quotations about knowledge
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
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
Man is an ignoramus athirst for knowledge.
CHARLES WAGNER
Justice
It is as though each of us investigated and made his own only a tiny circle of facts. Knowledge outside the day's work is regarded by most men as gewgaw. Still we are constantly in reaction against our ignorance. We rouse ourselves at intervals and speculate.
ROBERT WILSON LYND
The Pleasure of Ignorance
Knowledge is the most democratic source of power.
ALVIN TOFFLER
Powershift
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
Men have hunger, sleep, fear and carnal intercourse in common with the lower animals. It is only knowledge that a man has more than they. Those men who have not it may be regarded as beasts.
CHANAKYA
Vridda-Chanakya
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
The knowledge of useful things is a purse seldom lost.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
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
What we know is to what we do not know, as a grain of sand is to the beach.
IVAN PANIN
Thoughts
Everybody knows something, and nobody knows everything.
DUSTY BAKER
Esquire, Apr. 2004
Humans crave knowledge, and when that craving ends, we are no longer human.
TIM LEBBON
Fallen
Information is the mortar that both builds and destroys empires.
TOBSHA LEARNER
The Witch of Cologne
Is not the fraction which you know, in relation to their totality, what a single number is to infinity?
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
Knowledge ... shall always bear witness like a clarion to its creator.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life
Seek knowledge from the purest source.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.
STEPHEN HAWKING
attributed, The Prism and the Rainbow
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
All knowledge, when separated from justice and virtue, is seen to be cunning and not wisdom.
PLATO
Menexenus