Interview in Writers at Work, Second Series (1963) edited by George Plimpton.
“I know of nothing more terrible than the poor creatures who have learned too much. Instead of the sound powerful judgement which would probably have grown up if they had learned nothing, their thoughts creep timidly and hypnotically after words, principles and formulae, constantly by the same paths. What they have acquired is a spider's web of thoughts too weak to furnish sure supports, but complicated enough to provide confusion.”
"On the Relative Educational Value of the Classics and the Mathematico-Physical Sciences in Colleges and High Schools", an address in (16 April 1886), published in Popular Scientific Lectures (1898), as translated by Thomas J. McCormack, p. 367
19th century
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Ernst Mach 12
Austrian physicist and university educator 1838–1916Related quotes
(A.J. Broomhall. Hudson Taylor and China’s Open Century, Book Four: Survivors’ Pact. London: Hodder and Stoughton and Overseas Missionary Fellowship, 1984, 346).
1930s, Second inaugural address (1937)
“The man who is too old to learn was probably always too old to learn.”
Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 74
The Tales of Zanthias (published in Weird Tales (July-August, 2003); reprinted in David G. Hartwell (ed.), Year’s Best Fantasy 4 (pp. 400-401))
Short fiction
Ford Hall Forum Boston Speech, Woman Rebel, The Margaret Sanger Story, Peter Bagge.
“I learned a little of beauty-- enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth…”
Source: The Beautiful and Damned