Knowledge

[Gustave Flaubert's comic characters Bouvard and Pécuchet] discovered through their friendship a common purpose: the pursuit of universal knowledge. To achieve this ambitious goal […] they attempted to read everything they could find on every branch of human endeavor, and cull from their readings the most outstanding facts and ideas, an enterprise that was, of course, endless. [… T]he two brave explorers […] read their way through many learned libraries of agriculture, literature, animal husbandry, medicine, archæology and politics, always with disappointing results. What Flaubert's two clowns discovered is what we have always known but seldom believed: that the accumulation of knowledge isn't knowledge.

-- Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University, 2008), page 88.