Knowledge Quotes

Farms and food production should be, I submit, at least as important as who pierced their navel in Hollywood this week. Please tell me I'm not the only one who believes this. Please. As a culture, we think we're well educated, but I'm not sure that what we've learned necessarily helps us survive.

~ Joel Salatin

With words at your disposal, you can see more clearly. Finding the words is another step in learning to see.

~ Robin Wall Kimmerer

You have a lot to learn, young man. Philosophy. Theology. Literature. Poetry. Drama. History. Archeology. Anthropology. Mythology. Music. These are your tools as much as brush and pigment. You cannot be an artist until you are civilized. You cannot be civilized until you learn. To be civilized is to know where you belong in the continuum of our art and your world. To surmount the past, you must know the past.

~ John Logan

For you see, when us people who know run into each other that's an event. It almost never happens. Sometimes we meet each other and neither guesses that the other is one who knows. That's a bad thing. It's happened to me a lot of times. But you see there are so few of us.

~ Carson Mccullers

...I like stories very much,” the priest said. “They help me understand myself better.

~ Simon Van Booy

Foolish men always believe that a little knowledge will give them control over the world, but it is no more than a display of their vanity.

~ J. P. Vinluca

We feel that, for the honour of God (and also, though we do not say this, for the sake of our own reputation as spiritual Christians), it is necessary for us to claim that we are, so to speak, already in the signal-box, here and now enjoying the inside information as to the why and wherefore of God’s doings. This comforting pretence becomes part of us: we feel sure that God has enabled us to understand all His ways with us and our circle thus far, and we take if for granted that we shall be able to see at once the reason for anything that may happen to us in the future. And then something very painful and quite inexplicable comes along, and our cheerful illusion of being in God’s secret councils is shattered. Our pride is wounded; we feel that God has slighted us; and unless at this point we repent, and humble ourselves very thoroughly for our former presumption, our whole subsequent spriritual life may be blighted.

~ J.i. Packer

While we can learn or study techniques for almost anything we might want to accomplish, real understanding is not the mere accumulation of knowledge. Understanding cannot be realized by listening or reading about the realization of others. It must be achieved firsthand via substantive, direct perception in the moment.

~ H.e. Davey

Maybe knowledge is as fundamental, or even more fundamental than [material] reality.

~ Anton Zeilinger

So we couldn't mingle with them, but we could eavesdrop. We got our knowledge that way--we caught it like germs.

~ Margaret Atwood

I thought that to get to know a desert it was enough to have been there. I thought that to have seen the dogs dying along the Cholula road, or to have seen the eyes of the lepers at Chiengmai gave me the right to talk about it. To have seen! To have been there! Rubbish! The world is not a book, it proves nothing. The spaces one has crossed were dark corridors with closed doors. The faces of the women to whom one gave oneself up completely: did they speak for anyone but themselves? The cities of man are secret. One walks along their streets, one sees them shine under one's feet, but one is not there, one never enters them. The dusty fields inhabited by people who are hungry, who wait patiently, are paradises of luxury and nourishment; shining at a vast distance from intelligence, at a vast distance from reason. They are not to be subjugated.

~ Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio

Information is what you put in empty heads to keep them empty.

~ Marty Rubin

There is no quarrel between science and spirituality. I often hear people of science trying to use it to prove the nonexistence of the spiritual, but I simply can't see a chasm in between the two. What is spiritual produces what is scientific and when science is used to disprove the spiritual, it's always done with the intent to do so; a personal contempt. As a result, scientists today only prove their inferiority to the great founding fathers of the sciences who were practitioners of alchemy. Today's science is washed-out and scrubbed-down and robbed of everything mystical and spiritual, a knowledge born of contempt and discontent. Or perhaps, there are a few who wish to keep those secrets to themselves and serve everyone else up with a tasteless version of science and the idiots of today blindly follow their equally blind leaders.

~ C. Joybell C.

Every other knowledge is harmful to him who does not have knowledge of goodness.

~ Michel De Montaigne

Science is often misrepresented as ‘the body of knowledge acquired by performing replicated controlled experiments in the laboratory.’ Actually, science is something broader: the acquisition of reliable knowledge about the world.

~ Jared Diamond

There is no arguing with the pretenders to a divine knowledge and to a divine mission. They are possessed with the sin of pride. They have yielded to the perennial temptation.

~ Walter Lippmann

The computer focuses ruthlessly on things that can be represented in numbers. In so doing, it seduces people into thinking that other aspects of knowledge are either unreal or unimportant. The computer treats reason as an instrument for achieving things, not for contemplating things. It narrows dramatically what we know and intended by reason.

~ George Friedman

In mysticism, knowledge cannot be separated from a certain way of life which becomes its living manifestation. To acquire mystical knowledge means to undergo a transformation; one could even say that the knowledge is the transformation. Scientific knowledge, on the other hand, can often stay abstract and theoretical. Thus most of today’s physicists do not seem to realize the philosophical, cultural and spiritual implications of their theories.

~ Lois Mcmaster Bujold

Continued observations in clinical psychological practice lead almost inevitably to the conclusion that deeper and more fundamental than sexuality, deeper than the craving for social power, deeper even than the desire for possessions, there is a still more generalized and universal craving in the human make-up. It is the craving for knowledge of the right direction - for orientation.

~ William Sheldon

Nothing is born of nothing, least of all knowledge, modernity, or enlightened thought; progress is made in tiny surges, in successive laps, like an endless relay race. But there are links without which nothing would be passed on, and for that reason, they deserve the gratitude of all who benefited from them.

~ Amin Maalouf

Accepting the reality of change gives rise to equanimity.

~ Allan Lokos

To be too knowing is a downfall.

~ Laura Linney

Flame is not the only fire.” Her tone turned almost stern. “You have brought your folk another spark far greater than any flame. You have opened their eyes to the world, Aljan, shown them lands and peoples formerly beyond their ken. You have whistled them out of their cramped, closed, inward-facing ring and led them into my Dance, the Great Circle and Cycle encompassing all. <…> Nay, flame has not been the greatest of my gifts to you. Knowledge, Aljan, that even now remakes the world. Knowledge is the fire.

~ Meredith Ann Pierce

Nothing is more beautiful than to know all.

~ Athanasius Kircher

Whereas a novice makes moves until he gets checkmated (proof), a Grand Master realizes 20 moves in advance that it’s futile to continue playing (conceptualizing).

~ Bill Gaede

One might have said that reason made him flee from reason.

~ André Maurois

But nothing in India is identifiable, the mere asking of a question causes it to disappear and merge into something else.

~ E.m. Forster

Each language is a unique repository of facts and knowledge about the world that we can ill afford to lose, or, at the least, facts and knowledge about some history and people that have their place in the understanding of mankind. Every language is a treasury of human experience. Eyak doesn't give a damn about tenses. But it sure does give a damn about other things, much more than I do. Therefore it broadens your thinking, enriches your ability to understand the world- to deal with reality and experience.

~ Michael E. Krauss

A man of logic is a man of sin.

~ Mike Norton

In an age when mass pleasures like television are becoming more feeble and homogeneous, the very act of discrimination becomes a form of protest. At a time when mass marketing of food produces a product so disgusting that it has to be wrapped in distracting gimmicks to be sold, the mere fact of paying attention to what you eat and drink and telling the truth about taste is a revolutionary act.

~ Lynn Hoffman

The worn soles of Daffy's boots skidded on the icy stones. He'd been saving up for a new pair for Christmas, but then he'd come across an encyclopaedia in ten volumes, going cheap. Boots might last ten years, at best, but knowledge was eternal.

~ Emma Donoghue

But it was Aldo’s pen that became his most forceful tool. He started a newsletter for rangers called the Carson Pine Cone. Aldo used it to “scatter seeds of knowledge, encouragement, and enthusiasm.” Most of the Pine Cone’s articles, poems, jokes, editorials, and drawings were Aldo’s own. His readers soon realized that the forest animals were as important to him as the trees. His goal was to bring back the “flavor of the wilds.

~ Marybeth Lorbiecki

Wolf's wool is the best wool, but it cannot be sheared, because the wolf will not comply. With knowledge as with wolves' surliness, the student studies voluntarily, refusing to be less than individual. He gives his opinion and then rests upon it; he renders service when there is no reward, and is too reclusive for some things to seem to touch him; not because he has no feeling but because he has so much.

~ Marianne Moore

knowledge without application is like a book that is never read' Christopher Crawford, Hemel Hempstead.

~ Christopher Crawford

Sharing will enrich everyone with more knowledge.

~ Ana Monnar

Books whose topics I thoroughy depsise are accapteble because they often force the reader to think and to examine his own beliefs. In an age where most people are either blindly obedient or radical, exposing oneself to the ideas contained in even the most controversial of books is a good thing.

~ Tiffini Johnson

Certainty is the most vivid condition of ignorance and the most necessarycondition for knowledge.

~ Kedar Joshi

As the Promethean fire which banished Darkness, so Knowledge bears the Power and the Light.

~ Leanna Renee Hieber

As outsiders looking in, my readers and I must reform how we think so we may open ourselves to new forms of knowledge.

~ Cristina Marrero

You believe me wise because I taught you once, but I have not been north, as you have. You have seen (what) I have never seen...You flatter me by asking my opinion.

~ Gene Wolfe