Knowledge Quotes

“Knowing I lov'd my books, he furnish'd me From mine own library with volumes that I prize above my dukedom.”

“I'll teach you differences.”

“Plutus himself,That knows the tinct and multiplying med'cine,Hath not in nature's mystery more scienceThan I have in this ring.”

“Ignorance is the curse of God; knowledge is the wing wherewith we fly to heaven.”

“Light seeking light doth light of light beguile: So, ere you find where light in darkness lies, Your light grows dark by losing of your eyes.”

“In nature's infinite book of secrecyA little I can read.”

“Within the book and volume of thy brain.”

“I say there is no darkness but ignorance.”

“They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.”

“Why, all delights are vain, but that most vain Which, with pain purchased, doth inherit pain: As, painfully to pore upon a book, To seek the light of truth, which truth the while Doth falsely blind the eyesight of his look.”

“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

“Hereafter, in a better world than this, I shall desire more love and knowledge of you”

“O, let my books be then the eloquence and dumb presages of my speaking breast.”

“There is a history in all men's lives, Figuring the nature of the times deceased, The which observed, a man may prophesy, With a near aim, of the main chance of things As yet not come to life, which in their seeds And weak beginnings lie intreasured.”

“Thought and knowledge are natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns, and pecuniary foundations, though of towns of gold, can never countervail the least sentence or syllable of wit. Forget this, and out American colleges will recede in their public importance whilst they grow richer every year.”

“A beggar's book outworths a noble's blood.”

“I, thus neglecting worldly ends, all dedicatedTo closeness and the bettering of my mind.”

“Me, poor man, my library Was dukedom large enough.”

“The kitchen clock is more convenient than sidereal time. We must use the popular category, as we do by the Linnæan classification, for convenience, and not as exact and final. Otherwise, we are presently confounded, when the best-settled traits of one race are claimed by some new ethnologist as precisely characteristic of the rival tribe.”

“Whenever a true theory appears, it will be its own evidence. Its test is, that it will explain all phenomena.”

“A certain awkwardness marks the use of borrowed thoughts; but as soon as we have learned what to do with them, they become our own.”

“But what is classification but the perceiving that these objects are not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law which is also the law of the human mind?”

“A mind does not receive truth as a chest receives jewels that are put into it, but as the stomach takes up food into the system. It is no longer food, but flesh, and is assimilated. The appetite and the power of digestion measure our right to knowledge. He has it who can use it. As soon as our accumulation overruns our invention or power to use, the evils of intellectual gluttony begin,— congestion of the brain, apoplexy and strangulation.”

“Knowledge is the only elegance.”

“A little fact is worth a whole limbo of dreams.”