"Let ignorance talk as it will, learning has its value"
About this Quote
Jean de La Fontaine, the 17th century French master of the fable, spent a career puncturing vanity while defending reason. The line "Let ignorance talk as it will, learning has its value" distills his quiet confidence in what endures. The phrasing sets noise against substance: ignorance talks, often loudly and without restraint; learning possesses value, a quieter quality that survives fashion and bluster. Talk is fleeting; value abides.
La Fontaine often mocked pedantry, the showy accumulation of facts, yet he drew a firm line between empty erudition and true learning. The latter is a discipline of mind: curiosity tempered by judgment, the habit of weighing reasons, a readiness to revise one’s view in the face of better evidence. Such learning pays dividends beyond utility. It strengthens character, equips citizens to resist manipulation, and cultivates the humility that real knowledge requires. Where ignorance is reactive and self-certain, learning is patient and self-correcting.
The historical backdrop matters. Writing under Louis XIV, amid courtly flattery, salon wit, and the growing authority of academies, La Fontaine used animal tales to speak truths that could be risky to state outright. He knew that knowledge invites envy and that public ridicule often targets scholars as pedants. Yet he refuses the easy cynicism that reduces education to pretense. Let ignorance have its say, he implies; it will anyway. The better answer is not to silence it by force but to outlast it by substance and results.
The sentence also carries a moral strategy. Do not dignify clamor with panic. Keep faith with the slow power of study and the practical wisdom it yields. When error tires itself out, what remains is what works, explains, and improves life. That is the wager of learning in La Fontaine’s world and in ours: it needs no trumpet, only time and proof.
La Fontaine often mocked pedantry, the showy accumulation of facts, yet he drew a firm line between empty erudition and true learning. The latter is a discipline of mind: curiosity tempered by judgment, the habit of weighing reasons, a readiness to revise one’s view in the face of better evidence. Such learning pays dividends beyond utility. It strengthens character, equips citizens to resist manipulation, and cultivates the humility that real knowledge requires. Where ignorance is reactive and self-certain, learning is patient and self-correcting.
The historical backdrop matters. Writing under Louis XIV, amid courtly flattery, salon wit, and the growing authority of academies, La Fontaine used animal tales to speak truths that could be risky to state outright. He knew that knowledge invites envy and that public ridicule often targets scholars as pedants. Yet he refuses the easy cynicism that reduces education to pretense. Let ignorance have its say, he implies; it will anyway. The better answer is not to silence it by force but to outlast it by substance and results.
The sentence also carries a moral strategy. Do not dignify clamor with panic. Keep faith with the slow power of study and the practical wisdom it yields. When error tires itself out, what remains is what works, explains, and improves life. That is the wager of learning in La Fontaine’s world and in ours: it needs no trumpet, only time and proof.
Quote Details
| Topic | Learning |
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