A garland of quotations LXXXVI

Culled from the finest illiterates in literary history, and re-woven every Wednesday (or possibly Friday if I goof)

[Oops, I published this instead of saving as a draft. Oh, well. Consider it a bonus. Come see me tomorrow at Westport Story Fest if you get a chance!]

Lately thumbing the pages of Works and Days,
I saw my Pyrrhê coming.
                                        Goodbye book!
“Why in the world should I cobweb my days,” I cried,
“With the works of Old Man Hesiod?”
•Marcus Argentarius, from the Greek Anthology (ca. 60).

Though Wisdom oft has sought me,
I scorn’d the lore she brought me,
          My only books
          Were woman’s looks,
And folly’s all they've taught me.
•Thomas More, Lalla Rookh (1817).

Don’t read much now: the dude
Who lets the girl down before
The hero arrives, the chap
Who’s yellow and keeps the store
Seem far too familiar. Get stewed:
Books are a load of crap.
•Philip Larkin, “A Study of Reading Habits” (1964).

Did you ever see a scholar standing in front of a slip of a girl? In all his learning he can find nothing to say to her. And every penny poet in the country knows.
•Donn Byrne, Messer Marco Polo (1921).

The universities do not teach all things, so a doctor must seek out old wives, gypsies, sorcerers, wandering tribes, old robbers, and such outlaws and take lessons from them. A doctor must be a traveller.
•Paracelsus (C16), quoted in Time-Life’s Secrets of the Alchemists (1990).

We pupils of old Austria were brought up to respect old people and women. But on our professors we had no mercy; they were our natural enemies.
•Hitler (1942), quoted in Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960).

Every sane man knows that, after a youth leaves college, he must devote most of his energies during three or four years, to ridding himself of the fallacies, delusions and imbecilities inflicted upon him by messieurs, his professors.
•Mencken, The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1907).

One has to pay heavily for one’s ignorance. Had I dealt with medical, climactic, and suchlike problems at the right time, instead of with Theognis and Diogenes Laertius, I would not have become this half-ruined human being.—¶And thus one loses one’s youth. Already I am beyond 40 and still immersed in the first experiments with what now is necessary, but what one should have had at least 20 years ago.—
•Nietzsche, letter to Franziska & Elisabeth Nietzsche (1885).

It was in Rome, and singularly enough it was when he wrote the “Ode to Youth” that he began to devote himself to mystical studies which had such an injurious effect upon his mind.
•Edna Worthley Underwood on Adam Mickiewicz, intro to Sonnets from the Crimea (1917).

Don’t be afraid to be ignorant of some things. You will learn enough of wickedness in your life in spite of yourself without purposely investigating it.
•Not in the Curriculum: A Book of Friendly Counsel to Students (1903).

Sources: M. Argentarius: trans. Dudley Fitts, in The Norton Book of Classical Literature (Norton, 1993); Larkin: The Whitsun Weddings (Faber & Faber, 2012); Nietzsche: Unpublished Letters (Philosophical Library, 1959); Not in the Curriculum: attributed to “Two Recent College Graduates”; some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.