college quotes

To the University of Oxford I acknowledge no obligation; and she will as cheerfully renounce me for a son, as I am willing to disclaim her for a mother. I spent fourteen months at Magdalen College: they proved the fourteen months the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life.

- Edward Gibbon
Memoirs of My Life (published1796), ch.3.

Thisgreat College, of this ancient University, has seen some strange sights. It has seen Wordsworth drunk and Porson sober. And here am I, a better poet than Porson, and a better scholar than Wordsworth, betwixt and between.

- A(lfred) E(dward) Housman
  Speech on taking up the Chair of Latin at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Theyare not clever school boys or scholarship candidates, but 'Fellows of another college'.

-John Edensor Littlewood
  Of the ancient Greeks.  A Mathematician's Miscellany.

It has lately been brought to my knowledge That the Ministers fully design To suppress each cathedral and college, And eject every learned divine. To assist this detestable scheme Three nuncios from Rome are come over; They left Calais on Monday by steam, And landed to dinner at Dover.

-1st Baron
  'The Country Clergyman's Trip to Cambridge', stanza 2.  A satiricalpoem against the opposition to Catholic emancipation.

   But thousands die, without or this or that, Die, and endow a college, or a cat.

- Alexander Pope
  Epistles to Several Persons,'To Lord Bathurst', l.95^6.

Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a symptom of a deficient vitality; and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.

- Robert Louis Stevenson
Virginibus Puerisque,'An Apology for Idlers'.