Erudition Quotes

1. "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, read the dry sardonic remarks of cynical philosophers like Cioran or even Carl Schmitt, read newspapers, read those who despise, dismiss or simply ignore poetry and try to understand why they do it. Read your enemies, read those who reinforce your sense of what's evolving in poetry, 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."
Author: Adam Zagajewski

2. "By and large the literature of a democracy will never exhibit the order, regularity, skill, and art characteristic of aristocratic literature; formal qualities will be neglected or actually despised. The style will often be strange, incorrect, overburdened, and loose, and almost always strong and bold. Writers will be more anxious to work quickly than to perfect details. Short works will be commoner than long books, wit than erudition, imagination than depth. There will be a rude and untutored vigor of thought with great variety and singular fecundity. Authors will strive to astonish more than to please, and to stir passions rather than to charm taste."
Author: Alexis De Tocqueville

3. "Erudition - dust shaken out of a book into an empty skull"
Author: Ambrose Bierce

4. "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."
Author: Amor Towles

5. "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."
Author: Amy Lane

6. "Erudition is the crude residue of wilted harvests; wit: the meddlesome weed that wilts them."
Author: Ashim Shanker

7. "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."
Author: Charles Caleb Colton

8. "You have overburdened your argument with ostentatious erudition."Spoken by Abigail Adams"
Author: David McCullough

9. "A poet's cultural baggage and erudition can interfere with a poem."
Author: Douglas Dunn

10. "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."
Author: Frederick Reines

11. "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."
Author: Friedrich Schleiermacher

12. "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."
Author: George Steiner

13. "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."
Author: Hannah Arendt

14. "Unless the hole is MEANT to be square,' I said with a sudden erudition that surprised me, 'in which case, all the round pegs are the ones that are wrong, and if the ROUND hole is one that is not meant to be square, then the square ones will, no, hang on--''Shame,' said the historian, 'and you were doing so well."
Author: Jasper Fforde

15. "Even a massive erudition could never heal a broken heart."
Author: Jelord Klinn Cabresos

16. "Cleverness can be captivating, both for those who dole it out and those who witness it. Sometimes a dazzling display of erudition and wit can be as entertaining and uplifting as a great piece of music."
Author: John Farndon

17. "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."
Author: Karen Marie Moning

18. "...my classical values make me advocate the triplet of erudition, elegance, and courage; against modernity's phoniness, nerdiness, and philistinism...many philistines reduce my ideas to an opposition of technology when in fact I am opposing the naive blindness to it's side affects - the fragility criterion. I'd rather be unconditional about ethical and conditional about technology than the the reverse."
Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb

19. "[The critic] serves up his erudition in strong doses; he pours out all the knowledge he got up the day before in some library or other, and treats in heathenish fashion people at whose feet he ought to sit, and the most ignorant of whom could give points to much wiser men than he.Authors bear this sort of thing with a magnanimity and a patience that are really incomprehensible. For, after all, who are those critics, who with their trenchant tone, their dicta, might be supposed sons of the gods? They are simply fellows who were at college with us, and who have turned their studies to less account, since they have not produced anything, and can do no more than soil and spoil the works of others, like true stymphalid vampires."
Author: Théophile Gautier

20. "...he plundered the living treasure of those shelves. There was Burton's marvelous Anatomy, his staggering erudition never smelling of the dust or of the lamp...There was the dark tremendous music of Sir Thomas Browne, and Hooker's sounding and tremendous passion made great by genius and made true by faith."
Author: Thomas Wolfe

21. "And yet I am happy. Yes, happy. I swear. I swear that I am happy...What does it matter that I am a bit cheap, a bit foul, and that no one appreciates all the remarkable things about me—my fantasy, my erudition, my literary gift…I am happy that I can gaze at myself, for any man is absorbing—yes, really absorbing! ... I am happy—yes, happy!"
Author: Vladimir Nabokov

22. "A fitly born and bred race, growing up in right conditions of outdoor as much as indoor harmony, activity and development, would probably, from and in those conditions, find it enough merely to live—and would, in their relations to the sky, air, water, trees, etc., and to the countless common shows, and in the fact of life itself, discover and achieve happiness—with Being suffused night and day by wholesome ecstasy, surpassing all the pleasures that wealth, amusement, and even gratified intellect, erudition, or the sense of art, can give."
Author: Walt Whitman

23. "Writers who used to show off their erudition no longer sing in the bare ruined choir of the media."
Author: William Safire

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