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. In order to properly understand the big picture, everyone should fear becoming mentally clouded and obsessed with one small section of truth.

42. Sometimes the knowledge you've been given in school or by an elder - 'this is just the way it is' - keeps you from accomplishing because it traps you in a box in your mind and limits your freedom to deliver.

43. There are some people who, if they don't already know, you can't tell 'em.

44. Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose. It is a seeking that he who wishes may know the cosmic secrets of the world and they that dwell therein.

45. 'We are closer to God when we are asking questions than when we think we have the answers.'

46. The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.

47. No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.

48. The discovery of radioactivity created a momentary chaos in chemistry and physics; but it soon led to a fuller interpretation of the old ideas. It dispersed many difficulties, harmonized many discords, and - yea, more! It shewed the substance of Universe as a simplicity of Light and Life, manners to compose atoms, themselves capable of deeper self-realization through fresh complexities and organizations, each with its own peculiar powers and pleasures, each pursuing its path through the world where all things are possible.

49. We have arrived at an intellectual chaos.

50. Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers, and I linger on the shore, And the individual withers, and the world is more and more.

51. So much one man can do, That does both act and know.

52. Search for the truth is the noblest occupation of man; its publication is a duty.

53. The Master was exceedingly gracious to university dons who visited him, but he would never reply to their questions or be drawn into their theological speculations. To his disciples, who marveled at this, he said, 'Can one talk about the ocean to a frog in a well or about the divine to people who are restricted by their concepts?'

54. You see, in life, lots of people know what to do, but few people actually do what they know. Knowing is not enough! You must take action.

55. What's hit's history: what's missed's mystery.

56. Sometimes I think I understand everything, then I regain consciousness.

57. I remember I used to half believe and wholly play with fairies when I was a child. What heaven can be more real than to retain the spirit-world of childhood, tempered and balanced by knowledge and common-sense...

58. Art hath an enemy called Ignorance.

59. Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

60. The lips of the righteous teach many, But fools die for want of wisdom.

61. Knowledge, surely, is always of time, whereas knowing is not of time. Knowledge is from a source, from accumulation, from conclusion, while knowing is a movement.

62. What we are after is the ROOT and not the branches. The root is the real knowledge; the branches are surface knowledge. Real knowledge breeds 'body feel' and personal expression; surface knowledge breeds mechanical conditioning and imposing limitation and squelches creativity.

63. We have designed our civilization based on science and technology and at the same time arranged things so that almost no one understands anything at all about science and technology. This is a clear prescription for disaster.

64. The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty. And yet our species is young and curious and brave and shows much promise. In the last few millennia we have made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the Cosmos and our place within it, explorations that are exhilarating to consider. They remind us that humans have evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy, that knowledge is prerequisite to survival. I believe our future depends on how well we know this Cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky.

65. A scientific colleague tells me about a recent trip to the New Guinea highlands where she visited a stone age culture hardly contacted by Western civilization. They were ignorant of wristwatches, soft drinks, and frozen food. But they knew about Apollo 11. They knew that humans had walked on the Moon. They knew the names of Armstrong and Aldrin and Collins. They wanted to know who was visiting the Moon these days.

66. Humans may crave absolute certainty; they may aspire to it; they may pretend, as partisans of certain religions do, to have attained it. But the history of science - by far the most successful claim to knowledge accessible to humans - teaches that the most we can hope for is successive improvement in our understanding, learning from our mistakes, an asymptotic approach to the Universe, but with the proviso that absolute certainty will always elude us.

67. There are many hypotheses in science which are wrong. That's perfectly all right; they're the aperture to finding out what's right. Science is a self-correcting process. To be accepted, new ideas must survive the most rigorous standards of evidence and scrutiny.

68. The ignorant man always adores what he cannot understand.

69. Yet the stones remain less real to those who cannot name them, or read the mute syllables graven in silica. To see a red stone is less than seeing it as jasper - metamorphic quartz, cousin to the flint the Kiowa carved as arrowheads. To name is to know and remember.

70. A mathematical formula should never be 'owned' by anybody! Mathematics belong to God.

71. Just once in a while let us exalt the importance of ideas and information.

72. 'Faith' is a fine invention When Gentlemen can see - But Microscopes are prudent In an Emergency.

73. Whatever nature has in store for mankind, unpleasant as it may be, men must accept, for ignorance is never better than knowledge.

74. We possess nothing certainly except the past.

75. 'Adam knew Eve his wife and she conceived.' It is a pity that this is still the only knowledge of their wives at which some men seem to arrive.

76. One does simply what one can in order to apply what one knows.

77. For all knowledge and wonder (which is the seed of knowledge) is an impression of pleasure in itself.

78. The human understanding is unquiet; it cannot stop or rest, and still presses onward, but in vain. Therefore it is that we cannot conceive of any end or limit to the world, but always as of necessity it occurs to us that there is something beyond... But he is no less an unskilled and shallow philosopher who seeks causes of that which is most general, than he who in things subordinate and subaltern omits to do so.

79. The desire of power in excess caused the angels to fall; the desire of knowledge in excess caused man to fall.

80. The whole visible world is perhaps nothing other than a motivation of man's wish to rest for a moment - an attempt to falsify the fact of knowledge, to try to turn the knowledge into the goal.

81. No human mind can comprehend all the knowledge which guides the actions of society.

82. The mind cannot foresee its own advance.

83. The Socratic maxim that the recognition of our ignorance is the beginning of wisdom has profound significance for our understanding of society. Most of the advantages of social life, especially in the more advanced forms that we call 'civilization' rest on the fact that the individual benefits from more knowledge than he is aware of. It might be said that civilization begins when the individual in the pursuit of his ends can make use of more knowledge than he has himself acquired and when he can transcend the boundaries of his ignorance by profiting from knowledge he does not himself possess.

84. Human reason can neither predict nor deliberately shape its own future. Its advances consist in finding out where it has been wrong.

85. The confidence in the unlimited power of science is only too often based on a false belief that the scientific method consists in the application of a ready-made technique, or in imitating the form rather than the substance of scientific procedure, as if one needed only to follow some cooking recipes to solve all social problems. It sometimes almost seems as if the techniques of science were more easily learnt than the thinking that shows us what the problems are and how to approach them.

86. If I am not mistaken, psychology, psychiatry and some branches of sociology, not to speak about the so-called philosophy of history, are even more affected by what I have called the scientistic prejudice, and by specious claims of what science can achieve.

87. In the Small group the individual can know the effects of his actions on his several fellows, and the rules may effectively forbid him to harm them in any manner and even require him to assist them in specific ways. In the Great Society many of the effects of a person's actions on various fellows must be unknown to him. It can, therefore, not be the specific effects in the particular case, but only rules which define kinds of actions prohibited or required, which must serve as guides to the individual.

88. All political theories assume, of course, that most individuals are very ignorant. Those who plead for liberty differ from the rest in that they include among the ignorant themselves as well as the wisest.

89. Freedom can occur only through education.

90. Knowledge, the object of knowledge and the knower are the three factors which motivate action; the senses, the work and the doer comprise the threefold basis of action.

91. Knowledge can be acquired by a suitable and complete study, no matter what the starting point is. Only one must know how to 'learn.' What is nearest to us is man; and you are the nearest of all men to yourself. Begin with the study of yourself; remember the saying 'Know thyself.'

92. I ask you to believe nothing that you cannot verify for yourself.

93. 'I think I know it all, relatively speaking.'

94. Astronomy is perhaps the science whose discoveries owe least to chance, in which human understanding appears in its whole magnitude, and through which man can best learn how small he is.

95. Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.

96. When a book and a head collide and a hollow sound is heard, must it always have come from the book?

97. If it were true what in the end would be gained? Nothing but another truth. Is this such a mighty advantage? We have enough old truths still to digest, and even these we would be quite unable to endure if we did not sometimes flavor them with lies.

98. If we make a couple of discoveries here and there we need not believe things will go on like this for ever.... Just as we hit water when we dig in the earth, so we discover the incomprehensible sooner or later.

99. Much reading has brought upon us a learned barbarism.

100. It is almost everywhere the case that soon after it is begotten the greater part of human wisdom is laid to rest in repositories.