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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"Their vain presumption of knowing all can take beginning solely from their never having known anything; for if one has but once experienced the perfect knowledge of one thing, and truly tasted what it is to know, he shall perceive that of infinite other conclusions he understands not so much as one."
"To use what has a boundary to pursue what is limitless is dangerous; with this knowledge, if we still go after knowledge, we will run into trouble. Do not do what is good in order to gain praise. If you do what is bad be sure to avoid the punishment. Follow the Middle Course, for this is the way to keep yourself together, to sustain your life, to care for your parents and to live for many years."
"I work for posterity, these things requiring ages for their accomplishment."
"Upon a given body to generate and superinduce a new nature or new natures is the work and aim of human power. To discover the Form of a given nature, or its true difference, or its causal nature, or fount of its emanation... this is the work and aim of human knowledge."
"Lastly, I would address one general admonition to all: that they consider what are the true ends of knowledge, and that they seek it not either for pleasure of the mind, or for contention, or for superiority to others, or for profit, or fame, or power, or any of these inferior things: but for the benefit and use of life; and that they perfect and govern it in charity."
"If you dissemble sometimes your knowledge of that you are thought to know, you shall be thought, another time, to know that you know not."
"But this is that which will dignify and exalt knowledge: if contemplation and action be more nearly and straitly conjoined and united together than they have been: a conjunction like unto that of the highest planets, Saturn, the planet of rest and contemplation, and Jupiter, the planet of civil society and action."
"To understand matters rightly we should understand their details; and as that knowledge is almost infinite, our knowledge is always superficial and imperfect."
"The trouble with the media is that it seems unable to distinguish between the end of the world and a bicycle accident."
"To judge wisely, we must know how things appear to the unwise."
"Nothing is so irrevocable as mind."
"When all beliefs are challenged together, the just and necessary ones have a chance to step forward and re-establish themselves alone."
"One of the deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which will suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it. There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance."
"Knowledge is to be acquired only by a corresponding experience. How can we know what we are told merely? Each man can interpret another's experience only by his own."
"Error has made man so deep, sensitive, and inventive that he has put forth such blossoms as religions and arts. Pure knowledge could not have been capable of it."
"Even great spirits have only their five-fingers' breadth of experience - just beyond it their thinking ceases and their endless empty space and stupidity begins."
"In almost all sciences the fundamental knowledge is either found in earliest times or is still being sought."
"In order to acquire intellect one must need it. One loses it when it is no longer necessary."
"In the knowledge of truth, what really matters is the possession of it, not the impulse under which it was sought."
"Once and for all, there are many things I choose not to know.--Wisdom sets limits even to knowledge."
