quotations about knowledge
Our human knowledge is a candle burnt
On a dim altar to a sun-vast Truth.
SRI AUROBINDO
Gems from Sri Aurobindo
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
The less we know, the longer the explanation.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVEN J. ANDERSON
Dune: House Corrino
The real scholar learns how to evolve the unknown from the known, and draws near the master.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
A man who is ready to converse but has nothing to say worth hearing, is a well without water; he that is rich in knowledge but reserved is a well without a bucket.
JOHN THORNTON
Maxims and Directions for Youth
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 end of man is knowledge but there's one thing he can't know. He can't know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed, all right, but he can't know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he has got or because of the knowledge which he hasn't got and which if he had it would save him.
ROBERT PENN WARREN
All the King's Men
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
Knowledge shuts a man's mouth.
ERWIN SYLVANUS
Dr. Korczak and the Children
For knowing is spoken of in three ways: it may be either universal knowledge or knowledge proper to the matter in hand or actualising such knowledge; consequently three kinds of error also are possible.
ARISTOTLE
Prior Analytics
The true method of knowledge is experiment.
WILLIAM BLAKE
All Religions are One
We just do not see how very specialized the use of "I know" is.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
On Certainty
As with all knowledge, once you knew it, you couldn't imagine how it was that you hadn't known it before.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Year of the Flood
We ought to be ten times as hungry for knowledge as for food for the body.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
The Way to Wealth: Ben Franklin on Money and Success
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
The world of knowledge takes a crazy turn
When teachers themselves are taught to learn.
BERTOLT BRECHT
Life of Galileo
Knowledge without follow-through is worse than no knowledge at all. because if you're guessing and it doesn't work out you can just say, shit, the gods are against me. but if you know and don't do, you've got attics and dark halls in your mind to walk up and down in and wonder about. this ain't healthy, leads to unpleasant evenings, too much to drink and the shredding machine.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
Notes of a Dirty Old Man
What we know is built on what we do not know.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
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