Pedantry Quotes

Robespierre, this pedant of freedom!

Pedantry is paraded knowledge.

A pedant holds more to instruct us with what he knows, than of what we are ignorant.

Perhaps the prevalence of pedantry may be largely accounted for by the common error of thinking that, because useful knowledge should be remembered, any kind of knowledge that is at all worth learning should be remembered too.

The wages of pedantry is pain.

The brains of a pedant however full, are vacant.

Pedantry is properly the over-rating of any kind of knowledge we pretend to.

Pedantry is the dotage of knowledge.

This is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put.

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.

Pedantry consists in the use of words unsuitable to the time, place, and company.

Pedantry in learning is like hypocrisy inn religion--a form of knowledge without the power of it.

All that was great in the past was ridiculed, condemned, combated, suppressed — only to emerge all the more powerfully, all the more triumphantly from the struggle.

Pedants make a great rout about criticism, as if it were a science of great depth, and required much pains and knowledge--criticism however is only the result of good sense, taste and judgment--three qualities that indeed seldom are found together, and extremely seldom in a pedant, which most critics are.

The pulpit style of Germany has been always rustically negligent, or bristling with pedantry.

'Tis well enough for a servant to be bred at an University. But the education is a little too pedantic for a gentleman.

Learning has always been made much of, but forgetting has always been deprecated; therefore pedantry has pretty well established itself throughout the modern world at the expense of culture.

Erudition without pedantry is as a rare as wisdom itself.

Pedantry crams our heads with learned lumber and takes out our brains to make room for it.

Pedantry and mastery are opposite attitudes toward rules. To apply a rule to the letter, rigidly, unquestioningly, in cases where it fits and in cases where it does not fit, is pedantry. [...] To apply a rule with natural ease, with judgment, noticing the cases where it fits, and without ever letting the words of the rule obscure the purpose of the action or the opportunities of the situation, is mastery.

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

Folly disgusts us less by her ignorance than pedantry by her learning.

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.

Though pedantry denies, It's plain the Bible means That Solomon grew wise While talking with his queens.

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.

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

The word "Verse" is used here as the term most convenient for expressing, and without pedantry, all that is involved in the consideration of rhythm, rhyme, meter, and versification... the subject is exceedingly simple; one tenth of it, possibly may be called ethical; nine tenths, however, appertains to the mathematics.

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.

No matter how efficient school training may be, it would only produce stagnation, orthodoxy, and rigid pedantry if there were no uncommon men pushing forward beyond the wisdom of their tutors.

I believe that science fiction is as profound as you want it to be or it can be very simple entertainment, and I'm all for very simple entertainment. Every now and then we all need to come home, veg-out, watch something and not think too deeply about it. It's what you want it to be. We tend to steer clear of being pedantic; it's entertainment first, otherwise we'd be on a lecture circuit.

He grinned. “I was trying to remember all the deadly sins the other day,” he said. “Greed,envy, gluttony, irony, pedantry…” “I’m pretty sure irony isn’t a deadly sin.” “I’m pretty sure it is.” “Lust,” she said. “Lust is a deadly sin.” “And spanking.” “I think that falls under lust.” “I think it should have its own category,” said Jace. “Greed, envy, gluttony, irony, pedantry, lust, and spanking.

Lust," she said. "Lust is a deadly sin." "And spanking." "I think that falls under lust." "I think it should have its own category." said Jace

The tone of good conversation is brilliant and natural; it is neither tedious nor frivolous; it is instructive without pedantry, gay without tumultuousness, polished without affectation, gallant without insipidity, waggish without equivocation.

A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.

Of course, we can distinguish between males and females; we can also, if we choose, distinguish between different age categories; but any more advanced distinction comes close to pedantry, probably a result of boredom. A creature that is bored elaborates distinctions and hierarchies. According to Hutchinson and Rawlins, the development of systems of hierarchical dominance within animal societies does not correspond to any practical necessity, nor to any selective advantage; it simply constitutes a means of combating the crushing boredom of life in the heart of nature.

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.

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.

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

The most ingenious men are now agreed, that [universities] are only nurseries of prejudice, corruption, barbarism, and pedantry.

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

Nature avenges herself speedily on the hard pedantry that would chain her waves. She is no literalist. Every thing must be taken genially, and we must be at the top of our condition, to understand any thing rightly.

The man of culture is one of the poorest mortals alive. For simple pedantry and want of good sense no man is his equal. No assumption is too unreal, no end is too unpractical for him.

Arrogance, pedantry, and dogmatism...the occupational diseases of those who spend their lives directing the intellects of the young.

History is the art of making an argument about the past by telling a story accountable to evidence. In the writing of history, a story without an argument fades into antiquarianism; an argument without a story risks pedantry. Writing history requires empathy, inquiry, and debate. It requires forswearing condescension, cant, and nostalgia. The past isn’t quaint. Much of it, in fact, is bleak.

Self-pity does not appreciate pedantry.

The most annoying of all blockheads is a well-read fool.

Learning, like traveling and all other methods of improvement, as it finishes good sense, so it makes a silly man ten thousand times more insufferable by supplying variety of matter to his impertinence, and giving him an opportunity of abounding in absurdities.

Pedantry, in the common acceptation of the word, means an absurd ostentation of learning, and stiffness of phraseology, proceeding from a misguided knowledge of books and a total ignorance of men.

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.

There are persons who are never easy unless they are putting your books and papers in order--that is, according to their notions of the matter--and hide things lest they should be lost, where neither the owner nor anybody else can find them. This is a sort of magpie faculty. If anything is left where you want it, it is called litter. There is a pedantry in housewifery, as well as in the gravest concerns. Abraham Tucker complained that whenever his maid servant had been in his library, he could not see comfortably to work again for several days.