#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.”

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

“I like to have a person's knowledge comprehend more than one class of topics, one row of shelves. I like a person who likes to see a fine barn as well as a good tragedy.”

“All life is an experiment. Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which animates all whom it floats, and you are without effort impelled to truth, to right and a perfect contentment. I wish to write such rhymes as shall not suggest a restraint, but contrariwise the wildest freedom. Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.”

“Study is like the heaven's glorious sun, That will not be deep-searched with saucy looks: Small have continual plodders ever won, Save base authority from others' books.”

“There can be no excess to love, none to knowledge, none to beauty.”

“Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, Plato,--at once the glory and the shame of mankind, since neither Saxon nor Roman have availed to add any idea to his categories.”

“In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.”

“The things taught in schools & colleges are not an education but the means of education.”

“Yet things are knowable! They are knowable, because, being from one, things correspond. There is a scale: and the correspondence of heaven to earth, of matter to mind, of the part to the whole, is our guide. As there is a science of stars, called astronomy; and science of quantities, called mathematics; a science of qualities, called chemistry; so there is a science of sciences,--I call it Dialectic,--which is the Intellect discriminating the false and the true.”

“He presents me with what is always an acceptable gift who brings me news of a great thought before unknown. He enriches me without impoverishing himself.”

“Knowledge is the antidote to fear. [especially as fear often stands for false evidence appearing real!]”

“Most of the classical citations you shall hear or read in the current journals or speeches were not drawn from the originals, but from previous quotations in English books.”

“Thought is the property of him who can entertain it, and of him who can adequately place it.”

“Demand me nothing: what you know, you know.”

“But also the constituency determines the vote of the representative. He is not only representative, but participant. Like can onlybe known by like. The reason why he knows about them is, that he is of them; he has just come out of nature, or from being a part of the thing.”

“There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant”

“Consider what you have in the smallest well-chosen library-a company of the wisest and wittiest men which can be plucked out of all civilized countries in a thousand years. The men themselves were then hidden and inaccessible. They were solitary, impatient of interruption, and fenced by etiquette. But now they are immortal, and the thought they did not reveal, even to their bosom friends, is here written out in transparent words of light to us, who are strangers of another age.”

“When science is learned in love, and its powers are wielded by love, they will appear the supplements and continuations of the material creation.”

“Our debt to tradition through reading and conversation is so massive, our protest so rare and insignificant-and this commonly on the ground of other reading and hearing-that in large sense, one would say there is no pure originality. All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. It is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.”

“The secret of genius is to suffer no fiction to exist for us; to realize all that we know; in the high refinement of modern life,in arts, in sciences, in books, in men, to exact good faith, reality, and a purpose; and first, last, midst, and without end, to honor every truth by use.”

“The permanence of all books is fixed by no effort friendly or hostile, but by their own specific gravity, or the intrinsic importance of their contents to the constant mind of man.”

“Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.”

“The unstable estimates of men crowd to him whose mind is filled with a truth, as the heaped waves of the Atlantic follow the moon.”

“The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances.”

“Could Shakespeare give a theory of Shakespeare?”