quotations about knowledge
To furnish the means of acquiring knowledge is ... the greatest benefit that can be conferred upon mankind. It prolongs life itself and enlarges the sphere of existence.
JOHN QUINCY ADAMS
report on the establishment of the Smithsonian Institution, 1846
I am conscious of my inability to grasp, in all its details and positive developments, any very large portion of human knowledge. The greatest intelligence would not be equal to a comprehension of the whole.
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
God and the State
Human knowledge is the parent of doubt.
FULKE GREVILLE
Maxims
By enlarging your knowledge of things, you will find your knowledge of self is enlarged.
CHARLES DE LINT
"The Pochade Box", The Ivory and the Horn
Mathematicians have sought knowledge in figures, Philosophers in systems, Logicians in subtleties, and Metaphysicians in sounds. It is not in any nor in all of these. He that studies only men, will get the body of knowledge without the soul, and he that studies only books, the soul without the body.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Knowledge without conscience is but the ruin of the soul.
FRANÇOIS RABELAIS
Pantagruel
The true method of knowledge is experiment.
WILLIAM BLAKE
All Religions are One
The knowledge of useful things is a purse seldom lost.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Learned men fall into error oftenest by mistaking knowledge for wisdom.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
In the world we live in, what we know and what we don't know are like Siamese twins, inseparable, existing in a state of confusion.
HARUKI MURAKAMI
Sputnik Sweetheart
Few can tell what they know without also showing what they do not know.
IVAN PANIN
Thoughts
Very few beings really seek knowledge in this world. Mortal or immortal, few really ask. On the contrary, they try to wring from the unknown the answers they have already shaped in their own minds -- justifications, confirmations, forms of consolation without which they can't go on.
ANNE RICE
The Vampire Lestat
Knowledge is the most democratic source of power.
ALVIN TOFFLER
Powershift
Knowledge ... shall always bear witness like a clarion to its creator.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life
In things which we know, everyone will trust us ... and we may do as we please, and no one will like to interfere with us; and we are free, and masters of others; and these things will be really ours, for we shall turn them to our good.
PLATO
Lysis
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance.
T. S. ELIOT
The Rock
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 twofold and consists not only in an affirmation of what is true, but in the negation of what is false.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Humans crave knowledge, and when that craving ends, we are no longer human.
TIM LEBBON
Fallen
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