If you crave for Knowledge, the banquet of Knowledge grows and groans on the board until the finer appetite sickens. If, still putting all your trust in Knowledge, you try to dodge the difficulty by specialising, you produce a brain bulging out inordinately on one side, on the other cut flat down and mostly paralytic at that: and in short so long as I hold that the Creator has an idea of a man, so long shall I be sure that no uneven specialist realises it. The real tragedy of the Library at Alexandria was not that the incendiaries burned immensely, but that they had neither the leisure nor the taste to discriminate.... but we may agree that, in reading, it is not quantity so much that tells, as quality and thoroughness of digestion.

About This Quote

About Arthur Quiller-Couch

Arthur Quiller-Couch was a 19th-century English writer and literary critic. Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch was an English writer who published using the pseudonym Q. Although a prolific novelist, he is remembered mainly for the monumental publication The Oxford Book of English Verse 1250–1900 and for his literary criticism. Read more on Wikipedia →

More quotes by Arthur Quiller-Couch

Related Quotes