“He knew everything there was to know about literature, except how to enjoy it”

Part 2, Book 1, Ch. 2
Ninety-Three (1874)
Context: Cimourdain was one of those men who have a voice within them, and who listen to it. Such men seem absent-minded; they are not; they are all attention.
Cimourdain knew everything and nothing. He knew everything about science, and nothing at all about life. Hence his inflexibility. His eyes were bandaged like Homer's Themis. He had the blind certainty of the arrow, which sees only the mark and flies to it. In a revolution, nothing is more terrible than a straight line. Cimourdain went straight ahead, as sure as fate.
Cimourdain believed that, in social geneses, the extreme point is the solid earth; an error peculiar to minds which replace reason with logic.

Source: The Mote in God's Eye (1974), Chapter 19 “Channel Two’s Popularity” (p. 162)

Source: Middlemarch

As quoted in her obituary in The New York Times (14 December 1961) http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0907.html

Statek (1994)

Speech at Birkbeck College (20 March 1924), quoted in On England, and Other Addresses (1926), p. 146.
1924

GoodReads https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/5712889.Sitting_Bull <br class="br">Attributed quotes

Qui sait tout souffrir peut tout oser.
Variant: He who knows how to suffer everything can dare everything.
Source: Reflections and Maxims (1746), p. 176.

Opening letter to Nathan Zuckerman
The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (1988)