Pedantry quotes:

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Pedantry is the dotage of knowledge. -- Holbrook Jackson
Pedantry in learning is like hypocrisy inn religion--a form of knowledge without the power of it. -- Joseph Addison
Pedantry crams our heads with learned lumber and takes out our brains to make room for it. -- Charles Caleb Colton
Pedantry is paraded knowledge. -- Josh Billings
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Pedantry is properly the over-rating of any kind of knowledge we pretend to. -- Jonathan Swift
Pedantry consists in the use of words unsuitable to the time, place, and company. -- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education. -- George Bernard Shaw
Pedantry prides herself on being wrong by rules; while common sense is contented to be right without them. -- Charles Caleb Colton
Diligent as one must be in learning, one must be as diligent in forgetting; otherwise the process is one of pedantry, not culture. -- Albert J. Nock
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. -- Albert J. Nock
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. -- Henry Mackenzie
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. -- Albert J. Nock
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. -- Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury
The brains of a pedant however full, are vacant. -- Sir Fulke Greville
To be exact has naught to do with pedantry or dogma. -- Leonora Speyer
Folly disgusts us less by her ignorance than pedantry by her learning. -- Charles Caleb Colton
One thing must be avoided at all costs: narrow-mindedness, pedantry, dull pettiness. -- Bruno Schulz
This is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put. -- Winston Churchill
Though pedantry denies, It's plain the Bible means That Solomon grew wise While talking with his queens.... -- William Butler Yeats
Arrogance, pedantry, and dogmatism...the occupational diseases of those who spend their lives directing the intellects of the young. -- Henry Seidel Canby
contempt for the degradation of specialization and pedantry. Specialization develops only part of a man; a man partially developed is deformed. -- Richard M. Weaver
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. -- Samuel Johnson
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. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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. -- Ludwig von Mises
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. -- Mike Duncan
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. -- Joseph Addison
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. -- Horace Walpole
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. -- StanisÅ?aw I LeszczyÅ?ski
We see that pedantry has never been held in such esteem for the government of the world as in our times, and it offers as many paths of the true intelligible species and objects of infallible and sole truth as there are individual pedants. -- Giordano Bruno
Self-pity does not appreciate pedantry. -- Alexander McCall Smith
Erudition without pedantry is as a rare as wisdom itself. -- George Sarton
This is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put. -- Winston Churchill
The pulpit style of Germany has been always rustically negligent, or bristling with pedantry. -- Thomas de Quincey
The most ingenious men are now agreed, that [universities] are only nurseries of prejudice, corruption, barbarism, and pedantry. -- George Berkeley
Also, what mountains of dead ashes, wreck and burnt bones, does assiduous pedantry dig up from the past time and name it History. -- Thomas Carlyle
Tis pedantry to estimate nations by the census, or by square miles of land, or other than by their importance to the mind of the time -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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. -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
In the history of education, the most striking phenomenon is that schools of learning, which at one epoch are alive with a ferment of genius, in a succeeding generation exhibit merely pedantry and routine. -- Ted Sizer

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