Erudition Quotes

Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

One can see the professionals and intellectuals talking to their rural brethren with an amused and condescending smile. They forget that but for the toiling rural masses, all their professional training and erudition would collapse like a castle of cards.

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.

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

You have overburdened your argument with ostentatious erudition.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

He who has imagination without learning has wings but no feet.
[Fr., Celui qui a de l’imagination sans erudition a des ailes, et n’a pas de pieds.]

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.