quotations about knowledge
We can't define anything precisely. If we attempt to, we get into that paralysis of thought that comes to philosophers… one saying to the other: "you don't know what you are talking about!". The second one says: "what do you mean by talking? What do you mean by you? What do you mean by know?"
RICHARD FEYNMAN
The Feynman Lectures on Physics
The greatest piece of folly is that every man thinks himself compelled to hand down what people think they have known.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
Seek knowledge from the purest source.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Knowledge is proud that he has learn'd so much;
Wisdom is humble that he knows no more.
WILLIAM COWPER
The Task
I do not approve the maxim which desires a man to know a little of everything. Superficial knowledge, knowledge without principles, is almost always useless and sometimes harmful knowledge.
LUC DE CLAPIERS
MARQUIS DE VAUVENARGUES, Reflections and Maxims
All knowledge, when separated from justice and virtue, is seen to be cunning and not wisdom.
PLATO
Menexenus
With the growth of knowledge our ideas must from time to time be organized afresh. The change takes place usually in accordance with new maxims as they arise, but it always remains provisional.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
What we know is built on what we do not know.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
The world grows more enlightened. Knowledge is more equally diffused.
JOHN ADAMS
Discourses on Davila
That is the beginning of knowledge--the discovery of something we do not understand.
FRANK HERBERT
God Emperor of Dune
I don't know what's the matter with people: they don't learn by understanding, they learn by some other way -- by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!
RICHARD FEYNMAN
Surely You're Joking
Folks don't like to have somebody around knowin' more than they do. It aggravates 'em.
HARPER LEE
To Kill a Mockingbird
We just do not see how very specialized the use of "I know" is.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
On Certainty
Those who have knowledge are more confident than those who have no knowledge, and they are more confident after they have learned than before.
PLATO
Protagoras
The surest way of concealing from others the boundaries of one's own knowledge is not to overstep them.
GIACOMO LEOPARDI
Leopardi: Poems and Prose
The less we know, the longer the explanation.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVEN J. ANDERSON
Dune: House Corrino
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 is power. Power to do evil ... or power to do good. Power itself is not evil. So knowledge itself is not evil.
VERONICA ROTH
Allegiant
It's a hard talk for a man to say I don't know; it hurts his pride: but should not the pretending he does, hurt it much more?
FULKE GREVILLE
Maxims
How dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to be greater than his nature will allow.
MARY SHELLEY
Frankenstein