quotations about knowledge
I have approximate answers and possible beliefs in different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything, and of many things I don't know anything about, but I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose which is the way it really is as far as I can tell.
RICHARD FEYNMAN
Horizon interview, 1981
As each generation comes into the world devoid of knowledge, its first duty is to obtain possession of the stores already amassed. It must overtake its predecessors before it can pass by them.
HORACE MANN
Thoughts
I ain't one of those who believe that a half knowledge of a subject is useless, but it has been my experience that when a fellow has that half knowledge he finds it's the other half which would really come in handy.
GEORGE HORACE LORIMER
Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son
Omniscience ... is an excellent quality in God, but suspect in everyone else.
JENNIFER LEE CARRELL
Interred With Their Bones
Knowledge, which is power, knows no limits, either in its enslavement of creation or in its deference to worldly masters.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Dialectic of Enlightenment
All our knowledge has its origin in our preceptions.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci
I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.
RICHARD FEYNMAN
The Pleasure of Finding Things Out
At all times it has not been the age, but individuals alone, who have worked for knowledge. It was the age which put Socrates to death by poison, the age which burnt Huss. The ages have always remained alike.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
The tiny, initial clue ... by allowing us to imagine what we do not know, stimulates a desire for knowledge.
MARCEL PROUST
Swann's Way
Let every sluice of knowledge be opened and set a-flowing.
JOHN ADAMS
A Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law
Information and knowledge: two currencies that have never gone out of style.
NEIL GAIMAN
American Gods
Drugs or overeating or alcohol or sex, it was all just another way to find peace. To escape what we know. Our education. Our bite of the apple.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK
Choke
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
On Science
People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little. It is plain that an ignorant person thinks everything he does know important, and he tells it to everybody. But a well-educated man is not so ready to display his learning; he would have too much to say, and he sees that there is much more to be said, so he holds his peace.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU
Emile
If I don't know I don't know
I think I know
If I don't know I know
I think I don't know
R. D. LAING
Knots
It has been observed that a dwarf standing on the shoulders of a giant will see farther than the giant himself; and the moderns, standing as they do on the vantage ground of former discoveries and uniting all the fruits of the experience of their forefathers, with their own actual observation, may be admitted to enjoy a more enlarged and comprehensive view of things than the ancients themselves.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
When we have passed beyond knowings, then we shall have Knowledge.
SRI AUROBINDO
Thoughts and Glimpses
The history of knowledge is a great fugue in which the voices of the nations one after the other emerge.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
This desire of knowledge and the wonder which it hopes to satisfy are the driving power behind all the changes that we, with careless, question-begging inference, call progress.
NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER
lecture at Columbia University, Mar. 4, 1908
There is but a slight difference between the man who may be said to know nothing and him who thinks he knows everything.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words