Progress would not have been the rarity it is if the early food had not been the late poison.
Walter BagehotRead
The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The scarcity of good books is due to a lack of knowledgeable writers.
Walter Bagehot's quote emphasizes that the quality and quantity of good literature are heavily dependent on the expertise and insight of the authors. It suggests that most aspiring writers lack the substantial knowledge or understanding necessary to create meaningful and impactful works, leading to a proliferation of mediocre books.
Themes
BooksWritingKnowledgeLiteratureEducation
In practice
Example use cases
In a literature class, one might use this quote to discuss the importance of knowledge in writing.
More from Walter Bagehot
All quotes βIt is good to be without vices, but it is not good to be without temptations.
Walter BagehotRead
War both needs and generates certain virtues; not the highest, but what may be called the preliminary virtues, as valor, veracity, the spirit of obedience, the habit of discipline. Any of these, and of others like them, when possessed by a nation, and no matter how generated, will give them a military advantage, and make them more likely to stay in the race of nations.
Walter BagehotRead
Efficiency in an assembly requires a solid mass of steady votes; and these are collected by a deferential attachment to particular men, or by a belief in the principles that those men represent, and they are maintained by fear of those men - by the fear that if you vote against them, you may soon yourself have no vote at all.
Walter BagehotRead
Life is a compromise of what your ego wants to do, what experience tells you to do, and what your nerves let you do.
Walter BagehotRead
The most melancholy of human reflections, perhaps, is that, on the whole, it is a question whether the benevolence of mankind does most good or harm.
Walter BagehotRead
Similar quotes
The job of an educator is to teach students to see vitality in themselves
Joseph CampbellRead
Pakistan has to export a lot of uneducated people, many of whom have become infected with the most barbaric reactionary ideas.
Christopher HitchensRead
I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are too baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka as roughage.
Zadie SmithRead
You know that I don't believe that anyone has ever taught anything to anyone. I question that efficacy of teaching. The only thing that I know is that anyone who wants to learn will learn. And maybe a teacher is a facilitator, a person who puts things down and shows people how exciting and wonderful it is and asks them to eat.
Carl RogersRead
I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.
Oscar WildeRead
I think they assign things to students which are way over their heads, which destroy your love of reading, rather than leading you to it. I don't understand that. Gosh.
Charles M. SchulzRead