C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Scholarship
A scholar has no ennui.
Scholarship, save by accident, is never the measure of a man’s power.
To talk in public, to think in solitude, to read and to hear, to inquire and answer inquiries, is the business of a scholar.
In the true literary man there is thus ever, acknowledged or not by the world, a sacredness; he is the light of the world; the world’s priest—guiding it, like a sacred pillar of fire, in its dark pilgrimage through the waste of time.
The resources of the scholar are proportioned to his confidence in the attributes of the intellect.
The mind of the scholar, if you would have it large and liberal, should come in contact with other minds. It is better that his armor should be somewhat bruised by rude encounters, even, than hang forever rusting on the wall.
A great scholar, in the highest sense of the term, is not one who depends simply on an infinite memory, but also on an infinite and electrical power of combination; bringing together from the four winds, like the Angel of the Resurrection, what else were dust from dead men’s bones, into the unity of breathing life.
Scholars are men of peace; they bear no arms, but their tongues are sharper than Actius’s sword, their pens carry further, and give a louder report than thunder. I had rather stand in the shock of a basilisk than in the fury of a merciless pen.