Quotes About Knowledge

La reconciliación sólo es posible sobre la base del conocimiento de la realidad

our brains—if we, that is, for our brains are the permanent essence of us—no longer have need of knowledge, and if we have no need because the computers do it all for us, then what is human intelligence good for? An existential intellectual crisis looms: If machines will acquire all our knowledge for us and do our thinking for us, then what, pray, is the need for us to be?

Despite all the intellectual activity of the time there was in print no guide to the tongue, no linguistic vade mecum, no single book that Shakespeare or Martin Frobisher, Francis Drake, Walter Raleigh, Francis Bacon, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nash, John Donne, Ben Jonson, Izaak Walton, or any of their other learned contemporaries could consult.

Epigraph For this, indeed, is the main source of our ignorance—the fact that our knowledge can be only finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite. —Sir Karl Popper, lecture to the British Academy (1960) Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? —T. S. Eliot, The Rock (1934)

With geology—a knowledge-based account of the nature of planet Earth, which one might legitimately regard as the ur-science—now unleashed from churchly teaching, other kinds of rational thinking started to seep into and infect all the other realms of natural philosophy. Science in its most general sense took off as a legitimate field of study and challenge, and the free-thinking rationality and free will that is the

Teach Your Children Well A generous and elevated mind is distinguished by nothing more certainly than an eminent degree of curiosity. —attributed to Samuel Johnson, dedication to Jerónimo Lobo's Voyage to Abyssinia, 1775

young orphaned Bertrand initially faltered—until the moment when, at age eleven, his older brother introduced him to the logical purity of Euclidean geometry. Suddenly mathematics, as well as a near-fanatical interest in peace, became the young man's watchwords. It was then that he began his "relentless search for knowledge," as he later described it, which seems to characterize all soi-disant polymaths, of which he was to be a prime exemplar.

It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for living.

but all day long I would be training myself to think, to understand, to criticize, to know myself; I was seeking for the absolute truth: this preoccupation did not exactly encourage polite conversation.

Self-consciousness is not knowledge but a story one tells about oneself.

All those minds that are interested in finding out the truth communicate with each other across the distances of space and time. I, too, was taking part in the effort which humanity makes to know.

faith draws its fanatical power from the fact that it is not knowledge: it is blind, passionate, stubborn, and stupid; what it puts forward is done unconditionally, against reason, against history, against all refutation.

Since we do not succeed in fleeing it, let us therefore try to look the truth in the face. Let us try to assume our fundamental ambiguity. It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our life that we must draw our strength to live and our reason for acting.

I had to call the past to life, and illuminate every corner of the five continents, descend to the centre of the earth and make the circuit of the moon and stars

It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our life that we must draw our stengths to love and our reason for acting

It is not a matter of approaching a fixed limit: absolute Knowledge or the happiness of man or the perfection of beauty; all human effort would then be doomed to failure, for with each step forward the horizon recedes a step; for man it is a matter of pursuing the expansion of his existence and of retrieving this very effort as an absolute. Science

On n'a jamais fini d'apprendre parce qu'on n'a jamais fini d'ignorer.

It is not a matter of approaching a fixed limit: absolute Knowledge or the happiness of man or the perfection of beauty; all human effort would then be doomed to failure, for with each step forward the horizon recedes a step; for man it is a matter of pursuing the expansion of his existence and of retrieving this very effort as an absolute.

C'est dans la connaissance des conditions authentiques de notre vie qu'il nous faut puiser la force de vivre et des raisons d'agir

Tant que les livres existeront, mon bonheur sera garanti.

A science which does not bring us nearer to God is worthless.

The most important part of teaching is to teach what it is to know.

Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.

Culture is an instrument wielded by professors to manufacture professors who when their time comes, will manufacture professors.