Selected knowledge quotes

1. As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.

2. Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.

3. Share your knowledge. It's a way to achieve immortality.

4. There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.

5. The greatest science in the world; in heaven and on earth; is love.

6. People who don't know anything tend to make up fake rules, the real rules being considerably more difficult to learn.

7. Without mathematics, we are blind.

8. In my view, only those who have had the courage to work through Lacan's anti-philosophy without faltering deserve to be called 'contemporary philosophers'.

9. To the philosophers of India, however, Relativity is no new discovery, just as the concept of light years is no matter for astonishment to people used to thinking of time in millions of kalpas, (A kalpa is about 4,320,000 years). The fact that the wise men of India have not been concerned with technological applications of this knowledge arises from the circumstance that technology is but one of innumerable ways of applying it.

10. I do not want to found anything on the incomprehensible. I want to know whether I can live with what I know and with that alone.

11. I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

12. I believe in intuition and inspiration. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research.

13. Any fool can know. The point is to understand.

14. As our circle of knowledge expands, so does the circumference of darkness surrounding it.

15. Truth is what stands the test of experience.

16. Measured objectively, what a man can wrest from Truth by passionate striving is utterly infinitesimal. But the striving frees us from the bonds of the self and makes us comrades of those who are the best and the greatest.

17. The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.

18. There comes a time when the mind takes a higher plane of knowledge but can never prove how it got there.

19. The last fact which knowledge can discover is that the world is a manifestation, and in every way a puzzling manifestation, of the universal will to live.

20. Man knows much more than he understands.

21. Well I don't know how many pounds make up a ton, Of all the nobel prizes that I've never won, And I may be the mayor of simpleton, But I know one thing, And that's I love you.

22. When you come to see you are not as wise today as you thought you were yesterday, you are wiser today.

23. I doubt whether any girl would be satisfied with her lover's mind if she knew the whole of it.

24. Book love... is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures.

25. The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead.

26. The one exclusive sign of thorough knowledge is the power of teaching.

27. Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man.

28. The apple cannot be stuck back on the Tree of Knowledge; once we begin to see, we are doomed and challenged to seek the strength to see more, not less.

29. That is a very good question. I don't know the answer. But can you tell me the name of a classical Greek shoemaker?

30. I always like to know what I'm doing, but there are times when nobody will tell me.

31. The closest you will ever come in this life to an orderly universe is a good library.

32. The greatest obstacle to discovering the truth is being convinced that you already know it.

33. My life has been greatly influenced by many books which I have never read.

34. Personally, I am dead against the burning of books.

35. Libraries are the one American institution you shouldn't rip off.

36. Where dost thou careless lie, Buried in ease and sloth? Knowledge that sleeps, doth die; And this security, It is the common moth, That eats on wits and arts, and oft destroys them both.

37. Evolutionism, as taught by Darwinism, has nothing - nothing - to say about how life originated. Has nothing to say about how the governing principles in the universe - gravity, thermodynamics, motion, fluid motion - how any of those originated. It's...it's got some gigantic missing pieces.

38. One sometimes gets the impression that those intimidating words are there to keep us from understanding. That way, the scholars can appear Superior, and will not likely be suspected of Not Knowing Something.

39. You know more than you think you do.

40. Mixing one's wines may be a mistake, but old and new wisdom mix admirably.

41. Man knows that love is, but not what it is.

42. A person who knows all that is good and all that is true---as much as can be known---but does not resist evils, knows nothing.

43. The God idea is growing more impersonal and nebulous in proportion as the human mind is learning to understand natural phenomena and in the degree that science progressively correlates human and social events.

44. The most violent element in society is ignorance.

45. It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.

46. I believe that saying a thing is to keep its virtues and take away its terror.

47. In order to understand, I destroyed myself.

48. If we knew the truth, we'd see it; all else is system and outskirts.

49. Given that we cannot know all the elements in a problem, we never can solve it.

50. There is no happiness without knowledge. But knowledge of happiness is unhappy; for knowing ourselves happy is knowing ourselves passing through happiness, and having to, immediatly at once, leave it behind. To know is to kill, in happiness as in everything. Not to know, though, is not to exist.

51. Les esprits mediocres condamnent d'ordinaire tout ce qui passe leur portee.

52. Il est plus aise de connaitre l'homme en general que de connaitre un homme en particulier.

53. Dans l'amitie comme dans l'amour on est souvent plus heureux par les choses qu'on ignore que par celles que l'on sait.

54. Presque tous les hommes ressemblent a ces grands palais deserts dont le proprietaire n'habite que quelques pieces; et il ne penetre jamais danss les ailes condamnees.

55. There are no facts, only interpretations.

56. Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of 'world history,' but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die. One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened.

57. The pride connected with knowing and sensing lies like a blinding fog over the eyes and senses of men, thus deceiving them concerning the value of existence. For this pride contains within itself the most flattering estimation of the value of knowing. Deception is the most general effect of such pride, but even its most particular effects contain within themselves something of the same deceitful character.

58. Whereas the man of action binds his life to reason and its concepts so that he will not be swept away and lost, the scientific investigator builds his hut right next to the tower of science so that he will be able to work on it and to find shelter for himself beneath those bulwarks which presently exist. And he requires shelter, for there are frightful powers which continuously break in upon him, powers which oppose scientific 'truth' with completely different kinds of 'truths' which bear on their shields the most varied sorts of emblems.

59. It is not enough to prove something, one has also to seduce or elevate people to it. That is why the man of knowledge should learn how to speak his wisdom: and often in such a way that it sounds like folly!

60. For believe me! - the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is: to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves! Be robbers and conquerors as long as you cannot be rulers and possessors, you seekers of knowledge! Soon the age will be past when you could be content to live hidden in forests like shy deer! At long last the search for knowledge will reach out for its due: - it will want to rule and possess, and you with it!

61. Preparatory human beings. - I welcome all signs that a more virile, warlike age is about to begin, which will restore honor to courage above all! For this age shall prepare the way for one yet higher, and it shall gather the strength that this higher age will require some day - the age that will carry heroism into the search for knowledge and that will wage wars for the sake of ideas and their consequences.

62. Then will he who goes under bless himself for being one who goes over and beyond; and the sun of his knowledge will stand at high noon for him.

63. The sage as astronomer. - If you still experience the stars as something 'over you,' you still don't have the eyes of a knower.

64. 'Faith' means not wanting to know what is true.

65. Der Mensch der Erkenntniss muss nicht nur seine Feinde lieben, er muss auch seine Freunde hassen konnen.

66. See now the power of truth; the same experiment which at first glance seemed to show one thing, when more carefully examined, assures us of the contrary.

67. All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.

68. I never met a man so unknowledgeable, I could not learn something from him.

69. What has philosophy got to do with measuring anything?

70. Hey stupid - are you too dumb to know there are 4 different simultaneous 24 hour days within a single rotation of Earth?

71. Minds must see a Time Cube, that eyes cannot comprehend.

72. We are often unable to tell people what they need to know because they want to know something else.

73. Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace, and wit, reminders of order, calm, and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark. The pleasure they give is steady, unorgastic, reliable, deep, and long-lasting. In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still, and absorbed.

74. Recognising the number 13 is a sign that you have been to school.

75. Not only can no one predict the future, we don't understand the present - and there isn't even any certainty about the past.

76. You don't need an explanation for everything, Recognize that there are such things as miracles -- events for which there are no ready explanations. Later knowledge may explain those events quite easily.

77. I asked a Jewish man 'Do you know where Michigan Avenue is?' He said 'Yes', and walked away.

78. What one knows is, in youth, of little moment; they know enough who know how to learn.

79. Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.

80. I have written too much history to have faith in it; and if anyone thinks I'm wrong, I am inclined to agree with him.

81. Philosophy: unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.

82. We are as much as we see. Faith is sight and knowledge. The hands only serve the eyes.

83. The frontiers are not east or west, north or south, but wherever a man fronts a fact, though that fact be his neighbor, there is an unsettled wilderness between him and Canada, between him and the setting sun, or, farther still, between him and it.

84. In our science and philosophy, even, there is commonly no true and absolute account of things. The spirit of sect and bigotry has planted its hoof amid the stars. You have only to discuss the problem, whether the stars are inhabited or not, in order to discover it.

85. Can any man have a higher notion of the rule of right and the eternal fitness of things?

86. To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it.

87. Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?

88. Every addition to true knowledge is an addition to human power.

89. But let a man know that there are things to be known, of which he is ignorant, and it is so much carved out of his domain of universal knowledge.

90. Virtue is an angel, but she is a blind one, and must ask of Knowledge to show her the pathway that leads to her goal.

91. Ignorance breeds monsters to fill up the vacancies of the soul that are unoccupied by the verities of knowledge.

92. 'Silence will save me from being wrong (and foolish), but it will also deprive me of the possibility of being right.'

93. There can be no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience. (B 1)

94. Human reason is by nature architectonic. (B 502)

95. Thus all human knowledge begins with intuitions, proceeds from thence to concepts, and ends with ideas. (B 730)

96. All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope? (B 832-833)

97. All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.

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

99. Intuition and concepts constitute... the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without concepts, can yield knowledge.

100. Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck.