quotations about knowledge
I tried to think of my knowledge, but it was a squirrel's heap of winter nuts. There was no strength in my knowledge any more and I felt small and naked as a new-hatched bird.
STEPHEN VINCENT BENET
"By the Waters of Babylon"
If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it.
MARGARET FULLER
Woman's Day Magazine, Sep. 12, 2007
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
When intelligent and sensible people despise knowledge in their old age, it is only because they have asked too much of it and of themselves.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
Knowledge of the world depends on the power of drawing general inferences from individual examples; and he is the most likely to be correct who has the greatest number of facts at his command.
CHARLES WILLIAM DAY
The Maxims
Let no one, then, seek to know from me what I know that I do not know; unless he perhaps wishes to learn to be ignorant of that of which all we know is, that it cannot be known.
ST. AUGUSTINE
The City of God
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
Knowledge, among diverse conditions, has these two--that what we know of anything will depend--first, on our size relative to it, and, secondly, on our distance from it. For if we are too far away, we shall not see it at all; and if too near, we shall be entangled in its parts, not seeing it in unity; while if in mind or body we be not large enough to couple with the object, our best understanding will be but piecemeal knowledge, take a mite whose feet tickle our finger; to the insect we must appear as to our body very differently from the manner in which we must see the creature. In like manner, we perceive a great mountain, which is unknown to the squirrel sporting on it, and more hid still from the cicada nibbling a leaf in the forest on it. A ball hurled from a gun across our vision and close to us, at a thousand miles an hour we cannot see; but we see the moon well, though its speed is more than two thousand miles an hour. By reason of the distance, the moon seems even not to move at all; and if we were not large enough in mind to study the moon, how could we know its motion, or how think of it except as done in leaps, since we could not observe the transition? If we were not much larger creatures in Nature's eye--which judges always according to power of thought--than a basin of water, we might be amazed to find it warm to one hand and cold to the other (as Berkeley has set forth), and led, perhaps, to fantastic dreams of two natures in one--as many as ever amused a medieval Aristotelian. These instances--and many more, easily multiplied--will show how distance and relative size affect knowledge, which I shall take as allowed.
JAMES VILA BLAKE
"Of Knowledge", Essays
The one thing we do not know is the limit of the knowable.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU
Emile
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance.
T. S. ELIOT
The Rock
If you are truly wise, you will conceal your knowledge from the world, and let every fool think himself your superior, especially if you have anything to gain by him; for envy is the strongest passion of the weak, and mediocrity is the hot-bed on which all the meaner passions flourish.
CHARLES WILLIAM DAY
The Maxims
How dreadful knowledge of the truth can be when there's no help in truth!
SOPHOCLES
Oedipus Rex
To receive instruction and knowledge is as natural as to receive the light of the sun, if a man opens his eyes.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
Seek knowledge from the purest source.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
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 grows more enlightened. Knowledge is more equally diffused.
JOHN ADAMS
Discourses on Davila
Knowledge will soon become folly, when good sense ceases to be its guardian.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
As I came not into life with any knowledge of it, and as my likings are for what is old, I busy myself in seeking knowledge there.
CONFUCIUS
The Wisdom of Confucius