Abbott L. Lowell Quotations

You will not accept credit that is due to another, or harbor jealousy of an explorer who is more fortunate.

All that you may achieve or discover you will regard as a fragment of a larger pattern of the truth which from the separate approaches every true scholar is striving to descry.

Your aim will be knowledge and wisdom, not the reflected glamour of fame.

You will be courteous to your elders who have explored to the point from which you may advance; and helpful to your juniors who will progress farther by reason of your labors.

You will seek not a near but a distant objective, and you will not be satisfied with what you may have done.

Pleasure is a by-product of doing something that is worth doing. Therefore, do not seek pleasure as such. Pleasure comes of seeking something else, and comes by the way.

I must follow them. I am their leader.

There's a Harvard man on the wrong side of every question.

A tale is told of a man in Paris during the upheaval in 1948, who saw a friend marching after a crowd toward the barricades. Warning him that these could not be held against the troops, that he had better keep way, he received this reply, " I must follow them. I am their leader."

All social life, stability, progress, depend upon each man's confidence in his neighbor, a reliance upon him to do his duty.

The mark of an educated man is the ability to make a reasoned guess on the basis of insufficient information.

Of course there's a lot of knowledge in universities: the freshmen bring a little in; the seniors don't take much away, so knowledge sort of accumulates.