"Information's pretty thin stuff unless mixed with experience"
About this Quote
Information is “thin” here the way broth is thin: technically nourishing, but nowhere near a meal. Clarence Day’s line works because it refuses the modern fantasy that facts arrive pre-meaningful. He’s not anti-knowledge; he’s anti-pretend-knowledge. The jab lands on anyone who confuses intake with insight, who treats a stack of data like a substitute for having been burned, bored, thrilled, responsible.
Day wrote in an era when “information” was becoming a commodity: mass newspapers, advice literature, efficiency culture, the early 20th-century faith that life could be improved by the right instructions. Against that backdrop, calling information “stuff” is quietly demoting it from enlightenment to raw material. It’s inert until it meets the mess of lived consequence.
The subtext is almost moral: experience isn’t just time served, it’s the solvent that dissolves trivia into judgment. Without it, information stays bloodless and oddly portable; it can be repeated without being understood. With experience, the same facts gain weight, texture, and proportion. You learn which details matter because you’ve paid for them - with embarrassment, risk, loss, or effort.
There’s also a warning aimed at the well-read spectator. Day implies a gap between knowing about and knowing. “Mixed” is the crucial verb: the goal isn’t to romanticize gut instinct, but to fuse the two so information becomes usable - not just correct, but true in the only way that counts: tested against life.
Day wrote in an era when “information” was becoming a commodity: mass newspapers, advice literature, efficiency culture, the early 20th-century faith that life could be improved by the right instructions. Against that backdrop, calling information “stuff” is quietly demoting it from enlightenment to raw material. It’s inert until it meets the mess of lived consequence.
The subtext is almost moral: experience isn’t just time served, it’s the solvent that dissolves trivia into judgment. Without it, information stays bloodless and oddly portable; it can be repeated without being understood. With experience, the same facts gain weight, texture, and proportion. You learn which details matter because you’ve paid for them - with embarrassment, risk, loss, or effort.
There’s also a warning aimed at the well-read spectator. Day implies a gap between knowing about and knowing. “Mixed” is the crucial verb: the goal isn’t to romanticize gut instinct, but to fuse the two so information becomes usable - not just correct, but true in the only way that counts: tested against life.
Quote Details
| Topic | Knowledge |
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