Knowledge quotes
2.1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside knowledge — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"People don't want to think. And the deeper they get into trouble, the less they want to think. But by some sort of instinct, they feel that they ought to and it makes them feel guilty. So they'll bless and follow anyone who gives them a justification for not thinking. Anyone who makes a virtue - a highly intellectual virtue - out of what they know to be their sin, their weakness and their guilt."
"The cultivated person's first duty is to be always prepared to rewrite the encyclopedia."
"We can say of Shakespeare, that never has a man turned so little knowledge to such great account."
"Knowledge is the only elegance."
"You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge, as the plant has root, bud, and fruit."
"Our Creator has put in us hungers that this earth can- not satisfy. We cannot be completely self-contained on earth. Physical sense cannot give us a full life, nor can knowledge alone. No life is full unless it is linked to some- thing that goes on after we are dead.... If we have nothing more to live for than just to get ahead in a competitive system, then democracy will go down before other philosophies."
"That there should one man die ignorant who had capacity for knowledge, this I call a tragedy."
"Knowledge of the soul would unfailingly make us melancholy if the pleasures of expression did not keep us alert and of good cheer."
"Conversation has a kind of charm about it, an insuating and insidious something that elicits secrets from us just like love or liquor."
"Expertise in one field does not carry over into other fields. But experts often think so. The narrower their field of knowledge the more likely they are to think so."
"Knowledge is our ultimate good."
"Knowledge must come through action. You can have no test which is not fanciful, save by trial."
"We are apt to think we know what time is because we can measure it, but no sooner do we reflect upon it than that illusion goes. So it appears that the range of the measureable is not the range of the knowable. There are things we can measure, like time, but yet our minds do not grasp their meaning. There are things we cannot measure, like happiness or pain, and yet their meaning is perfectly clear to us."
"Doctor Who: You want weapons? We're in a library. Books are the best weapon in the world. This room's the greatest arsenal we could have. Arm yourself! (from Tooth and Claw in Season 2)"
"My words are very easy to understand and very easy to practice; but there is no one in the world who is able to understand and practice them."
"Abandon wisdom, discard knowledge, and people will benefit a hundredfold."
"Our knowledge springs from two fundamental sources of the mind; the first is the capacity of receiving representations (receptivity for impressions), the second is the power of knowing an object through these representations (spontaneity [in the production] of concepts)."
"It is up to my spirit to find the truth. But how? Grave uncertainty, each time the spirit feels beyond its own comprehension; whenit, the explorer, is altogether to obscure land that it must search and where all its baggage is of no use. To search? That is not all: to create."
"There was a young man in Rome that was very like Augustus Caesar; Augustus took knowledge of it and sent for the man, and asked him "Was your mother never at Rome?" He answered "No Sir; but my father was.""
"No one has yet been found so firm of mind and purpose as resolutely to compel himself to sweep away all theories and common notions, and to apply the understanding, thus made fair and even, to a fresh examination of particulars. Thus it happens that human knowledge, as we have it, is a mere medley and ill-digested mass, made up of much credulity and much accident, and also of the childish notions which we at first imbibed."
