C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Pedantry
Opinionated assurance.
With loads of learned lumber in his head.
Deep-versed in books, and shallow in himself.
A pedant is a precocious old man.
Pedantry is paraded knowledge.
Pedantry proceeds from much reading and little understanding.
Pedants, who have the least knowledge to be proud of, are impelled most by vanity.
Folly disgusts us less by her ignorance than pedantry by her learning.
Pedantry consists in the use of words unsuitable to the time, place, and company.
The most annoying of all blockheads is a well-read fool.
The brains of a pedant, however full, are vacant.
A pedant holds more to instruct us with what he knows, than of what we are ignorant.
Pedants are men who would appear to be learned, without the necessary ingredient of knowledge.
Pedantry in learning is like hypocrisy in religion—a form of knowledge without the power of it.
Pendantry is the unseasonable ostentation of learning. It may be discovered either in the choice of a subject or in the manner of treating it.
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.
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.
Pedantry prides herself on being wrong by rules; while common-sense is contented to be right, without them. The former would rather stumble in following the dead, than walk upright by the profane assistance of the living.
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.
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.