To know more than is necessary blunts your weapons, for fine points generally bend or break. Common-sense truth is the surest. It is well to know but not to niggle. Lengthy comment leads to disputes. It is much better to have sound sense, which does not wander from the matter in hand.
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
There is a kind of cleverness that undoes itself by being too fine. The person who insists on the over-subtle point, who splits every hair and pursues every technicality, blunts the very sharpness they are showing off, because fine points bend and break under real weight while plain sound sense holds. Excessive commentary breeds disputes rather than settling them, and the mind that wanders off into refinements loses the matter actually in hand. This is not an argument against knowledge; it is an argument against niggling, against mistaking the ability to complicate for the ability to think. The surest truths are the common-sense ones, and the most useful mind is the one that stays on the point rather than performing its own subtlety for an audience. Know much, but do not niggle it away.
Practice
- Prefer plain sound sense to the over-fine point; the subtle distinction that bends and breaks loses to the common-sense truth that holds (maxim 216 values clarity for the same reason).
- Resist the urge to niggle and over-comment; lengthy refinement breeds disputes and loses the matter in hand.
- Separate real thinking from the performance of subtlety; complicating a thing is not the same as understanding it.
Use this when
- Use this when you catch yourself splitting hairs or pursuing technicalities past the point of usefulness.
- Use it in disputes; the plain, sound argument persuades where the over-clever one invites a counter-quibble.
Ignore this when
- Don't mistake necessary precision for niggling; some matters genuinely turn on a fine point, and the caution is against excess, not rigour (maxim 60 keeps sound judgment).
- Don't use "common sense" as a cover for refusing real depth; the target is empty over-refinement, not genuine expertise.
A picture of it
In every review a lawyer derails the discussion with over-fine distinctions, technically correct, endlessly qualified, and utterly beside the point, until colleagues dread bringing anything to him. His subtlety, meant to show mastery, blunts it: the hair-splitting bends under any real decision, and people route around him to someone with plainer sound sense. When he learns to hold the over-fine points and speak to the matter in hand, his actual expertise finally lands, because it is no longer buried under the niggling. He had confused the ability to complicate with the ability to think, and the confusion had cost him the room.
The over-fine point bends; plain sound sense holds. Know much, stay on the matter, and do not niggle your own weapon blunt.