Knowledge Quotes

Knowledge kills action action requires the veils of illusion.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The offer of certainty, the offer of complete security, the offer of an impermeable faith that can’t give way, is an offer of something not worth having. I want to live my life taking the risk all the time that I don’t know anything like enough yet; that I haven’t understood enough; that I can’t know enough; that I’m always hungrily operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

~ Christopher Hitchens

[I]t was with a good end in mind – that of acquiring the knowledge of good and evil – that Eve allowed herself to be carried away and eat the forbidden fruit. But Adam was not moved by this desire for knowledge, but simply by greed: he ate it because he heard Eve say it tasted good.

~ Moderata Fonte

Of course. You get everything from books.

~ Gregory Maguire

One knows so little. When one knows more it is too late.

~ Agatha Christie

Isn’t that wonderful? That feeling of not knowing too much about something… Incomplete information… Endless possibilities… When you don’t know much about something, it’s the most exciting sensation.-Kutsnetz in TALUS

~ Erol Ozan

Perhaps by now I'd come far enough that I had the guts to be afraid.

~ Cheryl Strayed

First, the avid student must be aware that when the world was young it knew only seven things: water, life and death, salt, night, birds and the length of an hour.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

No power and no treasure can outweigh the extension of our knowledge.

~ Democritus

Musicians have always had a better understanding of love than the rest of us. Over the years they have told us that love: is like a rock, is here to stay, is all you need, will find a way, will keep us together, will tear us apart, sucks.

~ Cuthbert Soup

Enough talk, now read!

~ Toba Beta

To furnish the means of acquiring knowledge is ... the greatest benefit that can be conferred upon mankind. It prolongs life itself and enlarges the sphere of existence.

~ John Quincy Adams

When I was your age, art was a lonely thing: no galleries, no collecting, no critics, no money. We didn't have mentors. We didn't have parents. We were alone. But it was a great time, because we had nothing to lose and a vision to gain.

~ John Logan

From the dawn of exact knowledge to the present day, observation, experiment, and speculation have gone hand in hand; and, whenever science has halted or strayed from the right path, it has been, either because its votaries have been content with mere unverified or unverifiable speculation (and this is the commonest case, because observation and experiment are hard work, while speculation is amusing); or it has been, because the accumulation of details of observation has for a time excluded speculation.

~ Thomas Henry Huxley

I am not omniscient, but I know a lot.

~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

If it were customary to send little girls to school and teach them the same subjects as are taught to boys, they would learn just as fully and would understand the subtleties of all arts and sciences.

~ Christine De Pizan

What we want to see is the child in pursuit of the knowledge not the knowledge in pursuit of the child.

~ George Bernard Shaw

You cannot go on 'explaining away' for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on 'seeing through' things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it.

~ C.s. Lewis

We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.

~ John Archibald Wheeler

Everyone lives bound by their own knowledge and awareness. They define that as reality; but knowledge and awareness are vage, and perhaps better called illusions.

~ Masashi Kishimoto

They knew many things but had no idea why. And strangely this made them more, rather than less, certain that they were right.

~ Neal Stephenson

Man wants three things; life, knowledge, and love.

~ Fulton J. Sheen

I believe that we do not know anything for certain, but everything probably.

~ Christiaan Huygens

The range of human knowledge today is so great that we're all specialists and the distance between specializations has become so great that anyone who seeks to wander freely between them almost has to forego closeness with the people around him.

~ Robert M. Pirsig

Facts or opinions which are to pass through the hands of so many, to be misconceived by folly in one, and ignorance in another, can hardly have much truth left.

~ Jane Austen

It is like the thirsty traveller who at first sincerely sought the water of knowledge, but who later, having found it plain perhaps, proceeded to temper his cup with the salt of doubt so that his thirst now becomes insatiable though he drinks incessantly, and that in thus drinking the water that cannot slake his thirst, he has forgotten the original and true purpose for which the water was sought.

~ Syed Muhammad Naquib Al-Attas

There is much that I do not know and I'd like to know even less.

~ Martin Schuster

Nobody knows, nobody can ever know, not even in memory, because there are moments in time that are not knowable.

~ Amitav Ghosh

Curiosity is more important than knowledge.

~ Albert Einstein

There are no limitations to the mind except those that we acknowledge.

~ Napoleon Hill

I would suggest that science is, at least in my part, informed worship.

~ Carl Sagan

The complexities of adult life get in the way of the truth.

~ Mortimer J. Adler

The Search for reason ends at the known; on the immense expanse beyond it only the sense of the ineffable can glide. It alone knows the route to that which is remote from experience and understanding. Neither of them is amphibious: reason cannot go beyond the shore, and the sense of the ineffable is out of place where we measure, where we weigh. We do not leave the shore of the known in search of adventure or suspense or because of the failure of reason to answer our questions. We sail because our mind is like a fantastic seashell, and when applying our ear to its lips we hear a perpetual murmur from the waves beyond the shore. Citizens of two realms, we all must sustain a dual allegiance: we sense the ineffable in one realm, we name and exploit reality in another. Between the two we set up a system of references, but we can never fill the gap. They are as far and as close to each other as time and calendar, as violin and melody, as life and what lies beyond the last breath.

~ Abraham Joshua Heschel

In order to survive, a plurality of true communities would require not egalitarianism and tolerance but knowledge, an understanding of the necessity of local differences, and respect. Respect, I think, always implies imagination - the ability to see one another, across our inevitable differences, as living souls. (pg. 181, Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community)

~ Wendell Berry

Knowledge without courage is sterile.

~ Baltasar Gracián

I am a man who knows nothing, guesses sometimes, finds frequently and who's always amazed.

~ Villiers De L'isle-Adam

As the biggest library if it is in disorder is not as useful as a small but well-arranged one, so you may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value to you than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself; because only through ordering what you know by comparing every truth with every other truth can you take complete possession of your knowledge and get it into your power.

~ Arthur Schopenhauer

It's where we're nearest to our humanness. Useless knowledge for its own sake. Useful knowledge is good, too, but it's for the faint-hearted, an elaboration of the real thing, which is only to shine some light, it doesn't matter where on what, it's the light itself, against the darkness, it's what's left of God's purpose when you take away God.

~ Tom Stoppard

The meditative mind sees disagreeable or agreeable things with equanimity, patience, and good-will. Transcendent knowledge is seeing reality in utter simplicity. (146)

~ Jean-Yves Leloup

Scoring well on tests is the sort of happy thing that gets the school district the greenbacks they crave. Understanding and appreciating the material are secondary.

~ Libba Bray