Don’t you wish amateurs would mind their own business and leave theorizing to the experts?

Winston Churchill, My Early Life:

“Where my reason, imagination or interest were not engaged, I would not or I could not learn.  In all the twelve years I was at school no one ever succeeded in making me write a Latin verse or learn any Greek ? Perhaps if I had been introduced to the ancients through their history and customs, instead of through their grammar and syntax, I might have had a better record.”

Augustine put in his two cents also:

Why then did I hate the Greek language in which like songs are sung. For Homer also was skilful in weaving the like fables, and is most sweetly-vain, yet was he bitter to my boyish taste. And so I suppose would Virgil be to Grecian children, when forced to learn him as I was the other. Difficulty, in truth, the difficulty of learning a foreign tongue, sprinkled, as it were, with gall all the sweetness of Grecian fables. For I knew none of the words, and to make me know them, I was urged vehemently with cruel threats and punishments. Time was also (as an infant) I knew no Latin ; but this I learned without fear or torture, by mere observation, amid the caresses of my nurses, the jests of smiling friends, and the delights of those that played with me. This I learned without any burden of punishment to urge me on, for my heart urged me to give birth to its conceptions, which I could only do by learning words not of teachers, but of talkers; in whose ears also I gave birth to the thoughts, whatever I conceived. It is quite clear then, that a free curiosity has more power to make us learn these things than a terrifying obligation.