Pedantry Quotes - Page 3

• To be exact has naught to do with pedantry or dogma.

  Leonora Speyer

  Dogma

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• Shall we then judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely. 'Tis pedantry to estimate nations by the census, or by square miles of land, or other than by their importance to the mind of the time.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Country, Land, Squares

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1983). “Essays and Lectures”, p.1081, Library of America

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• contempt for the degradation of specialization and pedantry. Specialization develops only part of a man; a man partially developed is deformed.

  Richard M. Weaver

  Men, Degradation, Contempt

  Richard M. Weaver (2013). “Ideas Have Consequences”, p.56, University of Chicago Press

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• A well-read fool is the most pestilent of blockheads; his learning is a flail which he knows not how to handle, and with which he breaks his neighbor's shins as well as his own. Keep a fellow of this description at arm's length, as you value the integrity of your bones.

  Stanisław I Leszczyński

  Integrity, Arms, Fool

  François duc de La Rochefoucauld, Stanisław I Leszczyński (King of Poland) (1851). “Moral Reflections, Sentences and Maxims of Francis, Duc de la Rochefoucauld”, p.181

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• But what help from these fineries or pedantries? What help from thought? Life is not dialectics. We, I think, in these times, have had lessons enough of the futility of criticism.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Thinking, Criticism, Lessons

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1983). “Essays and Lectures”, p.478, Library of America

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• Pedantry and bigotry are millstones, able to sink the best book which carries the least part of their dead weight. The temper of the pedagogue suits not with the age; and the world, however it may be taught, will not be tutored.

  Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury

  Book, Age, World

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• A taxonomy of abilities, like a taxonomy anywhere else in science, is apt to strike a certain type of impatient student as a gratuitous orgy of pedantry. Doubtless, compulsions to intellectual tidiness express themselves prematurely at times, and excessively at others, but a good descriptive taxonomy, as Darwin found in developing his theory, and as Newton found in the work of Kepler, is the mother of laws and theories.

  Raymond Cattell

  Mother, Law, Intellectual

  "Intelligence: Its Structure, Growth and Action". Book by Raymond Cattell (p. 61), 1987.

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• Robespierre, this pedant of freedom!

  Franz Grillparzer

  Freedom, Pedants

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• Do you call it doubting to write down on a piece of paper that you doubt? If so, doubt has nothing to do with any serious business. But do not make believe; if pedantry has not eaten all the reality out of you, recognize, as you must, that there is much that you do not doubt, in the least. Now that which you do not at all doubt, you must and do regard as infallible, absolute truth.

  Charles Sanders Peirce

  Believe, Writing, Reality

  Charles Sanders Peirce (1958). “Selected Writings (Values in a Universe of Chance)”, p.188, Courier Corporation

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• Pendantry is the unseasonable ostentation of learning. It may be discovered either in the choice of a subject or in the manner d treating it.

  Samuel Johnson

  Choices, May, Subjects

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• One thing must be avoided at all costs: narrow-mindedness, pedantry, dull pettiness.

  Bruno Schulz

  Cost, Dull, Avoided

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• Sometimes I think that no situation actually fits the technical definition of irony, and that the word just sort of hangs out in the linguistic ether singing a Siren song that's designed to crash the unsuspecting against the jagged rocks of pedantry.

  Mike Duncan

  Song, Thinking, Rocks

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