quotations about knowledge
To receive instruction and knowledge is as natural as to receive the light of the sun, if a man opens his eyes.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
Knowledge alone doth not amount to Virtue; but certainly there is no Virtue without Knowledge.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
Men are more readily contented with no intellectual light than a little; and wherever they have been taught to acquire some knowledge in order to please others, they have most generally gone on to acquire more, to please themselves.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Seek knowledge from the purest source.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
In the case of various kinds of knowledge, we find that what in former days occupied the energies of men of mature mental ability sinks to the level of information, exercises, and even pastimes for children; and in this educational progress we can see the history of the world’s culture delineated in faint outline.
GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL
The Phenomenology of Spirit
There's a vast difference between having a carload of miscellaneous facts sloshing around loose in your head and getting all mixed up in transit, and carrying the same assortment properly boxed and crated for convenient handling and immediate delivery.
GEORGE HORACE LORIMER
Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son
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
The world grows more enlightened. Knowledge is more equally diffused.
JOHN ADAMS
Discourses on Davila
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
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
Yet with great toil all that I can attain
By long experience, and in learned schools,
Is for to know my knowledge is but vain,
And those that think them wise, are greatest fools.
SIR WILLIAM ALEXANDER
EARL OF STIRLING, The Tragedy of Croesus
How dreadful knowledge of the truth can be when there's no help in truth!
SOPHOCLES
Oedipus Rex
Humans crave knowledge, and when that craving ends, we are no longer human.
TIM LEBBON
Fallen
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
Our human knowledge is a candle burnt
On a dim altar to a sun-vast Truth.
SRI AUROBINDO
Gems from Sri Aurobindo
If you cannot make knowledge your servant, make it your friend.
BALTASAR GRACIAN
The Art of Worldly Wisdom
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
Folks don't like to have somebody around knowin' more than they do. It aggravates 'em.
HARPER LEE
To Kill a Mockingbird
All men by nature desire to know.
ARISTOTLE
Metaphysics
Knowledge of the world depends on the power of drawing general inferences from individual examples; and he is the most likely to be correct who has the greatest number of facts at his command.
CHARLES WILLIAM DAY
The Maxims