quotations about knowledge
Few can tell what they know without also showing what they do not know.
IVAN PANIN
Thoughts
If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it.
MARGARET FULLER
Woman's Day Magazine, Sep. 12, 2007
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
The true method of knowledge is experiment.
WILLIAM BLAKE
All Religions are One
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
As I came not into life with any knowledge of it, and as my likings are for what is old, I busy myself in seeking knowledge there.
CONFUCIUS
The Wisdom of Confucius
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
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
All our knowledge is the offspring of our perceptions.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life
Humans crave knowledge, and when that craving ends, we are no longer human.
TIM LEBBON
Fallen
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
What we know is built on what we do not know.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Seek knowledge from the purest source.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
All knowledge, when separated from justice and virtue, is seen to be cunning and not wisdom.
PLATO
Menexenus
Let no one, then, seek to know from me what I know that I do not know; unless he perhaps wishes to learn to be ignorant of that of which all we know is, that it cannot be known.
ST. AUGUSTINE
The City of God
Information is the mortar that both builds and destroys empires.
TOBSHA LEARNER
The Witch of Cologne
The less we know, the longer the explanation.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVEN J. ANDERSON
Dune: House Corrino
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
Knowledge, among diverse conditions, has these two--that what we know of anything will depend--first, on our size relative to it, and, secondly, on our distance from it. For if we are too far away, we shall not see it at all; and if too near, we shall be entangled in its parts, not seeing it in unity; while if in mind or body we be not large enough to couple with the object, our best understanding will be but piecemeal knowledge, take a mite whose feet tickle our finger; to the insect we must appear as to our body very differently from the manner in which we must see the creature. In like manner, we perceive a great mountain, which is unknown to the squirrel sporting on it, and more hid still from the cicada nibbling a leaf in the forest on it. A ball hurled from a gun across our vision and close to us, at a thousand miles an hour we cannot see; but we see the moon well, though its speed is more than two thousand miles an hour. By reason of the distance, the moon seems even not to move at all; and if we were not large enough in mind to study the moon, how could we know its motion, or how think of it except as done in leaps, since we could not observe the transition? If we were not much larger creatures in Nature's eye--which judges always according to power of thought--than a basin of water, we might be amazed to find it warm to one hand and cold to the other (as Berkeley has set forth), and led, perhaps, to fantastic dreams of two natures in one--as many as ever amused a medieval Aristotelian. These instances--and many more, easily multiplied--will show how distance and relative size affect knowledge, which I shall take as allowed.
JAMES VILA BLAKE
"Of Knowledge", Essays
How dreadful knowledge of the truth can be when there's no help in truth!
SOPHOCLES
Oedipus Rex