Knowledge Quotes

Very few beings really seek knowledge in this world. Mortal or immortal, few really ask. On the contrary, they try to wring from the unknown the answers they have already shaped in their own minds -- justifications, confirmations, forms of consolation without which they can't go on. To really ask is to open the door to the whirlwind. The answer may annihilate the question and the questioner.

~ Anne Rice

Peace does not mean an absence of conflicts; differences will always be there. Peace means solving these differences through peaceful means; through dialogue, education, knowledge; and through humane ways.

~ Dalai Lama Xiv

You know, it's pretty easy reading this book to see why I was angry and confused for all those years. I lived my life being told different stories: some true, some lies and I still don't know which is which. Children are born innocent. At birth we are very much like a new hard drive - no viruses, no bad information, no crap that's been downloaded into it yet. It's what we feed into that hard drive, or in my case head drive that starts the corruption of the files.

~ Nikki Sixx

The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.

~ John Berger

The thing that's important to know is that you never know. You're always sort of feeling your way.

~ Diane Arbus

Ah, child and youth, if you knew the bliss which resides in the taste of knowledge, and the evil and ugliness that lies in ignorance, how well you are advised to not complain of the pain and labor of learning.

~ Christine De Pizan

When walking alone in a jungle of true darkness, there are three things that can show you the way: instinct to survive, the knowledge of navigation, creative imagination. Without them, you are lost.

~ Toba Beta

Knowledge is the food of the soul.

~ Plato

Of whom and of what can I say: I know that! This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction. For if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers. I can sketch one by one all the aspects it is able to assume, all those likewise that have been attributed to it, this upbringing, this origin, this ardor or these silences, this nobility or this vileness. But aspects cannot be added up. This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance the gap will never be filled.

~ Albert Camus

An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject, and how to avoid them.

~ Werner Heisenberg

Opinion is usually something which people have when they lack comprehensive information.

~ Idries Shah

... there is no shame in not knowing. The problem arises when irrational thought and attendant behavior fill the vacuum left by ignorance.

~ Neil Degrasse Tyson

If a person holds no ambitions in this world, he suffers unknowingly. If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.

~ Alan Lightman

When you have wisdom that another person knows that he needs, you give it freely. But when the other person doesn't yet know that he needs your wisdom you keep it to yourself. Food only looks good to a hungry man.

~ Orson Scott Card

Acquiring knowledge is a form of imitation.

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information on it.

~ Samuel Johnson

When we make judgements we're inevitably acting on limited knowledge, isn't it best to ask if we seek to understand, or simply let them be?

~ Jay Woodman

If you do not know where you come from, then you don't know where you are, and if you don't know where you are, then you don't know where you're going. And if you don't know where you're going, you're probably going wrong.

~ Terry Pratchett

Someone said, 'The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.' Precisely, and they are that which we know.

~ T.s. Eliot

I can't protect you from knowledge.

~ Patricia Briggs

The more a man knows, the more willing he is to learn. The less a man knows, the more positive he is that he knows everything...

~ Robert G. Ingersoll

I think that knowledge enslaves us, that at the base of all knowledge there is a servility, the acceptation of a way of life wherein each moment has meaning only in relation to another or others that will follow it.

~ Georges Bataille

I see... the way you're always searching. How much you hate anything fake or phony. How you're older than your years, but still... playful, like a little girl. How you're always looking into people, or wondering what they see when they look back at you. Your eyes. It's all in the eyes.

~ Claudia Gray

Astrology is assured of recognition from psychology, without further restrictions, because astrology represents the summation of all the psychological knowledge of antiquity.

~ C.g. Jung

Those who don't know must learn from those who do.

~ Plato

Qui plussait, plus se tait. French, you know. The more a man knows, the less he talks.

~ Madeleine L'engle

What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.

~ Bertrand Russell

Darkness feeds on apathy.

~ Dan Brown

Yeah. Floyd is his batman.His what?Batman, like in the British army, each officer had a batman, a personal servant.You spend too much time reading, Spenser. You know more stuff that don't make you money than anybody I know.

~ Robert B. Parker

Some people still think knowledge is power.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

I was hugely impressed... was the ultimate example of a man who knew what he didn't know, was perfectly willing to admit it, and didn't want to leave until he understood. That's heroic to me. I wish every grad student had that attitude.

~ Randy Pausch

Depending on the situation, sometimes you can know a person better in ten minutes than someone you have crossed paths with all your life.

~ David Baldacci

Everything I need to know... I learned in kindergarten.

~ Robert Fulghum

When most of the greatest individuals in history were misunderstood and you've spent so much of your own adult life misunderstood, you can't help but believe that the majority of people know very little worth knowing.

~ Criss Jami

The soil needs the seed and the seed needs the soil. The one only has meaning with the other. It is the same thing with human beings. When male knowledge joins with female transformation, then the great magical union is created, and its name is wisdom. Wisdom means both to know and to transform.

~ Paulo Coelho

We need learn what we need to learn, know what we need to know, and do what we need to do.

~ Thomas S. Monson

...Turn our thoughts, in the next place, to the characters of learned men. The priesthood have, in all ancient nations, nearly monopolized learning. Read over again all the accounts we have of Hindoos, Chaldeans, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Celts, Teutons, we shall find that priests had all the knowledge, and really governed all mankind. Examine Mahometanism, trace Christianity from its first promulgation; knowledge has been almost exclusively confined to the clergy. And, even since the Reformation, when or where has existed a Protestant or dissenting sect who would tolerate a free inquiry? The blackest billingsgate, the most ungentlemanly insolence, the most yahooish brutality is patiently endured, countenanced, propagated, and applauded. But touch a solemn truth in collision with a dogma of a sect, though capable of the clearest proof, and you will soon find you have disturbed a nest, and the hornets will swarm about your legs and hands, and fly into your face and eyes.]

~ John Adams

People are invariably surprised to hear me say I am both an atheist and an agnostic, as if this somehow weakens my certainty. I usually reply with a question like, 'Well, are you a Republican or an American?' The two words serve different concepts and are not mutually exclusive. Agnosticism addresses knowledge; atheism addresses belief. The agnostic says, 'I don't have a knowledge that God exists.' The atheist says, 'I don't have a belief that God exists.' You can say both things at the same time. Some agnostics are atheistic and some are theistic.

~ Dan Barker

Knowledge is something which you can use.Belief is something which uses you.

~ Idries Shah

Knowledge was like candy: you never turned it down, especially if you didn't have to work too hard to get it.

~ Robert Liparulo