Quotes About Knowledge

No man thoroughly understands a truth until he has contended against it.

The things taught in colleges and schools are not an education, but the means of education.

Many time the reading of a book has made the future of a man.

Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated about among men of thought.

Every burned book enlightens the world.

Knowledge is the only elegance.

If a man knew anything, he would sit in a corner and be modest; but he is such an ignorant peacock, that he goes bustling up and down, and hits on extraordinary discoveries.

The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education, but the means of education.

A man's library is a sort of harem.

We die of words. We are hanged, drawn and quartered by dictionaries. We walk in the vale of shadows. It is an age of hobgoblins.

People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.

Things are of the snake.

Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books.

The scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state he is Man Thinking.

Truth is the property of no individual but is the treasure of all men.

Sunshine cannot bleach the snow, Nor time unmake what poets know.

Every known fact in natural science was divined by the presentiment of somebody, before it was actually verified.

Never read any book that is not a year old.

I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.

Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.

I suppose every old scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book which was significant to him, but which he could never find again. Sure he is that he read it there; but no one else ever read it, nor can he find it again, though he buy the book and ransack every page.

We may like well to know what is Plato's and what is Montesquieu's or Goethe's part, and what thought was always dear to the writer himself; but the worth of the sentences consists in their radiancy and equal aptitude to all intelligence. They fit all our facts like a charm. We respect ourselves the more that we know them.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

All our progress is an unfolding, like a vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge as the plant has root, bud, and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.