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     We labor only to fill out memory, and leave the understanding and the conscience empty.  Just as birds sometimes go in quest of grain, and carry it in the beak without tasting it to give a beakful to their little ones, so our pedants go pillaging knowledge in books and lodge it only on the end of their lips, in order merely to disgorge it and scatter it to the winds.
      It is wonderful how appropriately this folly fits my case.  Isn't it doing the same thing, what I do in most of this composition?  I go about cadging from books here and there the sayings that please me, not to keep them, for I have no storehouses, but to transport them into this one, in which, to tell he truth, they are no more mine than in their original place.  We are, I believe, learned only with present knowledge, not with past, any more than with future.

-Michel De Montaigne, from his essay Of Pedantry, from The Complete Works