Oxford quotes

  • Let us reunite ourselves with our better mind and with the world through science; and let it be one of our angelic revenges on the Philistines, who among their other sins are theguiltyauthors of Fenianism, tofound at Oxford a chair of Celtic, and to send, through the gentle ministration of science, a message of peace to Ireland.

    - Matthew Arnold
      'On the Study of Celtic Literature'.

  • Oxford is on the whole more attractive than Cambridge to the ordinary visitor; and the traveller is therefore recommended to visit Cambridge first, or to omit it altogether if he cannot visit both.

    - Karl Baedeker
      Great Britain, Route 30:'From London to Oxford'.

  • [At school] I was a modest, good-humoured boy. It is Oxford that has made me insufferable.

    - Sir (Henry) Max(imilian) Beerbohm
      More,'Going Back To School'.

  • The King to Oxford sent a troop of horse, ForTories own no argument but force; With equal skill to Cambridge books he sent, For Whigs admit no force but argument.

    -William Browne
    Literary  Anecdotes.

  • So poetry, which is in Oxford made An art, in London only is a trade.

    -John Dryden
      'Prologue to the University of Oxon†at the  Acting of  The Silent Woman'.

  • The Rhine is not more impassable than the Nile or Euphrates, and the Arabian fleet might have sailed without a naval combat into the mouth of theThames. Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pupils might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctityand truth of the revelation of Mahomet.

    - Edward Gibbon
    ^88  The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ch.52.

  • 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.

  • The clever men at Oxford Know all that there is to be knowed. But they none of them know one half as much As intelligent MrToad.

    - Kenneth Grahame
      The Wind in the Willows, ch.10.

  • I often think how much easier the world would have been to manage if Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini had been at Oxford.

    - Edward Frederick Lindley Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax
      Speech,York, 4 Nov.

  • You will hear more good things on the outside of a stagecoach from London to Oxford than if you were to pass a twelvemonth with the undergraduates, or heads of colleges, of that famous university.

    -William Hazlitt
    Table Talk, vol.1,'The Ignorance of the Learned'.

  • I can't tell who's leadingit's either Oxford or Cambridge.

    -John Snagge
      Radio commentary on the Boat Race, when the engine of Snagge's launch broke down. Quoted in C Dodd Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race (1983), ch.14.

Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations Copyright © 2010 by Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Published by Wiley, Hoboken, NJ. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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