Pedant Quotes & Sayings

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. — Charles Caleb Colton

My father was a pedant and a bully who cared about nobody, and I was not to see him until I was eighteen. — George Weinberg

The scholar may lose himself in schools, in words, and become a pedant; but when he comprehends his duties, he above all men is arealist, and converses with things. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is from this wide extension of design that so much instruction is derived. It is this which fills the plays of Shakespeare with practical axioms and domestick wisdom. It was said of Euripides, that every verse was a precept and it may be said of Shakespeare, that from his works may be collected a system of civil and oeconomical prudence. Yet his real power is not shown in the splendour of particular passages, but by the progress of his fable, and the tenour of his dialogue; and he that tries to recommend him by select quotations, will succeed like the pedant in Hierocles, who, when he offered his house to sale, carried a brick in his pocket as a specimen. — Samuel Johnson

My father was himself a college professor and a pedant to the bone. Every exchange contained a lesson, like the pit in a cherry. To this day, the Socratic method makes me want to bite someone. — Karen Joy Fowler

Robespierre, this pedant of freedom! — Franz Grillparzer

He who studies without passion will never become anything more than a pedant. — Stefan Zweig

Your total ignorance of that which you profess to teach merits the death penalty. I doubt whether you would know that St. Cassian of Imola was stabbed to death by his students with their styli. His death, a martyr's honorable one, made him a patron saint of teachers. Pray to him, you deluded fool, you "anyone for tennis?" golf-playing, cocktail-quaffing pseudo-pedant, for you do indeed need a heavenly patron. Although your days are numbered, you will not die as a martyr - for you further no holy cause - but as the total ass which you really are. ZORRO A sword was drawn on the last line of the page. — John Kennedy Toole

Memory likes to play hide-and-seek, to crawl away. It tends to hold forth, to dress up, often needlessly. Memory contradicts itself; pedant that it is, it will have its way. — Gunter Grass

The pedant and the priest have always been the most expert of logicians
and the most diligent disseminators of nonsense and worse. — H.L. Mencken

The pedant who has tried to put on his own head a crown which he stole from under a pillow
of — Alexandre Dumas

To expect an author to talk as he writes is ridiculous; or even if he did you would find fault with him as a pedant. — William Hazlitt

The main thing is, and of course this is a pedant talking, we should start our education on these issues in kindergarten. Instead of saying, "See Spot run," we ought to say, "See the plant grow in the sun." We ought to explain what runs the weather in the third or fourth grade to start out with. — Paul R. Ehrlich

He who will not listen to any advice, nor be corrected in his writings, is a rank pedant. — Jean De La Bruyere

Space, like time, gives birth to forgetfulness, but does so by removing an individual from all relationships and placing him in a free and pristine state--indeed, in but a moment it can turn a pedant and philistine into something like a vagabond. Time, they say, is water from the river Lethe, but alien air is a similar drink; and if its effects are less profound, it works all the more quickly. — Thomas Mann

Clarence Hervey might have been more than a pleasant young man, if he had not been smitten with the desire of being thought superior in every thing, and of being the most admired person in all companies. He had been early flattered with the idea that he was a man of genius; and he imagined that, as such, he was entitled to be imprudent, wild, and eccentric. He affected singularity, in order to establish his claims to genius. He had considerable literary talents, by which he was distinguished at Oxford; but he was so dreadfully afraid of passing for a pedant, that when he came into the company of the idle and the ignorant, he pretended to disdain every species of knowledge. His chameleon character seemed to vary in different lights, and according to the different situations in which he happened to be placed. He could be all things to all men - and to all women. — Maria Edgeworth

The scholar without good breeding is a pedant; the philosopher, a cynic. — Lord Chesterfield

The power of attaching an interest to the most trifling or painful pursuits, in which our whole attention and faculties are engaged, is one of the greatest happinesses of our nature. The common soldier mounts the breach with joy; the miser deliberately starves himself to death; the mathematician sets about extracting the cube-root with a feeling of enthusiasm; and the lawyer sheds tears of admiration over "Coke upon Littleton." It is the same through life. He who is not in some measure a pedant, though he maybe wise, cannot be a very happy man. — William Hazlitt

A pedant who beheld Solon weeping for the death of a son said to him, 'Why do you weep thus, if weeping avails nothing?' And the sage answered him, 'Precisely for that reason - because it does not avail. — Miguel De Unamuno

Nothing endures, nothing is precise and certain (except the mind of a pedant), perfection is the mere repudiation of that ineluctable marginal inexactitude which is the mysterious inmost quality of Being — H.G.Wells

Have you ever seen a pedant with a warm heart? — Johann Kaspar Lavater

Do not be bullied out of your common sense by the specialist; two to one, he is a pedant. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

A frightful dialect for the stupid, the pedant and dullard sort. — Thomas Carlyle

Grown children (an oxymoron, I realize) veer instinctively to extremes: the young scholar is much more a pedant than his older counterpart. And I, being young myself, took these pronouncements of Henry's very seriously. I doubt if Milton himself could have impressed me more. — Donna Tartt

The prudent man always studies seriously and earnestly to understand whatever he professes to understand, and not merely to persuade other people that he understands it; and though his talents may not always be very brilliant, they are always perfectly genuine. He neither endeavours to impose upon you by the cunning devices of an artful impostor, nor by the arrogant airs of an assuming pedant, nor by the confident assertions of a superficial and imprudent pretender. He is not ostentatious even of the abilities which he really possesses. His conversation is simple and modest, and he is averse to all the quackish arts by which other people so frequently thrust themselves into public notice and reputation. — Adam Smith

Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant. — George Orwell

It is an old trick. The playgoer who does not like dirty plays is denounced as a prude; the music-lover who resents cacophony is told he is a pedant; and in all these matters the final crushing blow administered to the man of discrimination is the ascription to him of a hidebound prejudice against things that are new because they are new. — Royal Cortissoz

An artist may visit a museum but only a pedant can live there. — George Santayana

Now, there's a young man who looks like a real pedant, for you! — Victor Hugo

Never argue with a pedant over nomenclature. It wastes your time and annoys the pedant. — Lois McMaster Bujold

When nature exceeds culture, we have the rustic. When culture exceeds nature then we the pedant. — Confucius

If this satanic sprinkling of redundant apostrophes causes no little gasp of horror or quickening of the pulse, you should probably put down this book. By all means congratulate yourself that you are not a pedant or even a stickler; that you are happily equipped to live in a world of plummeting punctuation standards; but just don't bother to go any further. — Lynne Truss

We have not chosen this time. We cannot help it if we are born as men of the early winter of full Civilization, instead of on the golden summit of a ripe Culture, in a Phidias or a Mozart time. Everything depends on our seeing our own position, our destiny, clearly, on our realizing that though we may lie to ourselves about it, we cannot evade it. He who does not acknowledge this in his heart, ceases to be counted among the men of his generation, and remains either a simpleton, a charlatan, or a pedant. — Oswald Spengler

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

All discourse of which others cannot partake is not only an irksome usurpation of the time devoted to pleasure and entertainment, but, what never fails to excite resentment, an insolent assertion of superiority, and a triumph over less enlightened understandings. The pedant is, therefore, not only heard with weariness but malignity; and those who conceive themselves insulted by his knowledge never fail to tell with acrimony how injudiciously it was exerted. — Samuel Johnson

And if Francoise then, inspired like a poet with a flood of confused reflections upon bereavement, grief, and family memories, were to plead her inability to rebut my theories, saying: "I don't know how to espress (sic) myself" - I would triumph over her with an ironical and brutal common sense worthy of Dr. Percepied; and if she went on: "All the same she was a geological (sic) relation; there is always the respect due to your geology (sic)," I would shrug my shoulders and say: "It is really very good of me to discuss the matter with an illiterate old woman who cannot speak her own language," adopting, to deliver judgment on Francoise, the mean and narrow outlook of the pedant, whom those who are most contemptuous of him in the impartiality of their own minds are only too prone to copy when they are obliged to play a part upon the vulgar stage of life. — Marcel Proust

If a philosopher is not a man, he is anything but a philosopher; he is above all a pedant, and a pedant is a caricature of a man. — Miguel De Unamuno

The unlettered man who prayed to his maker would be heard; the pedant reciting a faultless invocation would be ignored. — Israel Shenker

Mum is a perfectionist and Dad is a pedant and that was partly why their marriage didn't work so well, Elsa figures. Because a perfectionist and a pedant are two very different things. — Fredrik Backman

A pedant holds more to instruct us with what he knows, than of what we are ignorant. — Jean Antoine Petit-Senn

I believe this. When we meet those we fall in love with, there is an aspect of our spirit that is historian, a bit of a pedant who reminisces or remembers a meeting when the other has passed by innocently ... but all parts of the body must be ready for the other, all atoms must jump in one direction for desire to occur. — Michael Ondaatje

The brains of a pedant however full, are vacant. — Sir Fulke Greville

Autocorrect: making Twitter pedants delete and re-tweet since 2007. — Cassandra Page

A fool is only troublesome, a pedant insupportable. — Napoleon Bonaparte