quotations about knowledge
All men by nature desire to know.
ARISTOTLE
Metaphysics
The misapplication of our knowledge is, in general, more injurious to our happiness and interest, than either the privations of ignorance, or the disqualifications of inexperience.
NORMAN MACDONALD
Maxims and Moral Reflections
The world of knowledge takes a crazy turn
When teachers themselves are taught to learn.
BERTOLT BRECHT
Life of Galileo
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
Knowledge grows exponentially. The more we know, the greater our ability to learn, and the faster we expand our knowledge base.
DAN BROWN
The Lost Symbol
It does not make much difference what a person studies--all knowledge is related, and the man who studies anything, if he keeps at it, will be learned.
ELBERT HUBBARD
The American Bible
Knowledge shuts a man's mouth.
ERWIN SYLVANUS
Dr. Korczak and the Children
All I want is to know things. The black gulph of the infinite is before me ...
H. P. LOVECRAFT
letter to Frank Belknap, February 27, 1931
We ought to be ten times as hungry for knowledge as for food for the body.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
There's so much knowledge to be had that specialists cling to their specialties as a shield against having to know anything about anything else. They avoid being drowned.
ISAAC ASIMOV
Prelude to Foundation
Hence the strong attraction which magic and science alike have exercised on the human mind; hence the powerful stimulus that both have given to the pursuit of knowledge. They lure the weary enquirer, the footsore seeker, on through the wilderness of disappointment in the present by their endless promises of the future: they take him up to the top of an exceeding high mountain and show him, beyond the dark clouds and rolling mists at his feet, a vision of the celestial city, far off, it may be, but radiant with unearthly splendour, bathed in the light of dreams.
JAMES FRAZER
The Golden Bough
We just do not see how very specialized the use of "I know" is.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
On Certainty
It is the mystery which lies all around the little we know which makes life so unspeakably interesting. I am thankful that that which I do not know, is so immeasurably greater than that which I know. I am thankful that I am only at the beginning of things.
REUEN THOMAS
Thoughts for the Thoughtful
A youth's knowledge is like a cheap shotgun--likely to do as much damage to the owner as to the game.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
The most that any of us know, is the least of that which is to be known.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
A man may do very well with a very little knowledge, and scarce be found out in mixed company; everybody is so much more ready to produce his own than to call for a display of your acquisition.
CHARLES LAMB
"The Old and the New Schoolmaster", Elia and the Last Essays of Elia
Too much knowledge never makes for simple decisions.
FRANK HERBERT
Children of Dune
Knowledge acquired too rapidly and without being personally supplemented is never very productive.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
The Reflections of Lichtenberg
If there's anything worse than knowing too little, it's knowing too much. Education will broaden a narrow mind, but there's no known cure for a big head. The best you can hope is that it will swell up and bust.
GEORGE HORACE LORIMER
Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son
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