Hoyt & Roberts, comps. Hoyt’s New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations. 1922.
Students
Rocking on a lazy billow
With roaming eyes,
Cushioned on a dreamy pillow,
Thou art now wise.
Wake the power within thee slumbering,
Trim the plot that’s in thy keeping,
Thou wilt bless the task when reaping
Sweet labour’s prize.
John Stuart Blackie—Address to the Edinburgh Students. Quoted by Lord Iddlesleigh—Desultory Reading.
Strange to the world, he wore a bashful look,
The fields his study, nature was his book.
Bloomfield—Farmer’s Boy. Spring. L. 31.
Experience is the best of schoolmasters, only the school-fees are heavy.
Carlyle—Miscellaneous Essays. I. 137. (Ed. 1888). Same idea in Franklin—Preliminary Address to the Pennsylvania Almanac for 1758.
The scholar who cherishes the love of comfort, is not fit to be deemed a scholar.
Confucius—Analects. Bk. XIV. Ch. III.
The studious class are their own victims; they are thin and pale, their feet are cold, their heads are hot, the night is without sleep, the day a fear of interruption,—pallor, squalor, hunger, and egotism. If you come near them and see what conceits they entertain—they are abstractionists, and spend their days and nights in dreaming some dream; in expecting the homage of society to some precious scheme built on a truth, but destitute of proportion in its presentment, of justness in its application, and of all energy of will in the schemer to embody and vitalize it.
Emerson—Representative Men. Montaigne.
The world’s great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men.
Holmes—Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. VI.
Ah, pensive scholar, what is fame?
A fitful tongue of leaping flame;
A giddy whirlwind’s fickle gust,
That lifts a pinch of mortal dust;
A few swift years, and who can show
Which dust was Bill, and which was Joe?
Holmes—Poems of the Class of ’29. Bill and Joe. St. 7.
Where should the scholar live? In solitude, or in society? in the green stillness of the country, where he can hear the heart of Nature beat, or in the dark, gray town where he can hear and feel the throbbing heart of man?
Longfellow—Hyperion. Bk. I. Ch. VIII.
And then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school.
As You Like It. Act II. Sc. 7. L. 145.
He was a scholar, and a ripe and good one;
Exceeding wise, fair-spoken, and persuading;
Lofty and sour to them that lov’d him not;
But to those men that sought him sweet as summer.
Henry VIII. Act IV. Sc. 2. L. 51.
And with unwearied fingers drawing out
The lines of life, from living knowledge hid.
Spenser—Faerie Queene. Bk. IV. Canto II. St. 48.