Quotes About Knowledge

Forty-two! yelled Loonquawl. Is that all you've got to show for seven and a half million years' work? I checked it very thoroughly, said the computer, and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you've never actually known what the question is.

You come to me for advice, but you can't cope with anything you don't recognize. Hmmm. So we'll have to tell you something you already know but make it sound like news, eh Well, business as usual , I suppose.

You cannot see what I see because you see what you see. You cannot know what I know because you know what you know. What I see and what I know cannot be added to what you see and what you know because they are not the same kind. Neither can it replace what you see and what you know, because that would be to replace you yourself.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term future perfect has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be.

Mark Carwardine's role, essentially, was to be the one who knew what he was talking about. My role, and one for which I was entirely qualified, was to be an extremely ignorant non-zoologist to whom everything that happened would come as a complete surprise.

A five-week sand blizzard? said Deep Thought haughtily. You ask this of me who have contemplated the very vectors of the atoms in the Big Bang itself? Molest me not with this pocket calculator stuff.

He had been told that when looking for a good oracle, it was best to find the oracle that other oracles went to.

What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else.

And as they drifter up their minds sang with the ecstatic knowledge that either what they were doing was completely and utterly and totally impossible or that physics had a lot of catching up to do. Physics shook its head and, looking the other way, concentrated on keeping the cards going along the Euston Road and out over towards the Westway flyover, on keeping the street lights lit and on making sure that when somebody on Baker Street dropped a cheeseburger it went splat on the ground.

You come to me for advice, but you can't cope with anything you don't recognize. Hmmm. So we'll have to tell you something you already know but make it sound like news, eh? Well, business as usual, I suppose.

You want to check your legal position, you do, mate. Under law the Quest for Ultimate Truth is quite clearly the inalienable prerogative of your working thinkers. Any bloody machine goes and actually finds it and we're straight out of a job, aren't we? I mean, what's the use of our sitting up half the night arguing that there may or may not be a God if this machine only goes and gives you his bleeding phone number the next morning?

No one with a thirst for knowledge goes to the university now. Half of the faculty has resigned, the other half gives courses in advanced ignorance

The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.

The teacher usually learns more than the pupil. Isn't that true?" "It would be hard to learn much less than my pupils," came a low growl from somewhere on the table, "without undergoing a prefrontal lobotomy.

Things had certainly come down a long way since the great days of Faust and Mephistopheles, when a man could gain all the knowledge of the universe, achieve all the ambitions of his mind and all the pleasures of the flesh for the price of his soul. Now it was a few record royalties, a few pieces of trendy furniture, a trinket to stick on your bathroom wall [...].

Only six people in the Galaxy knew that the job of the Galactic President was not to wield power but to attract attention away from it.

Well, there's probably a lot you don't know about me," said Arthur. "Come to mention it, there's probably a lot I don't know about me either.

She had heard it said that humans are supposed only to use about a tenth of their brains, and that no one was very clear what the other nine tenths were for, but she had certainly never heard it suggested that they were used for storing penguins.

You can't possibly be a scientist if you mind people thinking that you're a fool.

Protect me from knowing what I don't need to know. Protect me from even knowing that there are things to know that I don't know. Protect me from knowing that I decided not to know about the things that I decided not to know about. Amen.

You cannot see what I see because you see what you see. You cannot know what I know becasue you know what you know. What I see and what I know cannot be added to what you see and what you know because they are not of the same kind. Neither can it replace what you see and what you know, because that would be to replace you yourself.

As zoologists and botanists explore new areas, scrabbling to record the mere existence of species before they become extinct, it is like someone hurrying through a burning library desperately trying to jot down some of the titles of books that will now never be read.

So you see, the major difference between someone of my age and someone of yours is not how much I know, but how much I've forgotten

The teacher usually learns more than the pupils. Isn't that true? 'It would be hard to learn much less than my pupils,' came a low growl from somewhere on the table, 'without undergoing a pre-frontal lobotomy.