Knowledge Quotes

The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.

~ Huston Smith

There is no magic. There is only knowledge, more or less hidden.

~ Gene Wolfe

Your children will smash your understanding, knowledge and reality. You will be better off. Then they will leave. You'll miss them forever.

~ Tibor Kalman

A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild-flower discovered on the prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East. Genius is a light which makes the darkness visible, like the lightning’s flash, which perchance shatters the temple of knowledge itself--and not a taper lighted at the hearthstone of the race, which pales before the light of common day.

~ Henry David Thoreau

The books—the generous friends who met me without suspicion—the merciful masters who never used me ill! The only years of my life that I can look back on with something like pride... Early and late, through the long winter nights and the quiet summer days, I drank at the fountain of knowledge, and never wearied of the draught.

~ Wilkie Collins

I had felt the shot coming; I hadn’t realized the bow was loaded with this very quarrel, perfectly calibrated to hit him hardest. What part of me had been studying him, stockpiling knowledge as ammunition?

~ Rachel Hartman

Knowledge is like money: To be of value it must circulate, and in circulating it can increase in quantity and, hopefully, in value.

~ Louis L'amour

What we most love is not what we know, but what knows us and draws us. . . . (78)

~ Ravi Ravindra

Because some information is better than no information. Life does not give you big, simple answers, Caitlyn. It demands patience, focus, and an open, intelligent mind to gather the pieces of a puzzle and fit them together into a coherent whole. Nothing worth knowing is ever easily learned.

~ Lisa Cach

I know everything, you see,' the old voice wheedled. 'The beginning, the present, the end. Everything. You now, you see the past and the present, like other low creatures: no higher faculties than memory and perception. But dragons, my boy, have a whole different kind of mind.' He stretched his mouth in a kind of smile, no trace of pleasure in it. 'We are from the mountaintop: all time, all space. We see in one instant the passionate vision and the blowout.

~ John Gardner

The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you actually don’t know.

~ Robert M. Pirsig

To 'know Thyself' is considered quite an accomplishment.

~ L. Frank Baum

Judgement can do without knowledge: but not knowledge without judgement.

~ Michel De Montaigne

All children are atheists, they have no idea of God.

~ Paul Henri Thiry D'holbach

Life can give everything to whoever tries to understand and is willing to receive new knowledge.

~ Pramoedya Ananta Toer

We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster.

~ Carl Sagan

I admit that reason is a small and feeble flame, a flickering torch by stumblers carried in the star-less night, -- blown and flared by passion's storm, -- and yet, it is the only light. Extinguish that, and nought remains.

~ Robert G. Ingersoll

Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.

~ Aldous Huxley

But maybe that isn't possible. Maybe the mind of the majority is always the healthy mind, simply by virtue of its numbers. Maybe it's the definition of madness to believe I'm right and everyone else if wrong, to find my thoughts rational and reasonable when almost the entire world finds them damaged and flawed.

~ Stacey Jay

Knowledge counts but common sense matters.

~ Louanne Johnson

As long as reading is for us the instigator whose magic keys have opened the door to those dwelling-places deep within us that we would not have known how to enter, its role in our lives is salutary. It becomes dangerous, on the other hand, when, instead of awakening us to the personal life of the mind, reading tends to take its place, when the truth no longer appears to us as an ideal which we can realize only by the intimate progress of our own thought and the efforts of our heart, but as something material, deposited between the leaves of books like a honey fully prepared by others and which we need only take the trouble to reach down from the shelves of libraries and then sample passively in a perfect repose of mind and body.

~ Marcel Proust

To sustain the belief that there is no God, atheism has to demonstrate infinite knowledge, which is tantamount to saying, “I have infinite knowledge that there is no being in existence with infinite knowledge

~ Ravi Zacharias

I would teach how science works as much as I would teach what science knows. I would assert (given that essentially, everyone will learn to read) that science literacy is the most important kind of literacy they can take into the 21st century. I would undervalue grades based on knowing things and find ways to reward curiosity. In the end, it's the people who are curious who change the world.

~ Neil Degrasse Tyson

Television, radio, and all the sources of amusement and information that surround us in our daily lives are also artificial props. They can give us the impression that our minds are active, because we are required to react to stimuli from the outside. But the power of those external stimuli to keep us going is limited. They are like drugs. We grow used to them, and we continuously need more and more of them. Eventually, they have little or no effect. Then, if we lack resources within ourselves, we cease to grow intellectually, morally, and spiritually. And we we cease to grow, we begin to die.

~ Mortimer J. Adler

The ability to retain a child's view of the world with at the same time a mature understanding of what it means to retain it, is extremely rare - and a person who has these qualities is likely to be able to contribute something really important to our thinking.

~ Mortimer J. Adler

Was not Hypatia the greatest philosopher of Alexandria, and a true martyr to the old values of learning? She was torn to pieces by a mob of incensed Christians not because she was a woman, but because her learning was so profound, her skills at dialectic so extensive that she reduced all who queried her to embarrassed silence. They could not argue with her, so they murdered her.

~ Iain Pears

I felt knowledge and the unity of the world circulate in me like my own blood.

~ Hermann Hesse

Of what a strange nature is knowledge! It clings to a mind when it has once seized on it like a lichen on a rock. - Frankenstein p115

~ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

I was drawn to horses as if they were magnets. It was in my blood. I must have inherited from my grandfather a genetic proclivity toward the equine species. Perhaps there's a quirk in the DNA that makes horse people different from everyone else, that instantly divides humanity into those who love horses and the others, who simply don't know.

~ Allan J. Hamilton

I also hold very strong personal convictions about censorship. I don't believe in forbidden knowledge.

~ Andrea Cremer

Public libraries have been a mainstay of my life. They represent an individual's right to acquire knowledge; they are the sinews that bind civilized societies the world over. Without libraries, I would be a pauper, intellectually and spiritually.

~ James A. Michener

Everything stated or expressed by man is a note in the margin of a completely erased text. From what's in the note we can extract the gist of what must have been in the text, but there's always a doubt, and the possible meanings are many.

~ Fernando Pessoa

There is, so I believe, in the essence of everything, something that we cannot call learning. There is, my friend, only a knowledge-that is everywhere, that is Atman, that is in me and you and in every creature, and I am beginning to believe that this knowledge has no worse enemy than the man of knowledge, than learning.

~ Hermann Hesse

Then we shan’t regard anyone as a lover of knowledge or wisdom who is fussy about what he studies…

~ Plato

Mankind have a great aversion to intellectual labor; but even supposing knowledge to be easily attainable, more people would be content to be ignorant than would take even a little trouble to acquire it.

~ Samuel Johnson

It's not always what we don't know that gets in our way sometimes it's what we think we know that keeps us from learning.

~ Steve Maraboli

Only one who has learned much can fully appreciate his ignorance.

~ Louis L'amour

Even the knowledge of my own fallibility cannot keep me from making mistakes. Only when I fall do I get up again.

~ Vincent Van Gogh

We do not learn for the benefit of anyone, we learn to unlearn ignorance.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

Knowing was a temptation. What you don't know won't tempt you.

~ Margaret Atwood