“No real Englishman, in his secret soul, was ever sorry for the death of a political economist: he is much more likely to be sorry for his life.”

Roger Kimball’s Introduction to Walter Bagehot, Physics and Politics

"Talent does what it can; genius does what it must."

Edward George Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873) [the guy who also said "the pen is mightier than the sword" and started a novel "It was a dark and stormy night"]
 

"Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life."

Often attributed to Immanuel Kant but appears to be from Will Durant, part of Durant's effort to explain Kant's thought (whatever the merits of his analysis, Kant's often impenetrable prose style did not lend itself to bon mots)

"The world is always ready to receive talent with open arms. Very often it does not know what to do with genius. Talent is a docile creature. It bows its head meekly while the world slips the collar over it... It draws its load cheerfully, and is patient of the bit and of the whip. But genius is always impatient of its harness; its wild blood makes it hard to train."

Oliver Wendell Holmes, quoted as "Thought du jour" in Globe & Mail December 4, 2001

“One of the most eerie phenomena of our era, Eric Hobsbawm states in his masterful history Age of Extremes; The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991, is the ‘destruction of the past.’ Most young people, he argues, now ‘grow up in a sort of permanent present lacking any organic relation to the public past of the times they live in.’”

Sean Mills in The Beaver April-May 2005

“The study of history brings to youth the experience that is lacking to it; it can help the adolescent to overcome his most usual temptation: to be exclusive, to condemn in advance some particular tendency, person, or group; to have a vision of the universe limited only to his own vision (and if only this were a matter merely of adolescents!). At the age when it is important to confront the values received – those of his surroundings, childhood, family, or social milieu – with his own personality, the study of history would enlarge the field of this investigation… By familiarizing oneself with other times, other eras, other civilizations, one acquires the habit of distrusting criteria of one’s own time…”

Régine Pernoud, Those Terrible Middle AgesPernoud TMA p. 170.

"Knowledge leads either to reverence or arrogance."

"Anonymous”, quoted as "Thought du jour" in "Social Studies" in Globe & Mail December 6, 2006