Professors Quotes

• I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality.

  James Joyce

  Writing, Way, Arguing

  James Joyce, Jeri Johnson (2008). “Ulysses”, p.10, Oxford Paperbacks

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• My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors.

  Maya Angelou

  Education, Mother, School

  FaceBook post by Maya Angelou from Oct 07, 2015

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• A professor can never better distinguish himself in his work than by encouraging a clever pupil, for the true discovers are among them, as comets amongst the stars.

  Carl Linnaeus

  Education, Stars, Clever

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• Text is just ink on a page until a reader comes along and gives it life.

  Louise Rosenblatt

  Book, Reading, Writing

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• What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Life, Motivational, Education

  22 Copy quote

• Basically, I’m not interested in doing research and I never have been... I’m interested in understanding, which is quite a different thing. And often to understand something you have to work it out yourself because no one else has done it.

  David Blackwell

  Inspirational, Work, Understanding

  Interview with Donald J. Albers, published in Donald J. Albers and Gerald L. Alexanderson "Mathematical People: Profiles and Interviews", 1985.

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• Don't let others define you. Don't let the past confine you. Take charge of your life with confidence and determination and there are no limits on what you can do or be.

  Michael Josephson

  Inspirational, Life, Motivational

  226 Copy quote

• It appears that my worst fears have been realised: we have made progress in everything yet nothing has changed.

  Derrick Bell

  Change, Fear, African American

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• 

  You can't stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.

  Jon Kabat-Zinn

  Inspirational, Change, Positive

  Jon Kabat-Zinn (2005). “Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life”, Hyperion

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• We go forward with our heads held high, but look back and remember where we come from.

  Michael Hudson

  Inspirational, Moving On, Moving Forward

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• The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true.

  J. Robert Oppenheimer

  Inspirational, Funny, Life

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• Anyone can squash a bug but all professors of this world couldn't build one.

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  Squash, World, Bugs

  6 Copy quote

• I am standing on the seashore. A ship spreads her white sails to the morning breeze and starts for the ocean. I stand watching her until she fades on the horizon, and someone at my side says, She is gone. Gone where? The loss of sight is in me, not in her. Just at the moment when someone says, She is gone, there are others who are watching her coming. Other voices take up the glad shout, Here she comes! That is dying.

  Henry Scott Holland

  Morning, Ocean, Loss

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• Such is the grasping tendency of the human heart, that it must have a something to lay hold of - and which, if wrested away without the substitution of another something in its place, would leave a void and a vacancy as painful to the mind, as hunger is to the natural system.... The heart must have something to cling to.

  Thomas Chalmers

  Heart, Mind, Vacancy

  Thomas Chalmers (1855). “Sermons: Select Works”, p.250

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• Culture is an instrument wielded by professors to manufacture professors, who when their turn comes will manufacture professors.

  Simone Veil

  Education, Culture, Instruments

  "The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind". Book by Simone Veil, part 2: Uprootedness, chapter 1: Uprootedness in the Towns, 2002.

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• Earth is so thick with divine possibility that it is a wonder we can walk anywhere without cracking our shins on altars.

  Barbara Brown Taylor

  Inspirational, Christian, Religious

  FaceBook post by Barbara Brown Taylor from Nov 25, 2014

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• To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.

  Barack Obama

  Friends, Leather Jackets, Rocks

  Barack Obama (2007). “Dreams From My Father”, p.100, Canongate Books

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• My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my 'blackness' than ever before. I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don't belong.

  Michelle Obama

  White, Trying, Matter

  "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community". Senior thesis, Princeton University, p. 14-15, 1985.

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• The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.

  Arnold J. Toynbee

  Inspirational, Determination, Work

  "Mindfulness" edited by Ellen J. Langer, (p. 133), 1989.

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• Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.

  Sinclair Lewis

  Education, Literature, Cold

  Nobel Prize address, Stockholm, 12 Dec. 1930

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• After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.

  Albert Camus

  Teacher, Retirement, Book

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• Many professors are Marxists or other varieties of radicals who hate America.

  Phyllis Schlafly

  Hate, America, Marxist

  "Feminist Mischief on College Campuses". Phyllis Schlafly, "Phyllis Schlafly Report", Volume 38, No. 9, eagleforum.org. April 2005.

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• I still believe in man in spite of man. I believe in language even though it has been wounded, deformed, and perverted by the enemies of mankind. And I continue to cling to words because it is up to us to transform them into instruments of comprehension rather than contempt. It is up to us to choose whether we wish to use them to curse or to heal, to wound or to console.

  Elie Wiesel

  Inspirational, Sympathy, Believe

  Elie Wiesel (2012). “Open Heart”, p.73, Schocken

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• Modern technology has become a total phenomenon for civilization, the defining force of a new social order in which efficiency is no longer an option but a necessity imposed on all human activity.

  Jacques Ellul

  Technology, Order, Civilization

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• It seems that for success in science or art, a dash of autism is essential.

  Hans Asperger

  Funny, Success, Art

  169 Copy quote