There should then be a third crier, "O, the blockheads!" Men are apt presently to inquire, does such a one understand Greek or Latin?
Is he a poet?
or does he write in prose?
But whether he be grown better or more discreet, which are qualities of principal concern, these are never thought of.

We should rather examine, who is better learned, than who is more learned.
We only labour to stuff the memory, and leave the conscience and the understanding unfurnished and void.

Like birds who fly abroad to forage for grain, and bring it home in the beak, without tasting it themselves, to feed their young; so our pedants go picking knowledge here and there, out of books, and hold it at the tongue's end, only to spit it out and distribute it abroad.

And here I cannot but smile to think how I have paid myself in showing the foppery of this kind of learning, who myself am so manifest an example; for, do I not the same thing throughout almost this whole composition?
I go here and there, culling out of several books the sentences that best please me, not to keep them (for I have no memory to retain them in), but to transplant them into this; where, to say the truth, they are no more mine than in their first places.

We are, I conceive, knowing only in present knowledge, and not at all in what is past, or more than is that which is to come.