quotations about knowledge
All our knowledge is the offspring of our perceptions.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life
Folks don't like to have somebody around knowin' more than they do. It aggravates 'em.
HARPER LEE
To Kill a Mockingbird
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
Knowledge is proud that he has learn'd so much;
Wisdom is humble that he knows no more.
WILLIAM COWPER
The Task
Knowledge is twofold and consists not only in an affirmation of what is true, but in the negation of what is false.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Man is an ignoramus athirst for knowledge.
CHARLES WAGNER
Justice
We can't define anything precisely. If we attempt to, we get into that paralysis of thought that comes to philosophers… one saying to the other: "you don't know what you are talking about!". The second one says: "what do you mean by talking? What do you mean by you? What do you mean by know?"
RICHARD FEYNMAN
The Feynman Lectures on Physics
Yet with great toil all that I can attain
By long experience, and in learned schools,
Is for to know my knowledge is but vain,
And those that think them wise, are greatest fools.
SIR WILLIAM ALEXANDER
EARL OF STIRLING, The Tragedy of Croesus
All knowledge hurts.
CASSANDRA CLARE
City of Bones
How dreadful knowledge of the truth can be when there's no help in truth!
SOPHOCLES
Oedipus Rex
Humans crave knowledge, and when that craving ends, we are no longer human.
TIM LEBBON
Fallen
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
Knowledge gropes but meets not Wisdom's face.
SRI AUROBINDO
Gems from Sri Aurobindo
Knowledge, among diverse conditions, has these two--that what we know of anything will depend--first, on our size relative to it, and, secondly, on our distance from it. For if we are too far away, we shall not see it at all; and if too near, we shall be entangled in its parts, not seeing it in unity; while if in mind or body we be not large enough to couple with the object, our best understanding will be but piecemeal knowledge, take a mite whose feet tickle our finger; to the insect we must appear as to our body very differently from the manner in which we must see the creature. In like manner, we perceive a great mountain, which is unknown to the squirrel sporting on it, and more hid still from the cicada nibbling a leaf in the forest on it. A ball hurled from a gun across our vision and close to us, at a thousand miles an hour we cannot see; but we see the moon well, though its speed is more than two thousand miles an hour. By reason of the distance, the moon seems even not to move at all; and if we were not large enough in mind to study the moon, how could we know its motion, or how think of it except as done in leaps, since we could not observe the transition? If we were not much larger creatures in Nature's eye--which judges always according to power of thought--than a basin of water, we might be amazed to find it warm to one hand and cold to the other (as Berkeley has set forth), and led, perhaps, to fantastic dreams of two natures in one--as many as ever amused a medieval Aristotelian. These instances--and many more, easily multiplied--will show how distance and relative size affect knowledge, which I shall take as allowed.
JAMES VILA BLAKE
"Of Knowledge", Essays
The less we know, the longer the explanation.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVEN J. ANDERSON
Dune: House Corrino
The one thing we do not know is the limit of the knowable.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU
Emile
The true method of knowledge is experiment.
WILLIAM BLAKE
All Religions are One
The world of knowledge takes a crazy turn
When teachers themselves are taught to learn.
BERTOLT BRECHT
Life of Galileo
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
What we know is to what we do not know, as a grain of sand is to the beach.
IVAN PANIN
Thoughts