Quotes About Knowledge

We have grown away from knowledge, away from knowing what something is really like, toward knowing only what somebody else says it is like. There seems to be a desire to ignore the truth in favor of drama.

Perhaps when I am grown I will not know anything. Perhaps that is the way it works, the way it is with growing. When you grow, you start to unlearn things.

I wish I had a dollar for every hour I've spent in the library, he always says. I have to agree- we'd probably never have to worry about money again.

The most, MOST important thing is to read. Read all the time; read when they tell you not to read, what they tell you not to read, read with a flashlight under the covers, read on the bus, standing on a corner, waiting for a friend, in the dentist's waiting room. Read every minute you can. READ LIKE A WOLF EATS. Read. 

We don't like to think of ourselves as prey—it is a lessening thought—but the truth is that in our arrogance and so-called knowledge we forget that we are not unique. We are part of nature as much as other animals, and some animals—sharks, fever-bearing mosquitoes, wolves and bear, to name but a few—perceive us as a food source, a meat supply, and simply did not get the memo about how humans are superior.

I owe everything I am and everything I will ever be, to books.

The rule that science is the only way to know something is itself unscientific; it cannot be tested. So the claim that only science can demonstrate truth actually flunks its own test, since it cannot validate itself!

The biggest advances are not made by being a great teacher; they are made by being a great student.

Also, I've spent an entire week without reading any books or talking about them too loudly. I'm learning to work my apparat's screen, the colourful pulsating mosaic of it, the fact that it knows every last stinking detail about the world, whereas my books only know the minds of their authors.

We're people of the Orient. We know everything. And what we don't know, we can sense.

Why do you know so much old rap? Because I'm white.

WE SHALL SEE WHO KNOWS HOW TO BE

There are two things that are really educational. One is being with a bunch of really smart people. The other is being all by yourself.

If you have an understanding and cannot express it, then your understanding is not yet complete.

Nothing ever becomes real 'til it is experienced. John Keats

To sum up, while we do not seek to instruct the reader, we should feel rewarded for our efforts if we can persuade him to practice an exercise at which we are a master: to laugh at oneself. No progress is possible in the acquisition of objective knowledge without this self-critical irony.

Knowing must therefore be accompanied by an equal capacity to forget knowing.

How much philosophers would learn, if they would consent to read the poets!

If we were to study these fragments by Baudelaire according to the normal methods of psychology, we might conclude that when the poet left behind him the settings of the world, to experience the single setting of immensity, he could only have knowledge of an abstraction come true. Intimate space elaborated in this way by a poet, would be merely the pendant of the outside space of geometricians, who seek infinite space with no other sign than infinity itself.

Le paradis, à n'en pas douter, n'est qu'une immense bibliothèque.

In reality, however, the poet has given concrete form to a very general psychological theme, namely, that there will always be more things in a closed, than in an open, box. To verify images kills them, and it is always more enriching to imagine than to experience.

Non-knowing is not a form of ignorance but a difficult transcendence of knowledge.

De waarheid is een gecorrigeerde vergissing.

Avant de penser, il faut étudier. Seuls les philosophes pensent avant d'étudier.