Education Quote by Jeremy Taylor

Pride is doing the devil's work with a halo on. Jeremy Taylor, a 17th-century Anglican clergyman writing in a world of theological knife-fights and status-obsessed institutions, aims this line at the educated striver who mistakes credentials for character. The jab lands because it flips the expected hierarchy: learning is supposed to rescue you from ignorance, yet boasting about it becomes proof you never grasped what learning is for.

Taylor's intent is pastoral as much as polemical. In a Christian moral universe where humility is not just a personality trait but a spiritual technology, "proud of learning" signals a soul seduced by vanity. The subtext is that knowledge without self-knowledge is a kind of illiteracy. If learning becomes a social weapon, it stops being illumination and turns into costume: an outward display meant to command deference, not deepen understanding.

Context matters. Taylor lived through civil war, religious upheaval, and the hardening of factions. In that environment, erudition could be ammunition - a way to win arguments, mark class, and justify cruelty with footnotes. His line warns that intellectual superiority is often just tribal superiority dressed in Latin. It's also a critique of early modern clerical culture itself: men trained in scripture and rhetoric who could still be blind to charity, restraint, and doubt.

What makes the aphorism durable is its precision. It doesn't condemn learning; it condemns the ego that hijacks it. The smartest person in the room, Taylor implies, is the one least invested in proving it.