Quotes About Knowledge

The intelligence of few perceives what has been carefully hidden in the recesses of the mind.

I've bought pretty much every book ever written about the Alamo, and I talk to my friends that I've made over the past 15, 20 years. It's just a constant learning and fascinating thing for me.

In learning you will teach, and in teaching you will learn.

In learning we teach and in teaching we learn.

Being convinced one knows the whole story is the surest way to fail.

To learn, you must understand what you do not know. It is not enough to know you do not understand.

Know what happened, wonder what happened or ignore what happened and i would not want to be 2 or 3

Wisdom is always an overmatch for strength.

I'm tired of ignorance held up as inspiration, where vicious anti-intellectualism is considered a positive trait, and where uninformed opinion is displayed as fact.

Lots of archaeology. Most of it hidden. Overgrown castle mounds and tumps. And hill forts. No official history – like no National Trust stuff, but it's all around you, unlabelled. You need to know what you're looking for. I like that.

There is a difference between failure caused by ignorance and failure caused by negligence.

even supposing knowledge to be easily attainable, more people would be content to be ignorant than would take even a little trouble to acquire it.

For example, among investors with common stock holdings having a market value of a quarter to a half million dollars, the percentage who own twenty-five or more different stocks is appalling. It is not this number of twenty-five or more which itself is appalling. Rather it is that in the great majority of instances only a small percentage of such holdings is in attractive stocks about which the investor or his advisor has a high degree of knowledge.

Wavefunction collapse is a generator of knowledge: it is not so much a process that gives us the answers, but is the process by which answers are created. The outcome of that process can't, in general, be predicted with certainty, but quantum mechanics gives us a method for calculating the probabilities of particular outcomes. That's all we can ask for.

Much of the skill in doing science resides in knowing where in the hierarchy you are looking – and, as a consequence, what is relevant and what is not.

If a little kid ever asks you just why the sky is blue, you look him or her right in the eye and say, "It's because of quantum effects involving Rayleigh scattering combined with a lack of violet photon receptors in our retinae.

Science asymptotically approaches reality.

Absolute power can only be supported by error, ignorance and prejudice.

In seeking wisdom thou art wise in imagining that thou hast attained it - thou art a fool.

Learning is acquired by reading books, but the much more necessary learning, the knowledge of the world is only to be acquired by reading men, and studying all the various editions of them.

Once we know the outcome of something, that knowledge skews our perception of what we thought before we knew the outcome: that's hindsight bias. Baruch Fischhoff was the first to document the phenomenon in a set of elegant experiments.

Like everyone else, scientists have intuitions. Indeed, hunches and flashes of insight—the sense that something is true even if you can't prove it—have been behind countless breakthroughs. The interplay between System 1 and System 2 can be subtle and creative.

When you combine the judgments of a large group of people to calculate the "wisdom of the crowd" you collect all the relevant information that is dispersed among all those people. But none of those people has access to all that information. One person knows only some of it, another knows some more, and so on.

The truth is, the truth is elusive.