Browsing Quotes With Tag: academia (5)
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“What happened was, I got the idea in my head – and I could not get it out – that college was one more dopey, inane place in the world dedicated to piling up treasure on earth and everything. I mean treasure is treasure, for heaven’s sake. What’s the difference if treasure is money, or property, or even culture, or even just plain knowledge? It all seemed like exactly the same thing to me, if you take off the wrapping – and it still does! Sometimes I think that knowledge – when it’s knowledge for knowledge’s sake, anyway – is the worst of all. The least excusable, certainly.” Franny
Speaker: J.D. SalingerSource: Franny and ZooeyPosted: 22 Aug 2010 at 6:05 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
The cards are stacked (quite properly, I imagine) against all professional aesthetes, and no doubt we all deserve the dark, wordy, academic deaths we all sooner or later die.
Speaker: J.D. SalingerSource: Franny and ZooeyPosted: 22 Aug 2010 at 5:57 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
You do not take up philosophy the way you enter the seminary, with a credo as your sword and a single path as your destiny. Should you study Plato. Epicurus, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel or even Husserl? Esthetics, politics, morality, epistemology, metaphysics? Should you devote your time to teaching, to producing a body of work, to research, to Culture? It makes no difference. The only thing that matters is your intention: are you elevating thought and contributing to the common good, or rather joining the ranks in a field of study whose only purpose is its own perpetuation, and only function the self-reproduction of a sterile elite – for this turns the university into a sect.
Speaker: Muriel BarberySource: the Elegance of the HedgehogPosted: 27 Jun 2009 at 1:02 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
If you want to make a [university] career, take a marginal, exotic text (William Ockham’s 'Sum of Logic’) that is relatively unexplored, abuse its literal meaning by ascribing it to an intention that the author himself had not been aware of (because, as we all know, the unknown in conceptual matters is far more powerful than any conscious design), distort that meaning to the point where it resembles an original thesis (it is the concept of the absolute power of God that is at the basis of a logical analysis, the philosophical implications of which are ignored), burn all your icons while you’re at it (atheism, faith in Reason as opposed to the reason of faith, love of wisdom ad other bagatelles dear to the hearts of socialists), devote a year of your life to this unworthy little game at the expense of a collectivity whom you drag from their beds at seven in the morning, and send a courier to your research director.
Speaker: Muriel BarberySource: the Elegance of the HedgehogPosted: 27 Jun 2009 at 12:59 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
It is the fate of most new and valuable insights to be enthusiastically developed beyond the limits of certainty, or even of probability.
Speaker: Bernard KnoxPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 10:31 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment!