Quotes About Knowledge

Those kids aren't dumb. But the people who run these schools want to make sure they don't get smart: they are really teaching the kids to be slaves.

I often wonder what I'd do if there weren't any books in the world.

We now know too much about matter to be materialists.

Scientific curiosity hungers for a knowledge of causes; causes which are physical, and, if possible, measurable.

An acquaintance with the laws of nature does not always, nor even commonly, carry with it the means of controlling them. Knowledge is seldom power. And a sociologist so coldly independent of the social forces among which he lived as thoroughly to understand them, would, in all probability, be as impotent to guide the evolution of a community as an astronomer to modify the orbit of a comet.

The fact is, of course, that the metaphysician wants to re-think the universe; the plain man does not. The metaphysician seeks for an inclusive system where all reality can be rationally housed. The plain man is less ambitious. He is content with the kind of knowledge he possesses about men and things—so far as it goes. Science has already told him much; each day it tells him more. And, within the clearing thus made for him in the tangled wilderness of the unknown, he feels at home.

Science also deems perception to be the source of all our knowledge of external nature. But it regards it as something more, and different. For perception is itself a part of nature, a natural process, the product of antecedent causes, the cause of subsequent effects. It requires, therefore, like other natural facts, to be observed and explained; and it is the business of science to explain it.

The well-known paradox of the theory of probabilities is that, to all seeming, it can extract knowledge from ignorance and certainty from doubt.

Growth in Knowledge, like productiveness in Art, can hardly, so far as its direct consequences are concerned, do otherwise than subserve the cause of progress.

The source of knowledge must be rational. If this be granted, you rule out Mechanism, you rule out Naturalism, you rule out Agnosticism; and a lofty form of Theism becomes, as I think, inevitable.

The unprepared will eventually be destroyed; ignorance is no hiding place.

The heavens and the earth, the woods and the wayside, teem with instruction and knowledge to the curious and thoughtful.

Theories are very thin and unsubstantial; experience only is tangible.

Even knowledge has to be in the fashion, and where it is not, it is wise to affect ignorance.

True knowledge lies in knowing how to live.

Know or listen to those who know.

There is none who cannot teach somebody something, and there is none so excellent but he is excelled.

But art consists not so much in the knowledge of principles, as in the manner of applying them; to reveal them to ignorant people is to put a razor in the hand of a monkey.

A man ought not to marry without having studied anatomy, and dissected at least one woman.

The number of things which you do not understand increases day by day.

Your Science, which makes you great in your own eyes, is paltry indeed beside the light which bathes a Seer.

Everyone lives the way she knows best. What I mean by 'their happiness' is living a life untouched as much as possible by the knowledge that we are really, all of us, alone. That's not a bad thing.

Perhaps it's because she spends all her time sleeping—she comes and goes just as she pleases in the world of her dreams, she's free to go anywhere she wants. And that gives her access to much more information than people have who are up all the time.

It was only I who had forgotten how well we knew each other.