"Erudition - dust shaken out of a book into an empty skull"
- Ambrose Bierce
About this Quote
This quote by Ambrose Bierce is a commentary on the idea of knowledge and education. He is suggesting that knowledge is not something that can be acquired simply by reading books. It is not enough to simply fill one's head with facts and figures, but rather, knowledge must be actively engaged with and understood. He is implying that knowledge is not something that can be acquired passively, but rather, it must be actively sought out and understood. He is also suggesting that knowledge is not something that can be acquired simply by memorizing facts and figures, but rather, it must be actively engaged with and understood. In other words, knowledge is not something that can be acquired simply by reading books, but rather, it must be actively sought out and understood.
"Amongst Women concentrated on the family, and the new book concentrates on a small community. The dominant units in Irish society are the family and the locality. The idea was that the whole world would grow out from that small space"
"I think for anybody reading the book they're going to get an idea in their heads of all those characters, and I think that once that gets fixed, it's quite hard to shake"
"The aphorism in which I am the first master among Germans, are the forms of "eternity"; my ambition is to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book - what everyone else does not say in a book"
"Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital"
"Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors"
