His misfortune was that he loved youth--he was weak to it, it kindled him. If there was one eager eye, one doubting, critical mind..., one lively curiosity in a whole lecture-room full of commonplace boys and girls, he was its servant. That ardour could command him. It hadn't worn out with years, this responsiveness, any more than the magnetic currents wear out; it had nothing to do with Time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In opening your doors to woman, it is mind that will enter the lecture room, it is intelligence that will ask for food; sex will n...ever be felt where science leads for the atmosphere of thought will be around every lecture.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with such applause in the lecture room, How soon, unaccountable, I b...ecame tired and sick; Till rising and gliding out, I wander'd off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My one pupil has begun his work with me, and I will give you a description how the lecture is conducted. It is the most important ...point, you know, that the tutor should be dignified and at a distance from the pupil, and that the pupil should be as much as possible degraded.... So I sit at the further end of the room; outside the door (which is shut) sits the scout; outside the outer door (also shut) sits the sub-scout: half-way downstairs sits the sub- sub-scout: and down in the yard sits the pupil. The questions are shouted from one to the other, and the answers come back in the same way--it is rather confusing till you are well used to it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There's a theory, one I find persuasive, that the quest for knowledge is, at bottom, the search for the answer to the question: "W...here was I before I was born." In the beginning was ... what? Perhaps, in the beginning, there was a curious room, a room like this one, crammed with wonders; and now the room and all it contains are forbidden you, although it was made just for you, had been prepared for you since time began, and you will spend all your life trying to remember it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Enormous Room seems to me to be the book that has nearest approached the mood of reckless adventure in which men will reach th...e white heat of imagination needed to fuse the soggy disjointed complexity of the industrial life about us into seething fluid of creation. There can be no more playing safe.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »