One of the very important characteristics of a student is to question. Let the students ask questions.
When the fabric of the universe becomes unknown, it is the duty of the university to produce weavers.
Accepting money from the federal government to conduct research places academic inquiry in the service of national interests.
And seek for truth in the groves of Academy
Quintus Horatius Flaccus
I like historical things; I like researching things.
Academical disputation gives vigor and briskness to the mind thus exercised, and relieves the languor of private study and meditation.
Children whose curiosity survives parental discipline and who manage to grow up before they blow up are invited to join the Yale faculty. Within the university they go on asking their questions and trying to find the answers ... it is a place where the world's hostility to curiosity can be defied.
Jesuits encourage an intellectual rigor in a way that I like.
It is my inner conviction that the development of science seeks in the main to satisfy the longing for pure knowledge.
Scholars do one of two things when they discover information that doesn't fit what they already know. Either they sweep it aside so it doesn't bring their cherished theories into question or they focus on it with laserlike intensity and try to get to the bottom of the mystery.
I believe everything learned in college is an answer to a question that someone has posed. Questions get posed differently and the answers that come back transport us to places we never knew existed.
Teaching and research are not to be confused with training for a profession. Their greatness and their misfortune is that they are a refuge or a mission.
This isn't higher education studying itself.
What is a Professor of Poetry? How can poetry be professed?
Academic freedom really means freedom of inquiry. To be able to probe according to one's own interest, knowledge and conscience is the most important freedom the scholar has, and part of that process is to state its results.
I never do research unless it's extraordinary circumstances.
It is not the least service which a college or university may render to those under its instruction, to habituate them to looking not only patiently but methodically on both sides, before adopting any conclusion upon controverted issues.
This is an extract from a well-known standard for college professors.
I really like research.
Research is of considerable importance in certain fields, such as science and history.
If you think about basic science or coming up with new theories of mathematics, these are not the kinds of things which are necessarily a well-defined market to pay people.
In the first English class I attended, Prof. E. H. Elliot, addressing me, asked if I really belonged to the Junior B. A. class, and I had to answer him in the affirmative. He then proceeded to inquire how old I was.
In the pursuit of knowledge, follow it wherever it is to be found; like fern, it is the produce of all climates, and like coin, its circulation is not restricted to any particular class.
I despise research. I think it's a crutch.
Historians are not good at hypothetical questions.
During my academical life, and from this time forward, I was indefatigable in my search after truth. I read all the authors of greatest repute, for and against the Trinity, original sin, and the most disputed doctrines, but I was not yet of an understanding sufficiently ripe for impartial decision, and all my inquiries terminated in Calvinism.