Quotes About Knowledge

Reading is the gateway skill that makes all other learnings possible.

Reading is the gateway skill that makes all other learning possible.

But I did find refuge in books. The reading habit was my mother's doing, instilled early in my childhood—her go-to move anytime I complained of boredom, or when she couldn't afford to send me to the international school in Indonesia, or when I had to accompany her to the office because she didn't have a babysitter. Go read a book, she would say. Then come back and tell me something you learned.

instilled early in my childhood—her go-to move anytime I complained of boredom, or when she couldn't afford to send me to the international school in Indonesia, or when I had to accompany her to the office because she didn't have a babysitter. Go read a book, she would say. Then come back and tell me something you learned.

In other words, if you wanted good government, then expertise mattered. You needed public institutions stocked with people whose job it was to pay attention to important stuff so the rest of us citizens didn't have to.

Lee un libro —me decía—. Y luego ven y cuéntame algo que hayas aprendido.»

An informed public depends upon literacy and language: its good use, conception, comprehension and incorruptibility.

So great was the witches' knowledge that in 1527, Paracelsus, considered the "father of modern medicine," burned his text on pharmaceuticals, confessing that he "had learned from the Sorceress all he knew.

We were not supposed to know anything about our own bodies or to participate in decision-making about our own care.

At issue is not only knowledge of the world but our survival as individuals and as a species. All the basic technologies ever invented by humans to feed and protect themselves depend on a relentless commitment to hard-nosed empiricism: you cannot assume that your arrowheads will pierce the hide of a bison or that your raft will float just because the omens are propitious and you have been given supernatural reassurance that they will. You have to be sure.

I was an answer-seeking machine, in love with what I called the truth, whether it came in the form of little truth particles stuck to the pages of books or vast patterns screaming out from the obvious and mundane.

The universe does not reveal itself to undergraduates or fools: This is the entire premise of higher education.

tengo demasiada información y me falta ingenuidad

Why revere the unknowable? Why not find out what it is?

If a woman dare to cure without having studied she is a witch and must die.

The pursuit of your power takes all that you have, if you will be great—it leaves neither time, nor energy, for anything else. We are born with the seeds of power in us and driven to be what we are by a hunger that knows no slaking. Knowledge—power—to know what songs the stars sing; to center all the forces of creation upon a rune drawn in the air—we can never give over the seeking of it. It is the stuff of loneliness.

Science doesn't tell us what we should do. It only tells us what is.

The past is all we know of the future.

It's safer knowing more about people than they know about you.

People ask without wanting to know.

For scientists, reality is not optional.

There are always more questions. Science as a process is never complete. It is not a foot race, with a finish line.... People will always be waiting at a particular finish line: journalists with their cameras, impatient crowds eager to call the race, astounded to see the scientists approach, pass the mark, and keep running. It's a common misunderstanding, he said. They conclude there was no race. As long as we won't commit to knowing everything, the presumption is we know nothing.

Perhaps growing up meant we put our knives away and feigned ignorance of the damage.

A blank space on a form, the missing page, a void, a hole in your knowledge of someone--it's still some real thing . It exists. You don't get to fill it in with whatever you want.