Erudition Quotes

• Read for yourselves, read for the sake of your inspiration, for the sweet turmoil in your lovely head. But also read against yourselves, read for questioning and impotence, for despair and erudition... and also read those whose darkness or malice or madness or greatness you can't understand because only in this way will you grow, outlive yourself, and become what you are.

  Adam Zagajewski

  Sweet, Inspiration, Greatness

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• Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.

  Georg C. Lichtenberg

  Fruit, Produce, Foliage

  "Aphorisms". Book by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. Notebook C 26, 1799.

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

  Ambrose Bierce

  Book, Dust, Skulls

  Ambrose Bierce (2001). “The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary”, p.70, University of Georgia Press

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• 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

  Knowledge, Learning, Charming

  Agnes Repplier (1891). “Points of View”, Boston Houghton, Mifflin 1893.

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• Erudition without pedantry is as a rare as wisdom itself.

  George Sarton

  Pedantry

  George Sarton (1964). “A History of Science: Ancient Science Through the Golden Age of Greece”

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• 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

  School, Technology, Encounters

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• 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

  Beautiful, People, Agitation

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2010). “The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms”, p.27, Random House

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• No other book has been so chopped, knifed, sifted, scrutinized, and vilified. What book on philosophy or religion or psychology or belles lettres of classical or modern times has been subject to such a mass attack as the Bible? With such venom and skepticism? With such thoroughness and erudition? Upon every chapter, line and tenet?

  Bernard Ramm

  Philosophy, Book, Psychology

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• 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

  Art, Self, Joy

  Marcel Proust's preface (1910) to John Ruskin "The Bible of Amiens" translated by Marcel Proust (1904); later quoted in "Marcel Proust: On Reading Ruskin" translated by Jean Autret and Philip J. Wolfe (p. 53), 1987.

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

  George Iles

  Stars, Truth, Ignorance

  George Iles (1918). “Canadian Stories”

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

  Norm MacDonald

  Wisdom, Principles, Firsts

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• Muscles without strength, friendship without trust, opinion without risk, change without aesthetics, age without values, food without nourishment, power without fairness, facts without rigor, degrees without erudition, militarism without fortitude, progress without civilization, complication without depth, fluency without content; these are the sins to remember.

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb

  Civilization, Risk, Progress

  FaceBook post by Nassim Nicholas Taleb from Aug 11, 2014

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• We rarely quote nowadays to appeal to authority... though we quote sometimes to display our sapience and erudition. Some authors we quote against. Some we quote not at all, offering them our scrupulous avoidance, and so make them part of our "white mythology." Other authors we constantly invoke, chanting their names in cerebral rituals of propitiation or ancestor worship.

  Ihab Hassan

  Offering, Names, White

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• 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

  Literature, Stealing, Plagiarism

  Charles Caleb Colton (1824). “Lacon, Or, Many Things in a Few Words: Addressed to Those who Think”, p.231

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• When I think of the standing, the importance and the erudition of all these people who see nothing about racism in Heart of Darkness, I'm convinced that we must really be living in different worlds.

  Chinua Achebe

  Heart, Thinking, Racism

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• 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

  Prayer, Flower, Acceptance

  Edward McKendree Bounds (1976). “The necessity of prayer”, Baker Pub Group

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• Don’t you love quotations? I am immensely fond of them; a certain proof of erudition.... [I]f you should happen to write an insipid poem... send it to me, and my fiat shall crown you with immortality.

  Frances Brooke

  Writing, Crowns, Immortality

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• 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

  Nature, Clouds, Mind

  Bodhidharma (2009). “The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma”, p.35, Macmillan

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• 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

  Beautiful, Appreciation, Profound

  Christian Nestell Bovee (1862). “Intuitions and Summaries of Thought”, p.123

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• You can be an artist without visual images, a reader without eyes, a mass of erudition with a bad elementary memory. In almost any subject your passion for the subject will save you. If you only care enough for a result, you will almost certainly attain it. If you wish to be rich, you will be rich; if you wish to be learned, you will be learned; if you wish to be good, you will be good. Only you must, then, really wish these things, and wish them with exclusiveness, and not wish at the same time a hundred other incompatible things just as strongly.

  William James

  Memories, Eye, Passion

  William James (2008). “Talks to Teachers on Psychology: And to Students on Some of Life's Ideals”, p.108, Nuvision Pubns

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• 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

  Order, Mind, Female

  James Madison (1867). “1816-1828”, p.232

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• 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

  Numbers, Knowing, Development

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• 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

  Mistake, Creativity, Science

  Charles Caleb Colton (1824). “Lacon, Or, Many Things in a Few Words: Addressed to Those who Think”, p.110

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• You have overburdened your argument with ostentatious erudition.

  David McCullough

  Argument, Abigail, Ostentatious

  "John Adams' Legacy Revisited in HBO Series". "Talk of the Nation" with Neal Conan, www.npr.org. April 15, 2008.

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• 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

  Wisdom, Men, Two

  Walter Savage Landor (1829). “Imaginary Conversations of Literary Men and Statesmen”, p.182

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