A scholar’s business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or even sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can’t have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having.
A. E. Housman, in Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love (reposted from a couple of years ago because I like to remind myself of it)