Academic Education Quotes

“The teacher should be like the conductor in the orchestra, not the trainer in the circus.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Education Decree

“The most dangerous thing about an academic education is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract thinking instead of simply paying attention to what’s going on in front of me.
Instead of paying attention to what's going on inside me.”
― David Foster Wallace

“...she knew from school that that sort of literature was boring: Gorky was correct but somehow ponderous; Mayakovsky was very correct but somehow awkward; Saltykov-Shchedrin was progressive, but you could die yawning if you tried to read him through; Turgenev was limited to his nobleman's ideals; Goncharov was associated with the beginnings of Russian capitalism; Lev Tolstoi came to favor patriarchal peasantry—and their teacher did not recommend reading Tolstoi's novels because they were very long and only confused the clear critical essays written about him. And then they reviewed a batch of writers totally unknown to anyone: Dostoyevsky, Stepnyak-Kravchinsky, and Sukhovo-Kobylin. It was true that one did not even have to remember the titles of their works. In all this long procession, only Pushkin shone like a sun.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle

“The academician commonly is more interested in gaining information to swell his or her bag of facts, than to open him or herself up to psycho-spiritual transmutation. This wisdom would be wasted on those whose only interest is to rape wisdom for academic data.”
― Laurence Galian, Beyond Duality: The Art of Transcendence

“As I see it, academia is the mirror of society, and the ugly academic reality we are witnessing nowadays is an indication that many academics have let the society down, and that we have not done a good job in being part of people’s struggle for justice.”
― Louis Yako

“A university cannot make an imbecile less of a fool, neither can it make a warped mind straight; it is supposed to be a laboratory for the inquisitive mind so that he or she can take advantage of its academic resources. - On Academic Learning”
― Lamine Pearlheart, Walking the Soul

“Attending creative writing courses is like snorkeling in a pool nearby Tubbataha.”
― Anoir Ou-Chad

“This is because Spirit is as much the Irrational as it is the Rational. Academicians need to show some humility in the face of what will always be Irrational. They only see half the picture.”
― Laurence Galian, The Sun at Midnight: The Revealed Mysteries of the Ahlul Bayt Sufis

“Some misguided scientists and professors of academe possess a kind of arrogance. By misguided we mean those who are content with the extent of their formal knowledge without being characterized by its inner meaning. There is often a lack of humility in science and academia. To them, their intellectual-linear paradigms are the one true way to perceive reality.”
― Laurence Galian, The Sun at Midnight: The Revealed Mysteries of the Ahlul Bayt Sufis