quotations about knowledge
Wonder is the desire of knowledge.
THOMAS AQUINAS
Summa Theologica
The tiny, initial clue ... by allowing us to imagine what we do not know, stimulates a desire for knowledge.
MARCEL PROUST
Swann's Way
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 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
All our knowledge has its origin in our preceptions.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci
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
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
On Science
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
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
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
All knowledge hurts.
CASSANDRA CLARE
City of Bones
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
Information and knowledge: two currencies that have never gone out of style.
NEIL GAIMAN
American Gods
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
Omniscience ... is an excellent quality in God, but suspect in everyone else.
JENNIFER LEE CARRELL
Interred With Their Bones
In the pursuit of knowledge, follow it wherever it is to be found; like fern, it is the produce of all climates, and like coin, its circulation is not restricted to any particular class.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
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
Men have hunger, sleep, fear and carnal intercourse in common with the lower animals. It is only knowledge that a man has more than they. Those men who have not it may be regarded as beasts.
CHANAKYA
Vridda-Chanakya
This is the bitterest pain among men, to have much knowledge but no power.
HERODOTUS
The Histories: Book 9
Knowledge is, indeed, that which, next to virtue, truly and essentially raises one man above another.
JOSEPH ADDISON
The Guardian, July 18, 1713