Quotes About Knowledge

The fountain of content must spring up in the mind, and he who has so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition will waste his life in fruitless efforts, and multiply the griefs which he purposes to remove.

The supreme end of education is expert discernment in all things--the power to tell the good from the bad, the genuine from the counterfeit, and to prefer the good and the genuine to the bad and the counterfeit.

You teach your daugthers the diameters of the planets and wonder when you are done that they do not delight in your company.

Men know that women are an overmatch for them, and therefore they choose the weakest or the most ignorant. If they did not think so, they never could be afraid of women knowing as much as themselves.

Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.

The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book.

Never let your schooling interfere with your education.

If you dont read the newspaper, youre uninformed; if you do read the newspaper, youre misinformed.

Education consists mainly in what we have unlearned.

The self-taught man seldom knows anything accurately, and he does not know a tenth as much as he could have known if he had worked under teachers;

Definition of a classic something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

The trouble with facts is that there are so many of them.

Samuel Noah Kramer

Samuel Noah Kramer

Though he be a fool, yet he keeps much company, and will tell all he sees or hears, and so a man may understand what the common talk of the town is.

All our physicians cannot tell what an ague is, and all our arithmetique is not able to number the days of a man;" which, God knows, is not the fault of arithmetique, but that our understandings reach not the thing.

I also believe that the most meaningful change, where individuals can triumph over both entropy and evolution as it were, comes when people use empirical knowledge against good taste, use strength against power, skill against art, and technology against science in their easiest and unthinking modes.

I am limited, finite, and fixed. I am in terror of the infinity before me, having come through the one behind bringing no knowledge I can take on. I commend myself up to what is greater than I, and try to be good.

When I was packing those, I caught myself taking all the important, profound, and indispensable titles I could – nearly filled the box. But one of the more eccentric librarians at the internment compound I'd gotten permission to riffle had put up a whole shelf full of cubes of women writers or texts about women. She was convinced nobody could be truly educated unless they'd read them – though nobody I ever met had, except her, maybe. […]

When a guy gets out and gets his face ground into the real world he comes up angry, wants to know how it works, and he'll believe anybody who tells him how, right or wrong.

Books kept connecting with books. That is what made them live…

In a hundred years they may both be sciences. Fine. But today a person who learns the rules of art well is a little rarer than the person who learns the rules of science.

There is so much knowledge available today that there can be no such thing anymore as a classical education that we can expect more than a relatively few people to share.

If only because there is so much to know in our human universe, the working assumption you can go on is: You may assume, about absolutely any fact (how many transuranic elements are there? why does cold water remove human blood stains faster than hot?) that nine hundred and ninety-nine people out of a thousand do NOT know it- which goes for the working assumption too.