out the gaps with words and phrases. It is this, and not the dryness
of the subject-matter, that makes most books such tedious reading.
There is a saying that a good cook can make a palatable dish even
out of an old shoe; and a good writer can make the dryest things
interesting.

With by far the largest number of learned men, knowledge is a means,
not an end. That is why they will never achieve any great work;
because, to do that, he who pursues knowledge must pursue it as an
end, and treat everything else, even existence itself, as only a
means. For everything which a man fails to pursue for its own sake is
but half-pursued; and true excellence, no matter in what sphere, can
be attained only where the work has been produced for its own sake
alone, and not as a means to further ends.

And so, too, no one will ever succeed in doing anything really great
and original in the way of thought, who does not seek to acquire
knowledge for himself, and, making this the immediate object of his
studies, decline to trouble himself about the knowledge of others. But
the average man of learning studies for the purpose of being able to
teach and write. His head is like a stomach and intestines which let
the food pass through them undigested. That is just why his teaching
and writing is of so little use. For it is not upon undigested refuse
that people can be nourished, but solely upon the milk which secretes
from the very blood itself.

The wig is the appropriate symbol of the man of learning, pure and
simple. It adorns the head with a copious quantity of false hair, in
lack of one's own: just as erudition means endowing it with a great
mass of alien thought. This, to be sure, does not clothe the head so