Knowledge Quotes

In friendship as well as love, ignorance very often contributes more to our happiness than knowledge.

A man's ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful-while his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides being ugly.

The desire to know is natural to good men.

I know how the birds fly, how the fishes swim, how animals run. But there is the Dragon. I cannot tell how it mounts on the winds through the clouds and flies through heaven. Today I have seen the Dragon.

I knew a lot about what I did when I was 20. I had read a lot, and I aspired to learn everything I could about the subject.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

Every known fact in natural science was divined by the presentiment of somebody, before it was actually verified.

If the parents in each generation always or often knew what really goes on at their sons' schools, the history of education would be very different.

Books externalise our brains and turn our homes into thinking bodies.

The scientist finds his reward in what Henri Poincare calls the joy of comprehension, and not in the possibility of application to which any discovery may lead.

I believe that it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than be ignorant.

I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn't know.

A good aphorism is too hard for the tooth of time, and is not worn away by all the centuries, although it serves as food for every epoch.

An ignorant person is one who doesn't know what you have just found out.

Reality is infinitely diverse, compared with even the subtlest conclusions of abstract thought, and does not allow of clear-cut and sweeping distinctions. Reality resists classification.

Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract, be they facts or be they principles, under penalty of endless inconsistency and frustration.

Middle English is an exciting field - almost uncharted, I begin to think, because as soon as one turns detailed personal attention on to any little corner of it, the received notions and ideas seem to crumple up and fall to pieces - as far as language goes, at any rate.

No book is of much importance; the vital thing is, What do you yourself think?

Knowledge can be enormously costly, and is often scattered in widely uneven fragments, too small to be individually usable in decision making. The communication and coordination of these scattered fragments of knowledge is one of the basic problems- perhaps the basic problem- of any society.

Deep is the well of truth and long does it take to know what has fallen into its depths.

Knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be.

We dance round in a ring and suppose, but the secret sits in the middle and knows.

The mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-à-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value.

Certain books seem to be written, not that we might learn from them, but in order that we might see how much the author knows.

...These healers...my intellect has been unable to assimilate their theories....But their facts are patent and startling; and anything that interferes with the multiplication of such facts, and with our freest opportunity of observing and studying them, will, I believe, be a public calamity.

However we select from nature a complex [of phenomena] using the criterion of simplicity, in no case will its theoretical treatment turn out to be forever appropriate (sufficient).... I do not doubt that the day will come when [general relativity], too, will have to yield to another one, for reasons which at present we do not yet surmise. I believe that this process of deepening theory has no limits.

It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!

The philosopher is in love with truth, that is, not with the changing world of sensation, which is the object of opinion, but with the unchanging reality which is the object of knowledge.

I heard what was said of the universe, heard it and heard it of several thousand years; it is middling well as far as it goes - but is that all?

No country and no people can be free and ignorant at the same time.

Conceptions without experience are void; experience without conceptions is blind.

You know we're constantly taking. We don't make most of the food we eat, we don't grow it, anyway. We wear clothes other people make, we speak a language other people developed, we use a mathematics other people evolved and spent their lives building. I mean we're constantly taking things. It's a wonderful ecstatic feeling to create something and put it into the pool of human experience and knowledge.

We want to know in order to make ourselves free. That is our life: one universal cry for freedom.

Since we cannot know all that there is to be known about anything, we ought to know a little about everything.

To know that you do not know is the best. To pretend to know when you do not know is a disease.

To Thales the primary question was not what do we know, but how do we know it.

To study and at times practice what one has learned, is this not a pleasure?

To one who is accustomed to thinking a lot, every new thought that he hears or reads about immediately appears as a link in a chain.

Any man will go considerably out of his way to pick up a silver dollar; but here are golden words, which the wisest men of antiquity have uttered, and whose worth the wise of every succeeding age have assured us of; and yet we learn to read only as far as Easy Reading, the primers and classbooks, and when we leave school, the Little Reading, and story books, which are for boys and beginners; and our reading, our conversation and thinking, are all on a very low level, worthy only of pygmies and manikins.

What the first philosopher taught the last will have to repeat.

A book is a loaded gun in the house next door...Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?

What are the libraries of science but files of newspapers?

Until man duplicates a blade of grass, nature can laugh at his so called scientific knowledge.

Without books the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are the engines of change, windows on the world, "Lighthouses" as the poet said "erected in the sea of time." They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind, Books are humanity in print.

Books take their place according to their specific gravity as surely as potatoes in a tub.

If I could remember the names of all these particles, I'd be a botanist.

It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand, and what those things are. Human understanding has vulgarly occupied itself with nothing but understanding, but if it would only take the trouble to understand itself at the same time it would simply have to posit the paradox.

All knowledge is spendable currency, depending on the market.

All perception of truth is the detection of an analogy.

What is not intelligible to me is not necessarily unintelligent

It is my inner conviction that the development of science seeks in the main to satisfy the longing for pure knowledge.

...because knowledge rapidly deteriorates unless it is used constantly, maintaining within an organization an activity that is used only intermittently guarantees incompetence.

The ignorant man never enjoys.

Knowledge has two extremes. The first is the pure natural ignorance in which all men find themselves at birth. The other extreme is that reached by great minds, who, having run through all that men can know, find they know nothing, and come back again to that same natural ignorance from which they set out; this is a learned ignorance which is conscious of itself.

All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own.

Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.

Parts exist only for purposes of figuring and describing, and as we figure the world out we become confused if we do not remember this all the time.

I know a lot about cars, man. I can look at any car's headlights and tell you exactly which way it's coming.

Many an object is not seen, though it falls within the range of our visual ray, because it does not come within the range of our intellectual ray.

The news we hear, for the most part, is not news to our genius. It is the stalest repetition.