Quotes About Pedants

God is a child who amuses himself, passes from laughter to tears without reason, and every day invents the world for the torment of the abstractors of its quintessence, the pedants, and the preachers who pretend to teach him his trade of creator.

Fools act on imagination without knowledge, pedants act on knowledge without imagination.

Fools act on imagination without knowledge, pedants act on knowledge without imagination.

Do you not see what damage has been done to science through this: i.e. pedants wishing to be philosophers; to treat of natural things, and mix themselves with and decide about things Divine?

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.

It is the fault of the present age, owing to the freer commerce that different ranks and professions now enjoy with each other, that characters are not marked with sufficient strength: the several classes run too much into one another. We have fewer pedants, it is true, but we have fewer striking originals.

Language pedants hew to an oral tradition of shibboleths that have no basis in logic or style, that have been defied by great writers for centuries, and that have been disavowed by every thoughtful usage manual.

Education jargon is the language of pedants; it identifies those who have so little confidence in themselves and their work that they seek to create a veil of words to hide them.

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

I am a book-collector, a proud avocationist in what Eric Quayle (wrongly) asserts to be the least vicious of hobbies (we are quite savage). We collectors are puzzled and often piqued unpleasantly by the common, absurd notion whereby we are only a pack of myopic, semi-crazed old pedants fretting over a book's colophon, dull dogs full of humorless zeal and no conversation, who suck our fingers free of pounce.

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