Quotes About Knowledge

just because you know a bunch of things doesn't give you an unerring guide to know what to do about those things

Willful blindness is the refusal to know something that could be known.

Nietzsche said that a man's worth was determined by how much truth he could tolerate. You are by no means only what you already know. You are also all that which you could know, if you only would.

You don't understand anything. You didn't even know that you were blind.

Before the dawn of the scientific worldview, a mere six hundred years ago, reality was construed as all that which human beings experience.

Scientific truths were made explicit a mere five hundred years ago, with the work of Francis Bacon, René Descartes and Isaac Newton. In whatever manner our forebears viewed the world prior to that, it was not through a scientific lens (any more than they could view the moon and the stars through the glass lenses of the equally recent telescope).

Nuestras mentes son mucho más antiguas que la humanidad.

Nuestro gran poder tecnológico convierte las consecuencias de nuestros errores y debilidades individuales en cosas cada vez más graves; si deseamos seguir expandiendo nuestro poder, también debemos expandir continuamente nuestro saber. Por desgracia, es horrible pedir algo así.

DA POR HECHO QUE LA PERSONA A LA QUE ESCUCHAS PUEDE SABER ALGO QUE TÚ NO SABES

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?

If they're not, then it will serve as a major red flag that the person who's asking them is not an expert in their field. For example, imagine being on the receiving end of the following series of intelligence-gathering questions, asked in exactly this order:

knowing often felt preferable to not knowing. It provided the illusion of control.

Doctor, as in "an apple a day"? Or one of those guys who's got an honorary title for staying in college too long?

You probably don't want to put me in any situation where I'm expected to know something about the sportball.

Knowing mathematics is like wearing a pair of X-ray specs that reveal hidden structures underneath the messy and chaotic surface of the world.

A reasonable person believes, in short, that each of his beliefs is true and that some of them are false.

It's not like that, as we've seen. Mathematicians aren't crazy, and we aren't aliens, and we aren't mystics. What's true is that the sensation of mathematical understanding-of suddenly knowing what's going on, with total certainty, all the way to the bottom-is a special thing, attainable in few if any other places in life. You feel you've reached into the universe's guts and put your hand on the wire. It's hard to describe to people who haven't experienced it.

Nobody ever looks in the mirror and says, "Let's face it, I'm smarter than Gauss." And yet, in the last hundred years, the joined effort of all these dummies-compared-to-Gauss has produced the greatest flowering of mathematical knowledge the world has ever seen.

The ultimate reason for teaching kids to write a proof is not that the world is full of proofs. It's that the world is full of non-proofs , and grown-ups need to know the difference. It's hard to settle for a non-proof once you've really familiarized yourself with the genuine article.

Math is a science of not being wrong about things,

The less you know about a topic, the more you overestimate the quality of your knowledge.

Algú va dir que la veritat surt quan es busca.

Jordi Sierra i Fabra

Iban a cultivar un huerto estéril, un huerto muerto, pero ¿cómo podían saberlo su nunca habían salido de Tenochtitlan?