Academic Humility Quotes

I always begin my courses by saying if I knew anything about, politics, I wouldn’t be here.

What do you think I'm a professor of? The little finger? (On offers of honorary doctorates.)

When I was finishing my PhD, I could just see people who were a bit quicker and brighter and smarter than me and I thought, 'well they are the people who are going to make the great discoveries.'

I think, the more of a student I am, the better it will be for my work because it means once you have too many accolades you don't try harder. I would never allow myself to think that I don't have to try harder. I like the idea of always learning, always trying to do better. The word "master" sits uneasy on my terms.

When [Erwin Schrödinger] went to the Solvay conferences in Brussels, he would walk from the station to the hotel where the delegates stayed, carrying all his luggage in a rucksack and looking so like a tramp that it needed a great deal of argument at the reception desk before he could claim a room.

Economists should be modest and be aware that they are part of the broader social science community. We need to be pragmatic about the methods we use. When we need to do history, we should do history. When we need to study political science, we should study political science.

Study is like the heaven's glorious sun, That will not be deep-searched with saucy looks: Small have continual plodders ever won, Save base authority from others' books.

I couldn't pass a senior high school math test right now, but I could probably teach intellectual property and trademark law at Harvard.

In the first place, the preparation of the Nobel lecture which I am to give has shown me, even more clearly than I knew before, how many others share with me, often, indeed, have anticipated me, in the discoveries for which you have awarded me the prize.

I wasn't the guy who got straight As. I got As and Bs and a couple Cs.

I've never professed to be anything but an average student.

Our professor was Marty Scorsese. Marty was a graduate student, or Mr. Scorsese, which is what I had to call him, and still do when I see him 'cause he gave me a C.

I am a great fan of science, but I cannot do a quadratic equation.

I'm not a stereotypical professor type. I don't smoke a pipe and wear a tweedy jacket. I'm more like a student who stayed at the university for so long that they gave him a job to keep him out of trouble.

I wrote a novel for my degree, and I'm very happy I didn't submit that to a publisher. I sympathize with my professors who had to read it.

Economists tend to think they are much, much smarter than historians, than everybody. And this is a bit too much because at the end of the day, we don't know very much in economics.

No sociologist should think himself too good, even in his old age, to make tens of thousands of quite trivial computations in his head and perhaps for months at a time.

I never insisted that I was a good student.

I was good at math, math was my thing - but I was not nearly good enough to be an astrophysicist. I was way outta my league. I realized this very quickly.

I have always been, am, and propose to remain a mere scholar. All that I have ever proposed to myself is to say, this and this I have learned; thus and thus have I learned it; go thou and learn better; but do not thrust on my shoulders the responsibility for your own laziness if you elect to take, on my authority, conclusions the value of which you ought to have tested for yourself.

He that knew all that learning ever writ, Knew only this - that he knew nothing yet.

It wasn't until I got to college and had a lot of my ego beaten out of me... That's when I started to turn to literature as something deeper than a way to put up points.