Quotes About Knowledge

a mind broadened by rigorous understanding of theory, but also steeped in the nuances of actual practice.

its passion for organizing and systematizing knowledge.

Everyone and everything were becoming bricks in the comprehensive and complex edifice Aristotle was determined to build in order to reach the most profound truths. Those truths, as he made clear,† come not in a sudden moment of intuitive insight or from some inner contemplative process. They are the result of hard work and thought.

All of Aristotle's works point out, however, that the most vital knowledge we have comes a posteriori, meaning "after the fact" or from experience, as we link up a given visible effect to its preceding cause.

Aristotle decided that Reality with a capital R is not (for the most part) something ultimately above or behind the world we see and hear and smell and touch. It is that world. What Plato had dismissed as the illusions of the cave, Aristotle set out to prove were the keys to ultimate understanding all along.

From the point of view of Plato—not to mention Socrates—this was a shocking downgrading of reason. But Bernard was only following Plato's hierarchy of knowledge as adopted and adapted by Saint Augustine. Just as reason is superior to opinion (doxa), so Saint Augustine taught that faith is superior to reason because it rests on the highest wisdom of all, the truth of God's revelation.9 Faith of this potent kind is more than belief.

Reason steps in after, not before, experience; it sorts our observations into meaningful patterns and arrives at a knowledge as certain and exact as anything in Plato's Forms.

Abelard's love for Héloïse was actually a form of self-love, even self-obsession. "He is a man who does not know his limitations," Bernard confided to a friend. "Nothing in heaven or on earth is hidden from him, except himself.

To be a human is to have a soul, Socrates and Plato tell us. Our soul is our true essence, our true identity. It is the soul that actively seeks to unlock the mysteries of the world, including the truth about reality.

Grace is given of God, but knowledge is bought in the market.

Spreken over iets wat je niet begrijpt is onnozel, ernaar vragen slim. Wat is wetenschap anders dan uitkomen voor je onwetendheid? Je kunt immers alleen iets leren waar je nog geen weet van hebt.

De rust waarvan ik in een bibliotheek zo geniet bestaat niet alleen uit stilte. Al dat papier dempt ieder geluid, maar ook het ruisen van mijn gedachten. Hun ongedurigheid vindt troost in de overmacht aan kennis langs de wanden. Die is zoveel groter dan ooit in mijn hoofd zal passen. Dat kalmeert me en herinnert mij eraan dat ik niet per se alles hoef te weten en begrijpen. Zoveel is al opgeschreven en ik heb het allemaal binnen handbereik. Daar hoef ik mij dus niet meer mee bezig te houden.

We learn, when we learn, only from experience, and then we only learn from our mistakes. Our successes only serve to reinforce our superstitions.

My personal conviction is that science is concerned wholly with truth, not with ethics.

The foundation of all foundations and the pillar of all wisdom is to know God." His message is that

To do successful research, you don't need to know everything, you just need to know one thing that isn't known.

The only atheism is the denial of truth.

sin is an effort to gain the ecstasy and the knowledge that pertain alone to angels, and in making this effort man becomes a demon.

It was, indeed, an exquisite symbol beneath which men long ago veiled their knowledge of the most awful, most secret forces which lie at the heart of all things; forces before which the souls of men must wither and die and blacken, as their bodies blacken under the electric current.

He dived deeper and deeper into his books; he had taken all obsolescence to be his province; in his disgust at the stupid usual questions, "Will it pay?" "What good is it?" and so forth, he would only read what was uncouth and useless.

Ama yaln?zca çok az ÅŸey biliyorum; bir uçuruma bakm?? ve dehÅŸet içinde bak??lar?n? kaç?rm?? bir gezgin gibiyim.

Every branch of human knowledge, if traced up to its source and final principles, vanishes into mystery.

Holiness requires as great, or almost as great, an effort; but holiness works on lines that were natural once; it is an effort to recover the ecstasy that was before the Fall. But sin is an effort to gain the ecstasy and the knowledge that pertain alone to angels, and in making this effort man becomes a demon.

By whatever means it is accomplished, the prime business of a play is to arouse the passions of its audience so that by the route of passion may be opened up new relationships between a man and men, and between men and Man. Drama is akin to the other inventions of man in that it ought to help us to know more and not merely to spend our feelings.