The Audacity of Dopes

Marcus Aurelius, Letter to Fronto 4.3 (1.1 Haines)

^{It seems to me that, in all arts, it is far better to be entirely inexperienced and uneducated than to be somewhat experienced and know a little. Anyone who is conscious of the fact that they are out of their element in a given art will try less and thus screw up less. A lack of confidence is a check to audacity. But when someone shows off something that they have a passing familiarity with as if they had mastered it, their false confidence slips up in various ways. They even say that it is far better never to have touched on philosophy than to have done it lightly and sipped, as the saying goes, with the edge of your lips. Further, they add that people come out with the worst characters when they spend sometime in the antechamber of an art and then duck out before they have penetrated inside. Yet there is in some arts a place where you may lie hidden and be considered for some time an expert in that which you don’t understand. But in the selection and disposition of words, the amateur is obvious and can’t pour out words for a long time without demonstrating that they are ignorant of words, judge them badly, reckon them rashly, handle them ineptly, and make distinctions neither about the mode nor about the weight of words.}

Omnium artium, ut ego arbitror, imperitum et indoctum omnino esse praestat quam semiperitum ac semidoctum. Nam qui sibi conscius est artis expertem esse minus adtemptat eoque minus praecipitat: Diffidentia profecto audaciam prohibet. At ubi quis leviter quid cognitum pro conperto ostentat, falsa fiducia multifariam labitur. Philosophiae quoque disciplinas ajunt satius esse numquam attigisse quam leviter et primoribus, ut dicitur, labiis delibasse, eosque provenire malitiosissimos, qui in vestibulo artis obversati prius inde averterint, quam penetraverint. Tamen est in aliis artibus, ubi interdum delitiscas et peritus paulisper habeare, quod nescias. In verbis vero eligendis conlocandisque ilico dilucet nec verba dare diutius potest, quin se ipse indicet verborum ignarum esse eaque male probare et temere existimare et inscie contrectare neque modum neque pondus verbi internosse.