quotations about knowledge
How dreadful knowledge of the truth can be when there's no help in truth!
SOPHOCLES
Oedipus Rex
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
The knowledge which we have acquired ought not to resemble a great shop without order, and without an inventory; we ought to know what we possess, and be able to make it serve us in need.
GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ
attributed, Day's Collacon
Knowledge is a mimic creation.
HORACE MANN
Thoughts
Information is the mortar that both builds and destroys empires.
TOBSHA LEARNER
The Witch of Cologne
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
The greatest piece of folly is that every man thinks himself compelled to hand down what people think they have known.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
Seek knowledge from the purest source.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Knowledge often cuts the root that supports it.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
You have to live to really know things.
DAN SIMMONS
Hyperion
All knowledge hurts.
CASSANDRA CLARE
City of Bones
Men have hunger, sleep, fear and carnal intercourse in common with the lower animals. It is only knowledge that a man has more than they. Those men who have not it may be regarded as beasts.
CHANAKYA
Vridda-Chanakya
Few can tell what they know without also showing what they do not know.
IVAN PANIN
Thoughts
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
Those who have knowledge are more confident than those who have no knowledge, and they are more confident after they have learned than before.
PLATO
Protagoras
The knowledge of useful things is a purse seldom lost.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
What we know is built on what we do not know.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Religion has treated knowledge sometimes as an enemy, sometimes as a hostage; often as a captive, and more often as a child: but knowledge has become of age; and religion must either renounce her acquaintance, or introduce her as a companion and respect her as a friend.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Man is an ignoramus athirst for knowledge.
CHARLES WAGNER
Justice
Knowledge gropes but meets not Wisdom's face.
SRI AUROBINDO
Gems from Sri Aurobindo