Thou Shalt Not Vomit Up Knowledge and Smear It On Walls

There is something that deserves my attention and warrants my contemplation. Below are the following quotes I find useful while going through some of the LCL, (Loeb Classical Library.) The topic at hand: Digesting what you learned, and not putting undigested food on display and showing your immaturity. I think it's necessary to bring myself back to these important truths. Truth need not be seen spewn 24/7 by a "know it all," but let your knowledge be evident as it oozes out in your life's actions. "Digest and learn," the Lord says to me, for it is the Lord who alone is wise, and it is the Lord who departs His grace and gives wisdom and allows humankind to catch glimpses of reality!

“You must linger among a limited number of master-thinkers, and digest their works, if you would derive ideas which shall win firm hold in your mind. Everywhere means nowhere…Food does no good and is not assimilated into the body if it leaves the stomach as soon as it is eaten; nothing hinders a cure so much as frequent change of medicine; no would will heal when one salve is tried after another; a plant which is often moved can never grow strong.” Seneca, Epistles 2.2-3

“Those who have learned the principles and nothing else are eager to throw them immediately, just as persons with a weak stomach throw up their food. First digest your principles, and then you will surely not throw them up this way. Otherwise they are mere vomit, foul stuff and unfit to eat. But after you have digested these principles, show use some change in your governing principle that is due to them; as the athletes show their shoulders as the results of their exercising and eating, and as those who have mastered the arts can show the results of their learning. The builder does not come forward and say, “Listen to me deliver a discourse about the art of building”; but he takes a contract for a house, builds it, and thereby proves that he possesses the art. Do something of the same sort yourself too…” Epictetus, Discourses 3.21.1-5

“On no occasion call your self a philosopher, and do not, for the most part, talk among laymen about your philosophic principles, but do what follows from your principles. For example, at a banquet do not say how people ought to eat, but eat as a man ought…And if talk about some philosophic principle arises among laymen, keep silence for the most part, for there is great danger that you will spew up immediately what you have not digested…For sheep, too, do not bring their fodder to the shepherds and show how much they have eaten, but they digest their food within them, and on the outside produce wool and milk. And so do you, therefore, make no display to the laymen of your philosophical principles, but let them see the results which come from these principles when digested.” Epictetus, The Encheiridion 46