learning.

We in universities are not in the democracy business. What we do, when we're doing it, is teach and learn.

Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.

No man should escape our universities without knowing how little he knows.

The University conceives of itself as dedicated to the power of the intellect. Its commitment is to the way of reason.

It is the goal of the American university to be the brains of the republic.

A University should be a place of light, of liberty, and of learning.

An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don't.

A college education shows a man how little other people know.

Diligent as one must be in learning, one must be as diligent in forgetting; otherwise the process is one of pedantry, not culture.

Men have a respect for scholarship and learning greatly out of proportion to the use they commonly serve.

The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character - that is the goal of true education.

The task of a university is the creation of the future, so far as rational thought and civilized modes of appreciation can affect the issue.

Within the confines of the lecture hall, no other virtue exists but plain intellectual integrity.

I'd have liked to have been a bit more intellectual. I'd have liked to have had more brains.

I have not the advantage of a classical education, and no man should, in my judgement, accept a degree he cannot read.

Universities are the temple through which alone lies the road to that of Liberty.

It is only through reading that one can understand how people are smarter than you and what they have left behind for you.

If young gentlemen get from their years in college only manliness, esprit de corps, a release of their social gifts, a training ingive and take, a catholic taste in men and the standards of true sportsmen, they have gained much but they have not gained what a college should give them. It should give them insight into the things of the mind and the spiritthe consciousness of having taken on them the vows of true enlightenment and of having undergone the discipline, never to be shaken off, of those who seek wisdom in candor, with faithful labor and travail of spirit.

Learning is, in too many cases, but a foil to common sense; a substitute for true knowledge. Books are less often made use of as spectacles to look at nature with, than as blinds to keep out its strong light and shifting scenery from weak eyes and indolent dispositions. The learned are mere literary drudges.

A man who cannot think is not an educated man however many college degrees he may have acquired.

The wiser a man becomes, the more he will read, and those who are wisest read most.