Quotes About Erudition

#1. Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

#2. In many ways, 'What Teachers Make: In Praise of the Greatest Job in the World' is just one big thank-you note to my teachers. The book is dedicated to my fifth and sixth grade English teacher, Dr. Joseph D'Angelo, a massive force of erudition, martial artistry, culture, and love.

Taylor Mali

#3. A perceptive French critic has argued that in an age of deepening illiteracy, when even the educated have only a smattering of classical or theological knowledge, erudition is of itself a kind of fantasy, a surrealistic construct.

George Steiner

#4. However, I had a chance encounter with an admissions officer of Stevens Institute of Technology, who so impressed me by his erudition and enthusiasm for the school that I changed course and entered Stevens Institute.

Frederick Reines

#5. A harmless hilarity and a buoyant cheerfulness are not infrequent concomitants of genius; and we are never more deceived than when we mistake gravity for greatness, solemnity for science, and pomposity for erudition.

Charles Caleb Colton

#6. The first principle of solid wisdom is discretion, without it all the erudition of life is merely bagatelle.

Norm MacDonald

#7. James fought the temptation to repeat "traditional chromosomal energy signature," just because it was such an awesome example of erudition gone weird, and thought hard to answer her question.

Amy Lane

#8. It was hard to speed the male child up the stony heights of erudition, but it was harder still to check the female child at the crucial point, and keep her tottering decorously behind her brother.

Agnes Repplier

#9. For all its erudition, Cleopatra's Egypt produced no fine historian.

Stacy Schiff

#10. A sort of egotistical self-evaluation is unavoidable in those joys in which erudition and art mingle and in which aesthetic pleasure may become more acute, but not remain as pure.

Marcel Proust

#11. To quote copiously and well, requires taste, judgment, and erudition, a feeling for the beautiful, an appreciation of the noble, and a sense of the profound.

Christian Nestell Bovee

#12. Erudition - dust shaken out of a book into an empty skull.

Ambrose Bierce

#13. Let's face it: professing a deep interest in movies, the absolutely dominant global art form of the last century, is at this point like professing an interest in air. Passion is nice. Erudition is admirable. But it's like that moment when good manners cross over into meaningless etiquette.

David Rakoff

#14. In our society, we no longer pride ourselves on being educated, knowledgable, well-read. We prefer, instead, the illusion of erudition.

Michael Perkins

#15. My heart is properly cultivated ... and is not left to wither under the burden of cold erudition, and my religious feelings are not deadened by theological inquiries.

Friedrich Schleiermacher

#16. Erudition, like a bloodhound, is a charming thing when held firmly in leash, but it is not so attractive when turned loose upon a defenseless and unerudite public.

Agnes Repplier

#17. The clear and simple words of common usage are always better than those of erudition. The jargon of the philosophers not seldom conceals an absence of thought.

Andre Maurois

#18. Older people are most beautiful when they have what is lacking in the young: poise, erudition, wisdom, phronesis, and this post-heroic absence of agitation.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#19. The attack of a man, equipped with erudition, and of perfectly sober judgment, on cherished beliefs and revered institutions, must always excite the interest, by irritating the passions, of men.

Edward Gibbon

#20. If you see your nature, you don't need to read sutras or invoke buddhas. Erudition and knowledge are not only useless but also cloud your awareness. Doctrines are only for pointing to the mind. Once you see your mind, why pay attention to doctrines?

Bodhidharma

#21. These poems possess intelligence, erudition, gravitas and urgency. Serious and moving in voice and ambition, this passionately lyrical and articulate work reminds me very much of the capacious, fierce and intelligent work of Adrienne Rich.

Tony Hoagland

#22. If I wanted to be Rimbaud, what was I doing in graduate school? Trying to stay out of the army, of course. Graduate study gave me a draft deferment. But I also knew I lacked erudition and polish and was often sunk in forlorn reveries.

Richard Elman

#23. The ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has led either to sheer irrelevancy, the famous knowing of more and more about less and less, or to the development of a pseudo-scholarship which actually destroys its object.

Hannah Arendt

#24. Two evils, of almost equal weight, may befall the man of erudition; never to be listened to, and to be listened to always.

Walter Savage Landor

#25. Erudition is the crude residue of wilted harvests; wit: the meddlesome weed that wilts them.

Ashim Shanker

#26. I have to hold a meeting with the rising generation every evening, and that takes time. Henry can say, 'Twinkle, twinkle,' all himself, and Edward can repeat it after his father! Giants of genius! Paragons of erudition!

Adoniram Judson

#27. Surely a program of incremental reforms, of cautious steps, is the wisest way to proceed? You show xtraordinary erudition for an eighth-stratum, Archivist. I wonder if you encountered this dictum first spoken by a twentieth-century statesman: "An abyss cannot be crossed in two steps." We

David Mitchell

#28. Illuminated by the same joyful curiosity and erudition, lyric writing, and plain love of life that made a classic of Archie Carr's The Windward Road.

Peter Matthiessen

#29. the Chicago Tribune said on February 8, 1937: . . . . there is entertainment in erudition.

Judith C. Waller

#30. A poet's cultural baggage and erudition can interfere with a poem.

Douglas Dunn

#31. Far more gardens fail because the gardener is absent or not paying attention than because he or she lacks erudition. Yes, you need to know your ABCs [the basics], but the more you garden, the more you'll learn what works and what doesn't.

Barbara Damrosch

#32. The traits I respect are erudition and the courage to stand up when half-men are afraid for their reputation. Any idiot can be intelligent.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#33. They were eyes made for laughter, but not raucous yuks; rather, for the laughter of wit, of erudition, of the bon mot.

Stephen Hunter

#34. Was that the sum total of my exsitence? I didn't get the erudition of 'I think therefore I am.'
Instead I got 'I am, therefore I want to fuck Jericho Barrons.

Karen Marie Moning

#35. All preceptors should have that kind of genius described by Tacitus, "equal to their business, but not above it;" a patient industry, with competent erudition; a mind depending more on its correctness than its originality, and on its memory rather than on its invention.

Charles Caleb Colton

#36. Losers, like autodidacts, always know much more than winners. If you want to win, you need to know just one thing and not to waste your time on anything else: the pleasures of erudition are reserved for losers. The more a person knows, the more things have gone wrong.

Umberto Eco

#37. For some people, 'erudition' is nothing more than a vehicle for hostility and arrogance; 'good taste' merely an excuse for condescension--or worse, censorship -- Sadie

Alice Kimberly

#38. One must be prepared to fight for one's simple pleasures and to defend them against elegance and erudition and all manner of glamorous enticements.

Amor Towles

#39. In the old days of literature, only the very thick-skinned - or the very brilliant - dared enter the arena of literary criticism. To criticise a person's work required equal measures of erudition and wit, and inferior critics were often the butt of satire and ridicule.

Joanne Harris

#40. I know it's hard, Peter," she'd said. "But if you could contain your erudition and ready wit for just a little while we'd be most grateful." "Am I allowed to be cheeky?" I'd asked. "No you're fucking not," said Seawoll. "I'm

Ben Aaronovitch

#41. The room in fact was as depressing from its slatternliness as from its atmosphere of erudition.

Samuel Butler

#42. Erudition - that is, reading, writing, and arithmetic - is taught in the schools; but where is the more important quality, character, taught? Nowhere in particular. There is no authorized training for children in character.

Robert Baden-Powell

#43. Erudition without pedantry is as a rare as wisdom itself.

George Sarton

#44. Writers who used to show off their erudition no longer sing in the bare ruined choir of the media.

William Safire

#45. No erudition, no purity of diction, no width of mental outlook, no flowers of eloquence, no grace of person can atone for lack of fire. Prayer ascends by fire. Flame gives prayer access as well as wings, acceptance as well as energy. There is no incense without fire; no prayer without flame.

Edward McKendree Bounds

#46. A man who knows the world will not only make the most of everything he does know, but of many things he does not know, and will gain more credit by his adroit mode of hiding his ignorance than the pedant by his awkward attempt to exhibit his erudition.

Charles Caleb Colton

#47. The capacity of the female mind for studies of the highest order cannot be doubted, having been sufficiently illustrated by its works of genius, of erudition, and of science.

James Madison

#48. If we steal thoughts from the moderns, it will be cried down as plagiarism; if from the ancients, it will be cried up as erudition.

Charles Caleb Colton

#49. Ignorance may find a truth on its doorstep that erudition vainly seeks in the stars.

George Iles

#50. Literature has her quacks no less than medicine, and they are divided into two classes; those who have erudition without genius, and those who have volubility without depth; we shall get second-hand sense from the one, and original nonsense from the other.

Charles Caleb Colton

#51. The first effect of modernism was to make high culture difficult: to surround beauty with a wall of erudition.

Roger Scruton

#52. Mostly I was spending time in the Strand, that bastion of titillating erudition. Not so much a bookstore as a collision of 100 different bookstores, with literary wreckage strewn over 18 miles of shelves.

David Levithan

#53. I would hardly say that I have a rich knowledge of anything in particular, but I do seem to be burdened with an unseemly appetite for intellectual and artistic erudition, which, for the sake of balance, I keep well harnessed to a reliable sense of the absurd.

Thomas Steinbeck

#54. Ralph Ellison is a classic work of erudition, grace, and elegance. Rampersad offers us an Ellison whose gifts and warts orbit the same universe of creative genius. Like Ellison's work, Rampersad's text wrestles eloquently with difficult truths about race, politics, and American life.

Michael Eric Dyson

#55. You have overburdened your argument with ostentatious erudition.
Spoken by Abigail Adams

David McCullough

#56. Milton's learned vocabulary [ ... ] and his distant perspectives, represent the authoritative unintelligibility of the parents' speech as heard by the child.

John Broadbent

#57. Mrs. Bittarcy rustled ominously, holding her peace meanwhile. She feared long words she did not understand. Beelzebub lay hid among too many syllables.
("The Man Whom The Trees Loved")

Algernon Blackwood

#58. I'm not abnegation, I'm not dauntless, I am Divergent

Veronica Roth

#59. Innocence is the beginning of ignorance. Experience is the end of stupidity.

Michael Bassey Johnson

#60. I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.

Samuel Johnson