KNOWLEDGE QUOTES V

quotations about knowledge

I am conscious of my inability to grasp, in all its details and positive developments, any very large portion of human knowledge. The greatest intelligence would not be equal to a comprehension of the whole.

MIKHAIL BAKUNIN

God and the State

Tags: Mikhail Bakunin


All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance.

T. S. ELIOT

The Rock


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


Knowledge ... shall always bear witness like a clarion to its creator.

LEONARDO DA VINCI

Thoughts on Art and Life


The knowledge of useful things is a purse seldom lost.

EDWARD COUNSEL

Maxims


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


By enlarging your knowledge of things, you will find your knowledge of self is enlarged.

CHARLES DE LINT

"The Pochade Box", The Ivory and the Horn


Very few beings really seek knowledge in this world. Mortal or immortal, few really ask. On the contrary, they try to wring from the unknown the answers they have already shaped in their own minds -- justifications, confirmations, forms of consolation without which they can't go on.

ANNE RICE

The Vampire Lestat


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


Knowledge is the most democratic source of power.

ALVIN TOFFLER

Powershift


The highest knowledge can be nothing more than the shortest and clearest road to truth; all the rest is pretension, not performance, mere verbiage and grandiloquence, from which we can learn nothing.

CHARLES CALEB COLTON

Lacon


Learned men fall into error oftenest by mistaking knowledge for wisdom.

AUSTIN O'MALLEY

Keystones of Thought


Humans crave knowledge, and when that craving ends, we are no longer human.

TIM LEBBON

Fallen


Ultimately you want to have the entire world's knowledge connected directly to your mind.

SERGEY BRIN

Playboy, Sep. 2004


Mathematicians have sought knowledge in figures, Philosophers in systems, Logicians in subtleties, and Metaphysicians in sounds. It is not in any nor in all of these. He that studies only men, will get the body of knowledge without the soul, and he that studies only books, the soul without the body.

CHARLES CALEB COLTON

Lacon


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


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


Oh Christ, the exhaustion of not knowing anything. It's so tiring and hard on the nerves. It really takes it out of you, not knowing anything. You're given comedy and miss all the jokes. Every hour you get weaker. Sometimes, as I sit alone in my flat in London and stare at the window, I think how dismal it is, how heavy, to watch the rain and not know why it falls.

MARTIN AMIS

Money: A Suicide Note


To furnish the means of acquiring knowledge is ... the greatest benefit that can be conferred upon mankind. It prolongs life itself and enlarges the sphere of existence.

JOHN QUINCY ADAMS

report on the establishment of the Smithsonian Institution, 1846


Knowledge is twofold and consists not only in an affirmation of what is true, but in the negation of what is false.

CHARLES CALEB COLTON

Lacon