quotations about knowledge
What we know is built on what we do not know.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
The world grows more enlightened. Knowledge is more equally diffused.
JOHN ADAMS
Discourses on Davila
To receive instruction and knowledge is as natural as to receive the light of the sun, if a man opens his eyes.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
The world of knowledge takes a crazy turn
When teachers themselves are taught to learn.
BERTOLT BRECHT
Life of Galileo
The less we know, the longer the explanation.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVEN J. ANDERSON
Dune: House Corrino
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
There's a vast difference between having a carload of miscellaneous facts sloshing around loose in your head and getting all mixed up in transit, and carrying the same assortment properly boxed and crated for convenient handling and immediate delivery.
GEORGE HORACE LORIMER
Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son
The true method of knowledge is experiment.
WILLIAM BLAKE
All Religions are One
Men are more readily contented with no intellectual light than a little; and wherever they have been taught to acquire some knowledge in order to please others, they have most generally gone on to acquire more, to please themselves.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Seek knowledge from the purest source.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Although humans have existed on this planet for perhaps 2 million years, the rapid climb to modern civilization within the last 200 years was possible due to the fact that the growth of scientific knowledge is exponential; that is, its rate of expansion is proportional to how much is already known. The more we know, the faster we can know more. For example, we have amassed more knowledge since World War II than all the knowledge amassed in our 2-million-year evolution on this planet. In fact, the amount of knowledge that our scientists gain doubles approximately every 10 to 20 years.
MICHIO KAKU
Hyperspace
Our human knowledge is a candle burnt
On a dim altar to a sun-vast Truth.
SRI AUROBINDO
Gems from Sri Aurobindo
Is not the fraction which you know, in relation to their totality, what a single number is to infinity?
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
There is, perhaps, one universal truth about all forms of human cognition: the ability to deal with knowledge is hugely exceeded by the potential knowledge contained in man's environment. To cope with this diversity, man's perception, his memory, and his thought processes early become governed by strategies for protecting his limited capacities from the confusion of overloading. We tend to perceive things schematically, for example, rather than in detail, or we represent a class of diverse things by some sort of averaged "typical instance."
JEROME S. BRUNER
Art as a Mode of Knowing
I do not approve the maxim which desires a man to know a little of everything. Superficial knowledge, knowledge without principles, is almost always useless and sometimes harmful knowledge.
LUC DE CLAPIERS
MARQUIS DE VAUVENARGUES, Reflections and Maxims
If you cannot make knowledge your servant, make it your friend.
BALTASAR GRACIAN
The Art of Worldly Wisdom
An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
The Way to Wealth: Ben Franklin on Money and Success
It is the mystery which lies all around the little we know which makes life so unspeakably interesting. I am thankful that that which I do not know, is so immeasurably greater than that which I know. I am thankful that I am only at the beginning of things.
REUEN THOMAS
Thoughts for the Thoughtful
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
I don't know what's the matter with people: they don't learn by understanding, they learn by some other way -- by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!
RICHARD FEYNMAN
Surely You're Joking