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…Stupid, like a professional.
It is not in the wasteland of the world where man dies of cold, it is in the palace of concepts raised by the intellect.
Through a thousand pages, thought flows to condense into a golden droplet of purest essence…that the intellectual usually forgets to collect.
The amateur allowed onto the professional track often wins the race.
The specialist, who must ignore everything in order to become wise on some single point of a single subject, seems to me as admirable as he is incomprehensible. Let us thank God there are men who resolve to know just one thing well, and can thus prepare and elaborate our interests for us, these men who are ignorant of unleashed curiosity.
Specialized vocabularies allow one to speak with precision in the natural sciences, and to disguise trivialities in the humanities.
His serious university training shields the technician from any thought.
The intellectual irritates the civilized man, just as the adolescent irritates the adult, not because of the audacity of his bright ideas but because of the triviality of his insolence.
The greater the importance of an intellectual activity, the more ridiculous the pretension of enhancing the competence of the one practicing it. A dentistry degree is respectable, a philosophy degree is grotesque.
Hypocrisy is sometimes nothing more than an elevated sense of professional obligation.
The specialist, when they examine his basic notions, bristles as though before blasphemy and trembles as though the earth is quaking.
The professional never admits that in his field insignificant truths abound.
Watching the expert suffer some disgrace is always a nice spectacle.
The leftist intellectual does not attack anything with fearlessness and arrogance except ideas he believes to be dead.
The technician speaks to the layman like a petulant sorcerer.
I am not a non-conformist modern intellectual but an indignant medieval peasant.
The scholar knows what can be known about a subject; the intellectual knows what it is fashionable to know.
Yesterday, languages were corrupted thanks to ignorant peasants.
Today they are corrupted by the pedantry and carelessness of the uncultivated specialist.
Pedantry is the weapon with which the professional protects the interests of his guild.
The technical excellence of intellectual works has reached such a point that libraries are bursting at the seams with books we cannot disdain, but are not worth the trouble to read.
Those historical events inspired by rhetoric, the intellectual, or the technician, end up drowning the common people in blood.
Intellectual bullshitting is the fault we least know how to avoid in this age.
When the theologian explains the reason for some act of God, the listener wavers between indignation and laughter.
The book that does not scandalize the expert a little has no reason to exist.
Note: Dávila was a Colombian political philosopher and in the Latin church. His aphorisms are presented here for the purposes of enjoyment, study, and historical record, but do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this writer. For more information on Dávila, see this introductory post. For information on how to live your life, go to church and read the Church Fathers/Saints.
Featured image: Antique book cover from the British Library
