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Quotes tagged “Liberal Arts”

“Despite what your left-leaning liberal arts education instilled in you, reading, writing, and creating is a luxury not a right. Entitlement is thinking otherwise.”
— Molly Guy, 40 Things I’ve Learned in 40 Years
Tagged: Liberal Arts, Money, Career
“Do something you love and never work a day in your life they said. So I got a liberal arts degree.”
— GraphicCreations, Do something you love and never work a day in your life they said
Tagged: Liberal Arts, Jokes
“A liberal arts degree actually is good for something. Because of its diversity, the liberal arts provide a surprisingly good base for growth and learning.”
— Kenneth Burke, 23 Non Cliched Life Lessons I have Learned From Years Of Screwing Up
Tagged: 20-something, College, degree, Liberal Arts
“That Wheaton couldn’t make room for a scholar like Hawkins raises questions about what real diversity might look like in a setting where a certain uniformity of belief is essential.”
— Ruth Graham, The Professor Wore a Hijab in Solidarity — Then Lost Her Job
Tagged: Religion, Diversity, Education, Liberal Arts
“Really, why should we be forced to assume that there is an essential difference between 'true' and 'false' in the first place? Isn't it enough to assume that there are degrees of apparency and, so to speak, lighter and darker shadows and hues of appearance—different valeurs to use the language of painters?”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future
Tagged: Art, Complexity, Liberal Arts, Marginalization, Objectivity, Painting, Truth
“The artist may be well advised to keep his work to himself till it is completed, because no one can readily help him or advise him with it. ”
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Literature and Mass Culture
Tagged: Advice, Art, Artist, Inner Voice, Liberal Arts
“If music was studied, recreated or now-first-expressed emotion, why was he listening with such strained intensity, as if to learn some answer, solve some important life-riddle? Wasn't it the case, in fact, that he'd been listening all this while for the wrong thing entirely; that music— for that matter, all the arts—told one nothing at all, simply described things as they are, or were, or might be, simply named things as Adam was said to have named things in the garden except that it was the thing named? Was it the case, to put the idea more exactly, that music was nothing more than, as the formalists thought, one more expression of Nature's way, atomic orderliness, no more significant or meaningful— except for the fact that it was created by human beings and in public places flashed its complexity— than a jonquil, an elm tree, that it was simply one more particular thing in a crowded, gasping anarchy of things—itself, simply: meaningless and ultimately as worthless as a soup-spoon, or Donnie Matthews' foetus; or meaningless except in that, like the foetus, it might not have existed and someday would cease to exist?”
— Peter Mickelsson, Mickelsson's Ghosts
Tagged: Art, Liberal Arts, Meaning, Music
“In the fall of 2004, my freshman students and I analyzed a speech of John Kerry's and found it confused, contradictory, inchoate, and weak. Six weeks later I went out and voted for John Kerry. What I was doing in class was subjecting Kerry's arguments to an academic interrogation. Do they hang together? Are they coherent? Do they respond to the issues? Are they likely to be persuasive? He flunked. But when I stepped into the ballot box, I was asking another set of questions: Does Kerry represent or speak for interests close to mine? Whom would he bring into his administration? What are likely to be his foreign policy initiatives? How does he stand on the environment? The answers I gave to the first set of academic questions had no relationship whatsoever to the answers I gave to the second set of political questions. Whether it is a person or a policy, it makes perfect sense to approve it in one venue and disapprove it in another, and vice versa. You could decide that despite the lack of skill with which a policy was defended (an academic conclusion), it was nevertheless the right policy for the country (a political decision). In the classroom, you can probe the policy's history; you can explore its philosophical lineage; you can examine its implications and likely consequences, but you can't urge it on your students. Everything depends on keeping these two judgments, and the activities that generate them, separate.”
— Stanley Fish, Save the World on Your Own Time
Tagged: Complexity, Infinte Registers, Liberal Arts, Openness
“It is quite true that today a great deal of art grows out of exhibitionist impulses. Certainly some of the worst does. Maybe some of the best. It may even be possible that all art involves a certain exhibitionism at least of some vague sublimated kind.”
— Walter Ong, SLU.EDU
Tagged: Art, Exhibitionism, Liberal Arts, Reality Hunger
“One of the basic and difficult lessons every artist must learn is that even the failed pieces are essential.”
— David Bayles, Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils
Tagged: Liberal Arts, Meaning, purpose
“The most profound choice in life is to either accept things as they exist or to accept the responsibility for changing them.”
— Don Koberg, The Universal Traveler
Tagged: Creativity, Liberal Arts, Meaning, process, purpose
“PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT”
— Jenny Holzer, Stuart Collection UC San Diego
Tagged: Contemporary Art, Jenny Holzer, Liberal Arts
“The simplest reply was given by Tolstoy with his statement, 'Science is meaningless because it has no answer to the only questions that matter to us: What should we do? How shall we live?’ The fact that science cannot give us this answer is absolutely indisputable. The question is only in what sense does it give 'no' answer, and whether or not it might after all prove useful for somebody who is able to ask the right question.”
— Max Weber, The Vocation Lectures
Tagged: Epistemology, Knowledge, Liberal Arts, Science
“Indeed, when liberal arts education is doing its job properly, it is just like poetry because, like poetry, it makes no claims to efficacy beyond the confines of its performance. A good liberal arts course is not good because it tells you what to do when you next step into the ballot box or negotiate a contract. A good liberal arts course is good because it introduces you to questions you did not know how to ask and provides you with the skills necessary to answer them, at least provisionally. And what do you do with the answers you arrive at? What do you do with the habits of thought that have become yours after four or more years of discussing the mind/body problem, or the structure of DNA, or Firmat’s theorem, or the causes of World War I? Beats me! As far as I can tell those habits of thought and the liberal arts education that provides them don’t enable you to do anything, and, even worse, neither do they prevent you from doing anything. The view I am offering of higher education is properly called deflationary; it takes the air out of some inflated balloons. It denies to teaching the moral and philosophical pretensions that lead practitioners to envision themselves as agents of change or as the designers of a “transformative experience,” a phrase I intensely dislike. I acknowledge a sense in which education can be transformative. A good course may transform a student who knew little about the material in the beginning into a student who knows something about it at the end. That’s about all the transformation you should or could count on. Although the debates about what goes on in our colleges and universities are often conducted as if large moral, philosophical, and even theological matters are at stake, what is really at stake, more often than not, is a matter of administrative judgment with respect to professional behavior and job performance. Teaching is a job, and what it requires is not a superior sensibility or a purity of heart and intention—excellent teachers can be absolutely terrible human beings, and exemplary human beings can be terrible teachers—but mastery of a craft. Teachers who prefer grandiose claims and ambitions to that craft are the ones who diminish it and render it unworthy.”
— Stanley Fish, Save the World on Your Own Time
Tagged: Education, Liberal Arts

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This page was created by our editorial team. Each page is manually curated, researched, collected, and issued by our staff writers. Quotes contained on this page have been double checked for their citations, their accuracy and the impact it will have on our readers.

Kelly Peacock is an accomplished poet and social media expert based in Brooklyn, New York. Kelly has a Bachelor's degree in creative writing from Farieligh Dickinson University and has contributed to many literary and cultural publications. Kelly assists on a wide variety of quote inputting and social media functions for Quote Catalog. Visit her personal website here.

Kendra Syrdal is a writer, editor, partner, and senior publisher for The Thought & Expression Company. Over the last few years she has been personally responsible for writing, editing, and producing over 30+ million pageviews on Thought Catalog.