Quotes About Knowledge

Faith is that which, knowing the Lord's will, goes and does it; or, not knowing it, stands and waits, content in ignorance as in knowledge, because God wills; neither pressing into the hidden future, nor careless of the knowledge which opens the path of action. It is its noblest exercise to act with uncertainty of the result, when the duty itself is certain, or even when a course seems with strong probability to be duty.

There is more of the marvellous in an old library than ever any magic could work!

What it is, I can not tell; I only know it is not that which the young fool calls it, still less that which the old sinner thinks it.

Everything in the world is more or less misunderstood at first: we have to learn what it is, and come at length to see that it must be so, that it could not be otherwise. Then we know it; and we never know a thing really until we know it thus.

What is the matter with your master? George asked Dawtie as they bounced along toward Potlurg. God knows, sir. What is the use of telling me that? I want you to tell me what YOU know. I don't know anything, sir.

But indeed the business of the universe is to make such a fool of you that you will know yourself for one, and so begin to be wise!

To reason from a thing not understood, is to walk straight into the mire.

There are many things which a little learning, while it cannot really hide them, may make you less ready to see all at once

Humble mistake will not hurt us: the truth is there, and the Lord will see that we come to know it. We may think we know it when we have scarce a glimpse of it; but the error of a true heart will not be allowed to ruin it. Certainly that heart would not have mistaken the truth except for the untruth yet remaining in it; but he who casts out devils will cast out that devil.

I am the truth, said our Lord; and by those who are in some measure like him in being the truth, the Word can be understood. Let us try to understand him.

A library can't be made all at once, any more than a house, or a nation, or a great tree: they must all take time to grow, and so must a library...Folk must make acquaintance among books as they would among living folk.

To oppose, to refute, to deny is not to know the truth. Whatever good may come in the destroying of the false, the best hammer of the critic will not serve to carve the celestial form of the real; and when the iconoclast becomes the bigot of negation and declares the non-existence of any form worthy of worship because he has destroyed so many unworthy forms, he becomes a fool. That he has never conceived a deity worth worshipping is poor ground for saying such cannot exist.

if Donal was in any danger of loving the things of this world, it was in the shape of books–books he had a strong inclination to accumulate and hoard.

for Wisdom is justified of her children;

In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane.

For the first time he perceived that if you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself.  

If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself. You must know all the while that it is there, but until it is needed you must never let it emerge into your consciousness in any shape that can be given a name.

A generation of the unteachable is hanging upon us like a necklace of corpses.

We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone. But how far away that future may be, there is no knowing. It might be a thousand years. At present nothing is possible except to extend the area of sanity little by little. We cannot act collectively. We can only spread our knowledge outwards from individual to individual, generation after generation. In the face of the Thought Police there is no other way.

It said what he would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order. It was the product of a mind similar to his own, but enormously more powerful, more systematic, less fear-ridden. The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.

It is one of the tragedies of the half-educated that they develop late, when they are already committed to some wrong way of life.

If you hate violence and don't believe in politics, the only major remedy remaining is education.

The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable-what then?

The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.