Edinburgh Famous Quotes

After studying at Edinburgh University, he spent a decade broadening his mind on the Continent; for example, he befriended some Jansenists in the famous Catholic seminary at Douay in the Spanish Netherlands, and discovered in them a depth of sincere Christian faith and spiritual life he had not thought possible in Roman Catholics. It seems they reminded him of the Christians of the earliest centuries. There was always to be a Jansenist leaven in Leighton’s own piety; in particular, he admired monasticism and the celibate life—he himself never married.25

The billows and swells of the Platonic revival generated in Florence soon became a deluge that washed across the European intellectual landscape. Plato would so dominate the Western philosophical tradition for the next half-millennium that in 1927 the British philosopher A. N. Whitehead could famously declare in a lecture in Edinburgh: “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

The editors also realized an important secret in publishing, that information is made more memorable when it is tinged with bias. The Edinburgh Review’s motto was, “The judge is condemned when the guilty is acquitted.” The magazine became famous for its likes and dislikes, although “hatreds” might be a better word

There is a famous Cambridge toast that I have always liked: “God bless the higher mathematics, and may they never be of the slightest use to anybody”.

As a medical student, I read the lore of Joseph Bell, the Scottish surgeon on whom Sherlock Holmes was based. Bell, who taught Arthur Conan Doyle during his medical training at a hospital in Edinburgh, was famously observant, with an “eerie trick of spotting details.” From sailors’ tattoos he could know where they had traveled; from the lilt of a man’s accent, the calluses of his hands, the uneven way the legs of his trousers or the breast pocket of his jacket had faded, he could deduce the man’s hometown, his profession, his vices. “Most men have a head, two arms, a nose, a mouth and a certain number of teeth. It is the little differences—the ‘trifles’—such as the droop of an eyelid, which differentiates men,” Bell told his students. “Use your eyes.”II For his students, he would demonstrate the importance of “trifles,” meeting a patient for the first time and deciphering a sort of autobiography from their body in a theatrical performance. From one man’s elephantiasis—a parasitic infection that clogs the lymphatics and swells the legs—and military habit of never taking off his hat, Bell deduced that he was a Highland regiment officer who had been stationed in Barbados. From another’s military swagger and short stature—too short for a soldier—Bell deduced that he had played in a Highland regiment band. When the man replied that he was a cobbler and had never been in the army, Bell had two particularly burly trainees restrain and undress the man to find the tiny blue D, “deserter,” branded on his skin, the truth written indelibly on his body and his fears exposed, the doctor unmasking the denial.