quotations about knowledge
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
The world of knowledge takes a crazy turn
When teachers themselves are taught to learn.
BERTOLT BRECHT
Life of Galileo
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
What we know is built on what we do not know.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Seek knowledge from the purest source.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Is not the fraction which you know, in relation to their totality, what a single number is to infinity?
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.
STEPHEN HAWKING
attributed, The Prism and the Rainbow
Knowledge will soon become folly, when good sense ceases to be its guardian.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
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
Our human knowledge is a candle burnt
On a dim altar to a sun-vast Truth.
SRI AUROBINDO
Gems from Sri Aurobindo
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
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
The true method of knowledge is experiment.
WILLIAM BLAKE
All Religions are One
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
An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
The Way to Wealth: Ben Franklin on Money and Success
Knowledge is power. Power to do evil ... or power to do good. Power itself is not evil. So knowledge itself is not evil.
VERONICA ROTH
Allegiant
How dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to be greater than his nature will allow.
MARY SHELLEY
Frankenstein
You have to live to really know things.
DAN SIMMONS
Hyperion
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 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