William James Mayo quote: “A specialist is a man who knows more and more about less and less.”

“The more a man knows, the more willing he is to learn. The less a man knows, the more positive he is that he knows everything…”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

“The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less.”

Václav Havel book Letters to Olga

Letters to Olga (1988), p. 237

“The "rights of man" are the right of the less voracious to restrain those who are more so.”

Samuel Palmer (1805–1881) British landscape painter, etcher and printmaker

Letter to the Rev. J.P. Wright (1879), from The Life and letters of Samuel Palmer, Painter and Etcher (AH Palmer, London, 1892)

“Qui plussait, plus se tait. French, you know. The more a man knows, the less he talks.”

Madeleine L'Engle book A Wrinkle in Time

Source: A Wrinkle in Time

“I love not man the less, but nature more”

George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement

“The more a man judges, the less he loves.”

Honoré de Balzac book Physiology of Marriage

Plus on juge, moins on aime.
Part I, Meditation VIII: Of the First Symptoms http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Physiology_of_Marriage/Part_1/Med_8, aphorism LX.
Physiology of Marriage (1829)

“Our instinct uses "more" and "less" in application to man, of the presence of the soul, and not of its absence; the brave man is greater than the coward; the true, the benevolent, the wise, is more a man, and not less, than the fool and knave.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), Compensation
Context: We feel defrauded of the retribution due to evil acts, because the criminal adheres to his vice and contumacy, and does not come to a crisis or judgment anywhere in visible nature. There is no stunning confutation of his nonsense before men and angels. Has he therefore outwitted the law? Inasmuch as he carries the malignity and the lie with him, he so far deceases from nature. In some manner there will be a demonstration of the wrong to the understanding also; but should we not see it, this deadly deduction makes square the eternal account.
Neither can it be said, on the other hand, that the gain of rectitude must be bought by any loss. There is no penalty to virtue; no penalty to wisdom; they are proper additions of being. In a virtuous action, I properly am; in a virtuous act, I add to the world; I plant into deserts conquered from Chaos and Nothing, and see the darkness receding on the limits of the horizon. There can be no excess to love; none to knowledge; none to beauty, when these attributes are considered in the purest sense. The soul refuses limits, and always affirms an Optimism, never a Pessimism.
His life is a progress, and not a station. His instinct is trust. Our instinct uses "more" and "less" in application to man, of the presence of the soul, and not of its absence; the brave man is greater than the coward; the true, the benevolent, the wise, is more a man, and not less, than the fool and knave. There is no tax on the good of virtue; for that is the incoming of God himself, or absolute existence, without any comparative. Material good has its tax, and if it came without desert or sweat, has no root in me, and the next wind will blow it away. But all the good of nature is the soul's, and may be had, if paid for in nature's lawful coin, that is, by labor which the heart and the head allow. I no longer wish to meet a good I do not earn, for example, to find a pot of buried gold, knowing that it brings with it new burdens. I do not wish more external goods, — neither possessions, nor honors, nor powers, nor persons. The gain is apparent; the tax is certain. But there is no tax on the knowledge that the compensation exists, and that it is not desirable to dig up treasure. Herein I rejoice with a serene eternal peace. I contract the boundaries of possible mischief. I learn the wisdom of St. Bernard, — "Nothing can work me damage except myself; the harm that I sustain I carry about with me, and never am a real sufferer but by my own fault."

“Factories today are being run less and less by the authority of experience only, and more and more by the authority of figures and facts. The superintendent and manager of long experience and intuitive knowledge only is forced to make room for the younger man, of less experience, perhaps, but who modernizes his work by the jurisdiction of figures alone.”

Clinton Edgar Woods (1863) American engineer

Source: Organizing a factory (1905), p. 1

“The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him.”

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) German philosopher

“The more a man cultivates the arts, the less randy he becomes.”

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) French poet

Plus l'homme cultive les arts, moins il bande.
Variant translation: The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates.
Journaux intimes (1864–1867; published 1887), Mon cœur mis à nu (1864)

“A specialist is a man who knows more and more about less and less.”

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