Perhaps the prevalence of pedantry may be largely accounted for by the common error of thinking that, because useful knowledge should be remembered, any kind of knowledge that is at all worth learning should be remembered too.

The university's business is the conservation of useless knowledge and what the university itself apparently fails to see is that this enterprise is not only noble but indispensable as well, that society can not exist unless it goes on.

Life has obliged him to remember so much useful knowledge that he has lost not only his history, but his whole original cargo of useless knowledge history, languages, literatures, the higher mathematics, or what you will - are all gone.

Diligent as one must be in learning, one must be as diligent in forgetting otherwise the process is one of pedantry, not culture.

Concerning culture as a process, one would say that it means learning a great many things and then forgetting them and the forgetting is as necessary as the learning.