Quotes About Knowledge

If you study art (and literature and the humanities), you do it so that you can familiarize yourself with the collected wisdom of our civilization. This is a very good idea—a veritable necessity—because people have been working out how to live for a long time. What they have produced is strange but also rich beyond comparison, so why not use it as a guide?

The Land You Know, the Land You Do Not Know, and the Land You Cannot Even Imagine

This principle is sometimes known as Price's law, after Derek J. de Solla Price,13 the researcher who discovered its application in science in 1963.

It was from this that I drew my fundamental moral conclusions. Aim up. Pay attention. Fix what you can fix. Don't be arrogant in your knowledge. Strive for humility, because totalitarian pride manifests itself in intolerance, oppression

We use our past effectively when it helps us repeat desirable—and avoid repeating undesirable—experiences. We want to know what happened but, more importantly, we want to know why. Why is wisdom. Why enables us to avoid making the same mistake again and again, and if we are fortunate helps us repeat our successes.

We process the unknown world from the bottom up. We encounter containers of information, so to speak, whose full import is by no means self-evident.

If your life is not going well, perhaps it is your current knowledge that is insufficient, not life itself.

What saves is the willingness to learn from what you don't know.

Knowledge must pass through many stages of analysis—a multitude of transformations—before it becomes, let us say, commonplace.

No eres de forma alguna tan solo lo que ya sabes, también eres todo lo que podrías saber si así lo quisieras.

It is better to presume ignorance and invite learning than to assume sufficient knowledge and risk the consequent blindness.

Artists are the people who stand on the frontier of the transformation of the unknown into knowledge.

You need to consider the future and think, "What might my life look like if I were caring for myself properly? What career would challenge me and render me productive and helpful, so that I could shoulder my share of the load, and enjoy the consequences? What should I be doing, when I have some freedom, to improve my health, expand my knowledge, and strengthen my body?

Don't over-estimate your self-knowledge.

Thus, it is necessary even for the most accomplished (but who wishes to accomplish still more) to retain identification with the as yet unsuccessful; to appreciate the striving toward competence; to carefully and with true humility subordinate him or herself to the current game; and to develop the knowledge, self-control, and discipline necessary to make the next move.

Knowledge frequently results from knowing others, but the man who is awakened, has seen the uncarved block. Others might be mastered by force, but to master one's self requires the Tao. He who has many material things, may be described as rich, but he who knows he has enough, and is at one with the Tao, might have enough of material things and have self-being as well.

Someone with experience knows that people are capable of deception and willing to deceive. That knowledge brings with it an arguably justified pessimism about human nature, personal and otherwise, but it also opens the door to another kind of faith in humanity: one based on courage, rather than naivete.

Ideologies are substitutes for true knowledge, and ideologues are always dangerous when they come to power, because a simple-minded I-know-it-all approach

If your life is not going well, perhaps it is your current knowledge that is insufficient, not life itself. Perhaps your value structure needs some serious retooling. Perhaps what you want is blinding you to what else could be. Perhaps you are holding on to your desires, in the present, so tightly that you cannot see anything else—even what you truly need.

Life is short, and you don't have time to figure everything out on your own. The wisdom of the past was hard-earned, and your dead ancestors may have something useful to tell you).

You have a direction, but it might be wrong. You have a plan, but it might be ill-formed. You may have been led astray by your own ignorance—and, worse, by your own unrevealed corruption. You must make friends, therefore, with what you don't know, instead of what you know.

Truth is the ultimate, inexhaustible natural resource.

Every person is too complex to know themselves completely, and we all contain wisdom that we cannot comprehend.

Those well positioned (and this is a great danger of moving up) have used their current competence—their cherished opinions, their present knowledge, their current skills—to stake a moral claim to their status. In consequence, they have little motivation to admit to error, to learn or change—and plenty of reason not to.