Quotes About Knowledge

Thanks largely to Greenblatt's marvellous book The Swerve, I have only recently come to know Lucretius, and to appreciate the extent to which I am, and always have been without knowing it, a Lucretian/Epicurean.

Smith's genius as an individual, but I have one great advantage over him – I can read his book.

The wonderful thing about knowledge is that it is genuinely limitless. There is not even a theoretical possibility of exhausting the supply of ideas, discoveries and inventions.

The cumulative accretion of knowledge by specialists that allows us each to consume more and more different things by each producing fewer and fewer is, I submit, the central story of humanity. Innovation changes the world

Which would have advanced the most at the end of a month,' Henry David Thoreau asked: 'the boy who had made his own jack-knife from the ore which he had dug and smelted, reading as much as would be necessary for this – or the boy who had attended the lectures on metallurgy at the Institute in the meanwhile, and had received a Rodgers' penknife from his father?

The cumulative accretion of knowledge by specialists that allows us each to consume more and more different things by each producing fewer and fewer is, I submit, the central story of humanity.

knowledge 'never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess'.

Nancy Wexler fears that science is now in the position of Tiresias, the blind seer of Thebes.

Whenever you see the word equilibrium in a textbook, blot it out.' It is wrong because it assumes perfect competition, perfect knowledge and perfect rationality, none of which do or can exist.

Friedrich Hayek argued, knowledge is dispersed throughout society, because each person has a special perspective. Knowledge can never be gathered together in one place. It is collective, not individual.

As Friedrich Hayek first clearly saw, knowledge 'never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess'.

Science is like a hungry furnace that must feed from the the forest of ignorance that surrounds us.

But often, in the world's most crowded streets, But often, in the din of strife, There rises an unspeakable desire After the knowledge of our buried life; A thirst to spend our fire and restless force In tracking out our true, original course; A longing to inquire Into the mystery of this heart which beats So wild, so deep in us—to know Whence our lives come and where they go.

Culture is the endeavour to know the best and to make this knowledge prevail for the good of all humankind.

Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.

Roger Bacon held that three classes of substance were capable of magic: the herbal, the mineral, and the verbal. With their leaves of fiber, their inks of copperas and soot, and their words, books are an amalgam of the three.

But the library - especially one so vast - is no mere cabinet of curiosities; it's a world, complete and uncompleteable, and it is filled with secrets.

I'm a smeller of books and a marker-upper of books.

I know nothing," I say, cheerfully. "You never seem to. Have you ever wondered why that is?" "It's very deliberate. I've found that knowledge is usually a burden. I prefer to be surprised and then eventually horrified.

There are two types of guys in this world," she says. "Guys who know that 'So It Goes' is a Kurt Vonnegut reference, and guys who I want absolutely nothing to do with.

How odd it must be to go through life believing that a book is a book.

I was looking for something else in books. I could not really say what, but I think I can say why: a notion started in my own brain was probably wrong, but an answer read in a work of literature would be right. That was my conviction at nineteen, and only in later years would I come to trust myself over a book.

You are always better off to read a book, anyway, than to meet the person behind it.

Benjamin Franklin]. Not only one of our nation's founding geniuses but a printer and publisher, too... He knew that to form the soul of America, one must control the presses.