#academia

I was in an industrial laboratory because academia found me unsuitable. ↗

— Benoit Mandelbrot

#because #found #i #industrial #laboratory

What I learned on my own I still remember ↗

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#discovery #education #intelligence #learning #reading

Of course, it is very important to be sober when you take an exam. Many worthwhile careers in the street-cleansing, fruit-picking and subway-guitar-playing industries have been founded on a lack of understanding of this simple fact. ↗

— Terry Pratchett

#exams #sobriety #career

Self-actualization is what educated existence is all about. For members of the educated class, life is one long graduate school. When they die, God meets them at the gates of heaven, totes up how many fields of self-expression they have mastered, and then hands them a divine diploma and lets them in. ↗

— David Brooks

#graduate-school #intellectualism #meritocracy #self-actualization #upper-class

One entered the world, Denis pursued, having ready-made ideas about everything. One had a philosophy and tried to make life fit into it. One should have lived first and then made one's philosophy to fit life...Life, facts, things were horribly complicated; ideas, even the most difficult of them, deceptively simple. In the world of ideas, everything was clear; in life all was obscure, embroiled. Was it surprising that one was miserable, horribly unhappy? ↗

— Aldous Huxley

#education #ideas #intellectualism #life #philosophy

I envisioned that as my life: staying in academia to make a living and then taking summers off to write my novels. ↗

— David Duchovny

#envisioned #i #life #living #make

The imagination of the genius vastly surpasses his intellect; the intellect of the academic vastly surpasses his imagination ↗

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#art #artist #criticism #critics #genius

When April with its sweet showers has pierced the drought of March to the root, and bathed every vein of earth with that liquid by whose power the flowers are engendered; when the zephyr, too, with its dulcet breath, has breathed life into the tender new shoots in every copse and on every hearth, and the young sun has run half his course in the sign of the Ram, and the little birds that sleep all night with their eyes open give song (so Nature prompts them in their hearts), then, as the poet Geoffrey Chaucer observed many years ago, folk long to go on pilgrimages. Only, these days, professional people call them conferences. The modern conference resembles the pilgrimage of medieval Christendom in that it allows the participants to indulge themselves in all the pleasures and diversions of travel while appearing to be austerely bent on self-improvement. To be sure, there are certain penitential exercises to be performed - the presentation of a paper, perhaps, and certainly listening to papers of others. ↗

— David Lodge

#life

I could have seen myself going into academia, but I don't love it; I just like it. ↗

— Mira Sorvino

#could #going #i #into #just

Academia: a contemporary version of medieval scholasticism that updates the scholarship while retaining the fanaticism of the dark ages. ↗

— Bauvard

#funny #humor #medievalism #age