Alcuin of York Quotes on Knowledge
Alcuin (c. 735–804), the Northumbrian deacon whom Charlemagne summoned to head the palace school at Aachen, was the principal architect of the Carolingian renaissance and the institutional bearer of the seven liberal arts through the early Middle Ages. The treatises on grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic he composed for the school supplied the curricular foundation on which the cathedral and monastic schools of the ninth and tenth centuries were built, and the corresponding programme of manuscript correction and circulation transmitted the surviving classical and patristic inheritance to the Latin West.
Quotes
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Attributed to Alcuin of York:
“He who teaches well has lived well.”
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Attributed to Alcuin of York:
“Languages are the keys to the wisdom of the past.”
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Attributed to Alcuin of York:
“Learning is the inheritance the wise leave to the future.”
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Attributed to Alcuin of York:
“An unlettered king is a crowned ass.”
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Attributed to Alcuin of York:
“Quiet study is the seedbed of true philosophy.”
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“I, your Flaccus, am busy carrying out your wishes and instructions at St. Martin's, giving some the honey of the holy scriptures , making others drunk on the old wine of ancient learning.”
Letter to Charlemagne (796), as translated by Stephen Allott, Alcuin of York, c. A.D. 732 to 804: His Life and Letters (1974), p. 12 -
“Populus iuxta sanctiones divinas ducendus est, non sequendus; et ad testimonium personae magis eliguntur honestae. Nec audiendi qui solent dicere, vox populi, vox Dei , quum tumultuositas vulgi semper insaniae proxima sit.”
The people, by Divine ruling, is to be led, not to be followed, and for witness persons of high standing are to be preferred. The saying, 'The voice of the people is the voice of God,' is not to be listened to, since the seething of the crowd is always near to madness. | Letter to Charlemagne (800), as quoted in Eleanor Shipley Duckett, Alcuin, Friend of Charlemagne (1951), p. 224, footnote -
“Quapropter potius animam curare memento, quam carnem, quoniam haec manet, illa perit”
Therefore remember to care rather for the soul than the flesh, for this remains and that perishes. | Epitaph at St. Martin of Tours abbey [ citation needed ] -
“Epitaph at St. Martin of Tours abbey [ citation needed ]”
Quapropter potius animam curare memento, quam carnem, quoniam haec manet, illa perit