It is certainly better not to have studied a subject at all than to have studied it superficially. For when unaided healthy common sense seeks to form an opinion of something it does not go so far wrong as semi-erudition does.
Es ist gewiß besser, eine Sache gar nicht studiert zu haben, als oberflächlich. Denn der bloße gesunde Menschenverstand, wenn er eine Sache beurteilen will, schießt nicht so sehr fehl als die halbe Gelehrsamkeit.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Tuesday, June 25, 2013
A Little Knowledge
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799), Waste Books K.98 (tr. R.J. Hollingdale):