Humanities Quotes

“What we have witnessed in our own time is the death of universities as centres of critique. Since Margaret Thatcher, the role of academia has been to service the status quo, not challenge it in the name of justice, tradition, imagination, human welfare, the free play of the mind or alternative visions of the future. We will not change this simply by increasing state funding of the humanities as opposed to slashing it to nothing. We will change it by insisting that a critical reflection on human values and principles should be central to everything that goes on in universities, not just to the study of Rembrandt or Rimbaud.”
― Terry Eagleton

“You can’t enjoy art or books in a hurry.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly

“Whenever the intensity of looking reaches a certain degree, one becomes aware of an equally intense energy coming towards one through the appearance of whatever it is one is scrutinizing.”
― John Berger

“The humanities should constitute the core of any university worth the name.”
― Terry Eagleton

“In my parents' day and age, it used to be the person who fell short. Now it's the discipline. Reading the classics is too difficult, therefore it's the classics that are to blame. Today the student asserts his incapacity as a privilege. I can't learn it, so there is something wrong with it. And there is something especially wrong with the bad teacher who wants to teach it. There are no more criteria, Mr. Zuckerman, only opinions.”
― Philip Roth, The Human Stain

“The humanities are like the great old Paris Flea Market where, amidst masses of junk, people with a good eye found cast away treasures...They are like a refugee camp where all the geniuses driven out of their jobs and countries by unfriendly regimes are idling.”
― Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind

“إن القرآن لم يذر وسيلة موصلة إلى إنعاش العقل وتحرير الفكر إلا وتذرع بها، فهو إذا تحاكم فإلى العقل، وإذا حاج فبحكم العقل، وإذا سخط فعلى معطلي العقل، وإذا رضي فعن أولي العقل”
― عبد العزيز جاويش, أثر القرآن في تحرير الفكر البشري

“I have said that in one respect my mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost my taste for pictures or music. Music generally sets me thinking too energetically on what I have been at work on, instead of giving me pleasure. I retain some taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause me the exquisite delight which it formerly did. On the other hand, novels which are works of the imagination, though not of a very high order, have been for years a wonderful relief and pleasure to me, and I often bless all novelists. A surprising number have been read aloud to me, and I like all if moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily–against which a law ought to be passed. A novel, according to my taste, does not come into the first class unless it contains some person whom one can thoroughly love, and if a pretty woman all the better.

This curious and lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic tastes is all the odder, as books on history, biographies, and travels (independently of any scientific facts which they may contain), and essays on all sorts of subjects interest me as much as ever they did. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly organised or better constituted than mine, would not, I suppose, have thus suffered; and if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.”
― Charles Darwin, Autobiography Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Descent of Man A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World Coral Reefs Voyage of the Beagle Origin of Species Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals

“The case for the humanities is not hard to make, though it can be difficult--to such an extent have we been marginalized, so long have we acceded to that marginalization--not to sound either defensive or naive. The humanities, done right, are the crucible in which our evolving notions of what it means to be fully human are put to the test; they teach us, incrementally, endlessly, not what to do, but how to be. Their method is confrontational, their domain unlimited, their "product" not truth but the reasoned search for truth, their "success" something very much like Frost's momentary stay against confusion.”
― Mark Slouka, Essays from the Nick of Time: Reflections and Refutations

“In trying to justify the humanities, as in trying to live a life, what may turn out to matter most is holding one's nerve.”
― Stefan Collini

“Might not too much investment in teaching Shelley mean falling behind our economic competitors? But there is no university without humane inquiry, which means that universities and advanced capitalism are fundamentally incompatible. And the political implications of that run far deeper than the question of student fees.”
― Terry Eagleton

“When they first emerged in their present shape around the turn of the 18th century, the so-called humane disciplines had a crucial social role. It was to foster and protect the kind of values for which a philistine social order had precious little time. The modern humanities and industrial capitalism were more or less twinned at birth. To preserve a set of values and ideas under siege, you needed among other things institutions known as universities set somewhat apart from everyday social life. This remoteness meant that humane study could be lamentably ineffectual. But it also allowed the humanities to launch a critique of conventional wisdom.”
― Terry Eagleton

“The fate of the humanities faculty in the burgeoning world of for-profit higher education is easy to predict, but painful to contemplate. Universities that, by virtue of their very mission, validate economic efficiency and productivity above all else also sanction apathy toward the humanities. (p. 97)”
― Frank Donoghue, The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities

“A different voice may be particularly effective in disturbing the existing participants into re-examining matters they had come to take for granted.”
― Stefan Collini

“Good work, like good talk or any other form of worthwhile human relationship, depends upon being able to assume an extended shared world.”
― Stefan Collini

“Depth of understanding involves something which is more than merely a matter of deconstructive alertness; it involves a measure of interpretative charity and at least the beginnings of a wide responsiveness.”
― Stefan Collini

“In my humble way I am a student of man, and some years ago I made the discovery that he is most intimately to be studied in the reflections of him provided for the theatre.”
― Rafael Sabatini, Scaramouche

“People are always saying the humanities are dead so it's strange how many conferences there are.”
― Yōko Tawada, Scattered All Over the Earth

“إن هذا الارتياب المتأصل في المثقف المعني بالمعرفة دون العمل، قد شدت من أزره وطورته ظروف وعوامل عديدة كثيرة، من بينها الرغبة في إقامة وتدعيم مجتمع المساواة والندية الاجتماعية”
― Jerome Kagan, الثقافات الثلاث: العلوم الطبيعية والاجتماعية والإنسانيات في القرن الحادي والعشرين

“When abandon the arts, you become a machine. You become part of the capitalist machinery for production. That's why, many times, when you're a worker, you're forced to put aside your artistic inclinations.”
― Atty. Luke Espiritu

“History made by smartness alone, is no more than caves of silicon.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Amor Apocalypse: Canım Sana İhtiyacım

“Years later, while I was in college, my Dadi asked my mom what I was studying for hours at night, reading all those thick books. My mom said I was most likely going to major in "the humanities." Dadi froze. We feared she had had a ministroke. She slowly covered her shocked mouth and said, "But in Pakistan only the duffers and idiots do the humanities.”
― Wajahat Ali, Go Back to Where You Came From: And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American

“La religion est le rêve de l'esprit humain”
― Ludwig Feuerbach

“I have learnt to abide by the laws of my own sanity.”
― Isiphile Petse

“Незабаром всі країни світу почнуть виготовляти покоління корисних машин, а не повноцінних громадян, що здатні самостійно мислити, критикувати традиційний уклад та розуміти значення страждань і досягнень інших людей.”
― Martha C. Nussbaum, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities

“Перерахую здібності, що пов'язані з гуманітарними науками та мистецтвом: здатність до критичного мислення; здатність відірватися від приватних інтересів і поглянути на світові проблеми з точки зору "громадянина світу"; і, нарешті, здатність співчутливо ставитися до труднощів іншої людини.”
― Martha C. Nussbaum, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities

“A folyosón Enikő az egyik diákjába, Király Robiba botlik, aki egy hónapok óta ottfelejtett asztalon ül, és fintorogva olvas egy nem olyan régen megjelent novelláskötetet. Enikő régóta ismeri Robit, a fiú évek óta látogatja a szemináriumait, még most is, pedig így heted-nyolcadéves hallgatóként már megválogatja, hogy hova tesz még be a lábát. (262.)”
― Réka Mán-Várhegyi, Mágneshegy

“But Science — I use the word for the moment in its restricted meaning —

though it may displace the Humanities, could not and cannot replace them, for it cannot provide us with any clear record of how we have developed mentally.

For this we must turn to History, but History not in the sense in which that word is customarily employed as equivalent merely to Political History, nor even in the wider sense of Sociological History.

It is the history of mankind as a whole
that we need, the history of civilization, the history of man's thoughts, of man's knowledge, of man's self.”
― Ivor B Hart, Makers of Science: Mathematics, Physics, Astronomy

“AI has great potential, but let's leave the humanities to humans.”
― Steve A. Wiggins

“Why is it that the difference between humans and animals is so insisted on? If this were a simple division as between different subjects then why is there so much impassioned writing about it? Why need humans insist on their wearisome catalogue of language, writing, works of the imagination, conceptual analysis and so forth, as differing them from other animals? Why do people angrily dispute any suggestion that, for example, ants build cities or that chimpanzees love their young, rather than that they follow instincts which do not include human feelings? Why the grudging admission by scientists, only within this century, that animals feel pain? Why do our modern languages slip so easily into animalistic words like bestial or feral to indicate a moral distinction between us and them? Why are internalised thoughts so embedded that set animal and spiritual at different ends of a spectrum? The answer is easily given. It is because of the still inescapably present inheritance of religious thought. ~ Peter Ellis”
― Krishanu Maiti, Posthumanist Perspectives on Literary and Cultural Animals