Pedants Quotes - Page 2

• Pedants, who have the least knowledge to be proud of, are impelled most by vanity.

  Wilkie Collins

  Vanity, Proud, Pedantry

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• He who studies without passion will never become anything more than a pedant.

  Stefan Zweig

  Passion, Learning, Study

  Stefan Zweig (1955). “Stories and Legends”

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• Every age might perhaps produce one or two geniuses, if they were not sunk under the censure and obloquy of plodding, servile, imitating pedants.

  Jonathan Swift

  Two, Age, Genius

  Jonathan Swift (1761). “Works”, p.359

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• To expect an author to talk as he writes is ridiculous; or even if he did you would find fault with him as a pedant.

  William Hazlitt

  Writing, Faults, Ridiculous

  William Hazlitt (2015). “Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)”, p.1500, Delphi Classics

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• He who comes from the kitchen, smells of its smoke; and he who adheres to a sect, has something of its cant; the college air pursues the student; and dry inhumanity him who herds with literary pedants.

  Johann Kaspar Lavater

  College, Air, Smell

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• There is a sort of knowledge beyond the power of learning to bestow, and this is to be had in conversation; so necessary is this to the understanding the characters of men, that none are more ignorant of them than those learned pedants whose lives have been entirely consumed in colleges and among books; for however exquisitely human nature may have been described by writers the true practical system can be learned only in the world.

  Henry Fielding

  Book, Character, College

  Henry Fielding (1818). “Select Works of Henry Fielding Esq: To which is Prefaced an Original Account of the Life and Writings of the Author”, p.5

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• The learned languages are indispensable to form the gentleman and the scholar, and are well worth all the labor that they have cost us, provided they are valued not for themselves alone, which would make a pedant, but as a foundation for further acquirements.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Gentleman, Foundation, Cost

  Charles Caleb Colton (1824). “Lacon, Or, Many Things in a Few Words: Addressed to Those who Think”, p.123

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• Baseball fans are pedants, there is no other kind.

  Wilfrid Sheed

  Baseball, Fans, Kind

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• Nothing endures, nothing is precise and certain (except the mind of a pedant), perfection is the mere repudiation of that ineluctable marginal inexactitude which is the mysterious inmost quality of Being

  H. G. Wells

  Perfection, Mind, Quality

  H. G. Wells (2016). “A Modern Utopia”, p.31, H. G. Wells

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• A fool is only troublesome, a pedant insupportable.

  Napoleon Bonaparte

  Stupidity, Fool, Troublesome

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• 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

  Knowledge, Ignorance, Men

  Charles Caleb Colton (1824). “Lacon, Or, Many Things in a Few Words: Addressed to Those who Think”, p.83

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• It is an old trick. The playgoer who does not like dirty plays is denounced as a prude; the music-lover who resents cacophony is told he is a pedant; and in all these matters the final crushing blow administered to the man of discrimination is the ascription to him of a hidebound prejudice against things that are new because they are new.

  Royal Cortissoz

  Crush, Dirty, Blow

  Royal Cortissoz (1916). “Art and common sense”

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• All discourse of which others cannot partake is not only an irksome usurpation of the time devoted to pleasure and entertainment, but, what never fails to excite resentment, an insolent assertion of superiority, and a triumph over less enlightened understandings. The pedant is, therefore, not only heard with weariness but malignity; and those who conceive themselves insulted by his knowledge never fail to tell with acrimony how injudiciously it was exerted.

  Samuel Johnson

  Understanding, Triumph, Acrimony

  Samuel Johnson (1810). “The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.: With An Essay on His Life and Genius”, p.196

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• O Logic: born gatekeeper to the Temple of Science, victim of capricious destiny: doomed hitherto to be the drudge of pedants: come to the aid of thy master, Legislation

  Jeremy Bentham

  Math, Destiny, Temples

  Jeremy Bentham (1842). “The Works of Jeremy Bentham, Now First Collected: Under the Superintendence of His Executor, John Bowring ...”, p.145

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• The unlettered man who prayed to his maker would be heard; the pedant reciting a faultless invocation would be ignored.

  Israel Shenker

  Prayer, Men, Would Be

  Israel Shenker (1985). “Coat of Many Colors: Pages from Jewish Life”, Doubleday Books

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• God is a child who amuses himself, going from laughing to crying for no reason, each day reinventing the world to the chagrin of hair-splitters, pedants, and preachers, who try to teach God his job as Creator.

  Elie Faure

  God, Jobs, Children

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• I believe this. When we meet those we fall in love with, there is an aspect of our spirit that is historian, a bit of a pedant who reminisces or remembers a meeting when the other has passed by innocently…but all parts of the body must be ready for the other, all atoms must jump in one direction for desire to occur.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Falling In Love, Believe, One Direction

  FaceBook post by Michael Ondaatje from Jan 09, 2013

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• We have not chosen this time. We cannot help it if we are born as men of the early winter of full Civilization, instead of on the golden summit of a ripe Culture, in a Phidias or a Mozart time. Everything depends on our seeing our own position, our destiny, clearly, on our realizing that though we may lie to ourselves about it, we cannot evade it. He who does not acknowledge this in his heart, ceases to be counted among the men of his generation, and remains either a simpleton, a charlatan, or a pedant.

  Oswald Spengler

  Lying, Heart, Winter

  Oswald Spengler (1961). “Form and actuality”

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• My father was a pedant and a bully who cared about nobody, and I was not to see him until I was eighteen.

  George Weinberg

  Father, Bully, Eighteen

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• A frightful dialect for the stupid, the pedant and dullard sort.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Stupid, Dialect

  Thomas Carlyle (1872). “History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Called Frederick the Great”, p.276

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• I became a pedant of the form. I did my graduate work in art history and particularly in the history of French satirical cartooning. And that made me aware of what a rich and resilient tradition this seemingly scabrous sacrilegious magazine still represented in French life.

  Scott Simon

  Art, Magazines, Graduates

  Source: www.npr.org

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• In theory I am an agnostic, but pending the appearance of rational evidence I must be classed, practically and provisionally, as an atheist. The chance's of theism's truth being to my mind so microscopically small, I would be a pedant and a hypocrite to call myself anything else.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Atheist, Hypocrite, Mind

  H. P. Lovecraft (1999). “The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories”, p.11, Penguin

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• He who will not listen to any advice, nor be corrected in his writings, is a rank pedant.

  Jean de la Bruyere

  Writing, Advice

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• It is the fate of every great achievement to be pounced upon by pedants and imitators who drain it of life and turn it into an orthodoxy which stifles all stirrings of originality.

  Eric Hoffer

  Fate, Achievement, Orthodoxy

  Eric Hoffer (1982). “Between the Devil and the Dragon: The Best Essays and Aphorisms of Eric Hoffer”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• Silence is a trick when it imposes. Pedants and scholars, churchmen and physicians, abound in silent pride.

  Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmermann

  Pride, Silence, Physicians

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