Knowledge Quotes

There was, I found, always more to learn.

~ David Halberstam

Her searches after knowledge were arbitrary and without context. It was as if she were shining a small flashlight of curiosity into the dark room of the world.

~ Gloria Steinem

Those people who develop the ability to continuously acquire new and better forms of knowledge that they can apply to their work and to their lives will be the movers and shakers in our society for the indefinite future.

~ Brian Tracy

A monk should surely love his books with humility, wishing their good and not the glory of his own curiosity; but what the temptation of adultery is for laymen and the yearning for riches is for secular ecclesiastics, the seduction of knowledge is for monks.

~ Umberto Eco

... informed ignorance provides the natural state of mind for research scientists at the ever-shifting frontiers of knowledge. People who believe themselves ignorant of nothing have neither looked for, nor stumbled upon, the boundary between what is known and unknown in the cosmos.

~ Neil Degrasse Tyson

One had to live a long time to know a man's true nature.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

If you want to really know something you have to observe or experience it in person; if you claim to know something on the basis of hearsay, or on happening to see it in a book, you'll be a laughingstock to those who really know.

~ Jonathan D. Spence

We dream, we wake on a cold hillside, we pursue the dream again. In the beginning was the dream, and the work of disenchantment never ends.

~ Kim Stanley Robinson

Neglect of mathematics work injury to all knowledge, since he who is ignorant of it cannot know the other sciences or things of this world. And what is worst, those who are thus ignorant are unable to perceive their own ignorance, and so do not seek a remedy.

~ Roger Bacon

The ability to withstand the flinch comes with the knowledge that the future will be better than the past.

~ Julien Smith

Knowing trees, I came to realize, understand and appreciate the act of patience.

~ Ogwo David Emenike

She had discovered that her love of knowing was not unnatural or sinful but the direct consequence of a God-given ability to reason.

~ Donna Woolfolk Cross

I have sent books and music there, and all / Those instruments with which high spirits call / The future from its cradle, and the past / Out of its grave, and make the present last / In thoughts and joys which sleep, but cannot die, / Folded within their own eternity.

~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

The greatest challenge that has surreptitiously arisen in our age is the challenge of knowledge, indeed, not as against ignorance; but knowledge as conceived and disseminated throughout the world by Western civilization; knowledge whose nature has become problematic because it has lost its true purpose due to being unjustly conceived, and has thus brought about chaos in man's life instead of, and rather than, peace and justice; knowledge which pretends to be real but which is productive of confusion and scepticism, which has elevated doubt and conjecture to the 'scientific' rank in methodology; knowledge which has, for the first time in history, brought chaos to the Three Kingdom of Nature; the animal, vegetal and mineral.

~ Syed Muhammad Naquib Al-Attas

Politics:Lies about the truth,or the truth about lies?

~ Silverwolf

If you ask me what remains to be known in the future, I’ll say, ‘Memorize all the world’s encyclopedias.’ Once you do that, forget all that fancy junk and rake the leaves – else I’m gonna take a stick to you, boy.

~ M.c. Humphreys

The purpose of collecting so much information can only be power.

~ Nick Drake

Wandering across the vast room, I stopped at a set of shelves as high as the ceiling, and holding about six hundred volumes - all classics on the history of Soalris, starting with the nine volumes of Giese's monumental and already relatively obsolescent monograph. Display for its own sake was improbable in these surroundings. The collection was a respective tribute to the memory of the pioneers. I took down the massive volumes of Giese and sat leafing through them. Rheya had also located som reading matter. Looking over her shoulder, I saw that she had picked one of the many books brought out by the first expedition, the Interplanetary Cookery Book, which could have been the personal property of Giese himself. She was pouring over the recipes adapted to the arduous conditions of interstellar flight. I said nothing, and returned to the book resting on my knees. Solaris - Ten Years of Exploration had appeared as volumes 4-12 of the Solariana collection whose most recent additions were numbered in the thousands.

~ Stanisław Lem

When all this is over, people will try to blame the Germans alone, and the Germans will try to blame the Nazis alone, and the Nazis will try to blame Hitler alone. They will make him bear the sins of the world. But it's not true. You suspected what was happening, and so did I. It was already too late over a year ago. I caused a reporter to lose his job because you told me to. He was deported. The day I did that I made my little contribution to civilization, the only one that matters.

~ Iain Pears

You can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completely ignorant of it. A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.

~ Marilynne Robinson

The propensity to excessive simplification is indeed natural to the mind of man, since it is only by abstraction and generalisation, which necessarily imply the neglect of a multitude of particulars, that he can stretch his puny faculties so as to embrace a minute portion of the illimitable vastness of the universe. But if the propensity is natural and even inevitable, it is nevertheless fraught with peril, since it is apt to narrow and falsify our conception of any subject under investigation. To correct it partially - for to correct it wholly would require an infinite intelligence - we must endeavour to broaden our views by taking account of a wide range of facts and possibilities; and when we have done so to the utmost of our power, we must still remember that from the very nature of things our ideas fall immeasurably short of the reality.

~ James George Frazer

We must not attach knowledge to the mind, we have to incorporate it there.

~ Michel De Montaigne

One might suppose that reality must be held to at all costs. However, though that may be the moral thing to do, it is not necessarily the most useful thing to do. The Greeks themselves chose the ideal over the real in their geometry and demonstrated very well that far more could be achieved by consideration of abstract line and form than by a study of the real lines and forms of the world; the greater understanding achieved through abstraction could be applied most usefully to the very reality that was ignored in the process of gaining knowledge.

~ Isaac Asimov

Wilderness gave us knowledge. Wilderness made us human. We came from here. Perhaps that is why so many of us feel a strong bond to this land called Serengeti it is the land of our youth.

~ Boyd Norton

At present nothing is possible except to extend the area of sanity little by little. We cannot act collectively. We can only spread our knowledge outwards from individual to individual, generation after generation.

~ George Orwell

Ignorance is a knowledge illiteracy.

~ Toba Beta

Its a bit mad. Too bad, I mean, that getting to know each just for a fleeting second Must be replaced by unperfect knowledge of the featureless wholeLike some pocket history of the world, so generalAs to constitute a sob or wail

~ John Ashbery

...knowledge imprisons you. You cannot escape it. What you know you cannot unknow. That's why knowledge is dangerous. Learning will redefine your world, irreversibly.

~ Noam Shpancer

In that case, on behalf of Earthlife, I urge that, with full knowledge of our limitations, we vastly increase our knowledge of the Solar System and then begin to settle other worlds.

~ Carl Sagan

But there are roughly two sorts of informed people, aren't there? People who start off right by observing the pitfalls and mistakes and going round them, and the people who fall into them and get out and know they're there because of that. They both come to the same conclusions but they don't have quite the same point of view.

~ Margery Allingham

Trivia are not knowledge. Lists of facts don't comprise knowledge. Analyzing, hypothesizing, concluding from data, sharing insights, those comprise knowledge. You can't google for knowledge.

~ Elaine Ostrach Chaika

In order to exert influence over people, there were other things that could be used besides love. Knowledge seemed to be an equally strong force, perhaps even stronger. Whoever possessed knowledge not only had power over the changeable passions of people, but also power over their thinking, over their minds, hearts and souls.

~ Peter Prange

Whoever possessed knowledge not only had power over the changeable passions of people, but also power over their thinking, over their minds, hearts and souls.

~ Peter Prange

New knowledge enhances an ever increasing sense of our own ignorance. The more we know, the more we know we don't know. Feynman called it 'the expanding frontier of ignorance'.

~ Matt Baldwin

The phrase ‘popular science’ has in itself a touch of absurdity. That knowledge which is popular is not scientific.

~ Maria Mitchell

It is high time for the living to get tough, for toughness is indispensable in the struggle to safeguard and develop the life-force; this will not detract from their goodness, as long as they stand courageously by the truth. There is ground for hope in the fact that among millions of decent, hard-working people there are only a few plague-ridden individuals, who do untold harm by appealing to the dark, dangerous drives of the armored average man and mobilizing him for political murder. There is but one antidote to the average man's predisposition to plague: his own feelings for true life. The life force does not seek power but demands only to play its full and acknowledged part in human affairs. It manifests itself through love, work and knowledge.

~ Wilhelm Reich

Curiosity is a call from knowledge.

~ Toba Beta

A book is a product of a pact with the Devil that inverts the Faustian contract, he'd told Allie. Dr Faustus sacrificed eternity in return for two dozen years of power; the writer agrees to the ruination of his life, and gains (but only if he's lucky) maybe not eternity, but posterity, at least. Either way (this was Jumpy's point) it's the Devil who wins.

~ Salman Rushdie

A nation which expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, expects that which never was and never will be.

~ Thomas Jefferson

The more you test him, the slower he will learn and the less he'll want to do. The less you test him, the quicker he will learn and the more he'll want to learn. Knowledge is the most precious gift you can give your child. Give it as generously as you give him food.

~ Glenn Doman