quotations about knowledge
Knowledge without conscience is but the ruin of the soul.
FRANÇOIS RABELAIS
Pantagruel
The world grows more enlightened. Knowledge is more equally diffused.
JOHN ADAMS
Discourses on Davila
How dreadful knowledge of the truth can be when there's no help in truth!
SOPHOCLES
Oedipus Rex
Knowledge gropes but meets not Wisdom's face.
SRI AUROBINDO
Gems from Sri Aurobindo
The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.
STEPHEN HAWKING
attributed, The Prism and the Rainbow
Information is the mortar that both builds and destroys empires.
TOBSHA LEARNER
The Witch of Cologne
A youth's knowledge is like a cheap shotgun--likely to do as much damage to the owner as to the game.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
If you are truly wise, you will conceal your knowledge from the world, and let every fool think himself your superior, especially if you have anything to gain by him; for envy is the strongest passion of the weak, and mediocrity is the hot-bed on which all the meaner passions flourish.
CHARLES WILLIAM DAY
The Maxims
The knowledge of useful things is a purse seldom lost.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Sorrow is Knowledge: they who know the most
Must mourn the deepest o'er the fatal truth,
The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life.
LORD BYRON
Manfred
The misapplication of our knowledge is, in general, more injurious to our happiness and interest, than either the privations of ignorance, or the disqualifications of inexperience.
NORMAN MACDONALD
Maxims and Moral Reflections
In things which we know, everyone will trust us ... and we may do as we please, and no one will like to interfere with us; and we are free, and masters of others; and these things will be really ours, for we shall turn them to our good.
PLATO
Lysis
It is as though each of us investigated and made his own only a tiny circle of facts. Knowledge outside the day's work is regarded by most men as gewgaw. Still we are constantly in reaction against our ignorance. We rouse ourselves at intervals and speculate.
ROBERT WILSON LYND
The Pleasure of Ignorance
Man is an ignoramus athirst for knowledge.
CHARLES WAGNER
Justice
Practically all knowledge resolves itself into four forms: the knowledge of what to do, how to do, and when to do, and of what not to do.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
It's a hard talk for a man to say I don't know; it hurts his pride: but should not the pretending he does, hurt it much more?
FULKE GREVILLE
Maxims
Knowledge acquired too rapidly and without being personally supplemented is never very productive.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
The Reflections of Lichtenberg
This is the bitterest pain among men, to have much knowledge but no power.
HERODOTUS
The Histories: Book 9
Let no one, then, seek to know from me what I know that I do not know; unless he perhaps wishes to learn to be ignorant of that of which all we know is, that it cannot be known.
ST. AUGUSTINE
The City of God
Humans crave knowledge, and when that craving ends, we are no longer human.
TIM LEBBON
Fallen