Quotes About Knowledge

Of all the things that make for happiness, the love of books comes first. No matter how the world may have used us, sure solace lies there.

I love the energy and the knowledge. I barely know how to use this thing [mobile phone]. I get by.

Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the non-sucker, not exactly the same thing.

Neither love without knowledge, nor knowledge without love can produce a good life.

I think it is silly to be amateur about anything when one has an opportunity of learning.

If she can't spell, she shouldn't be a librarian.

IRWIN J. SNEED ELEMENTARY SCHOOL

And Sandra, she knew from her experience with the fly spray, was ruthless. "You don't know it." There was triumph in Sandra's voice. "I know something you don't

Il nome della materia non ha importanza. E neppure chi insegna a chi. Il sapere è uno scambio reciproco.

There seemed to be a mystifying universal conspiracy among textbook authors to make certain the material they dealt with never strayed too near the realm of the mildly interesting and was always at least a long-distance phone call from the frankly interesting.

Just sitting quietly, doing nothing at all, your brain churns through more information in thirty seconds than the Hubble Space Telescope has processed in thirty years. A morsel of cortex one cubic millimeter in size—about the size of a grain of sand—could hold two thousand terabytes of information, enough to store all the movies ever made, trailers included, or about 1.2 billion copies of this book.

Human beings would split the atom and invent television, nylon, and instant coffee before they could figure out the age of their own planet.

Strange as it may seem, wrote Richard Feynman, we understand the distribution of matter in the interior of the Sun far better than we understand the interior of the Earth.

The real significance of Magellan's voyage was not that it was the first to circumnavigate the planet, but that it was the first to realize just how big that planet was.

The history of epilepsy can be summarised as 4,000 years of ignorance, superstition and stigma followed by 100 years of knowledge, superstition and stigma.

Incidentally, the idea that we use only 10 percent of our brains is a myth. No one knows where the idea came from, but it has never been true or close to true. You may not use it all terribly sensibly, but you employ all your brain in one way or another.

I suppose—I was on a long flight across the Pacific, staring idly out the window at moonlit ocean, when it occurred to me with a certain uncomfortable forcefulness that I didn't know the first thing about the only planet I was ever going to live on.

Returning to my book, I learned that Sarah Palin thought Africa was a country. It was a wonderful evening.

The physicist Leo Szilard once announced to his friend Hans Bethe that he was thinking of keeping a diary: 'I don't intend to publish. I am merely going to record the facts for the information of God.' 'Don't you think God knows the facts?' Bethe asked. 'Yes,' said Szilard. 'He knows the facts, but He does not know this version of the facts.' Hans Christian von Baeyer, Taming the Atom

Facts are surprisingly delible things, and in four hundred years a lot of them simply fade away. One of the most popular plays of the age was Arden of Faversham, but no one now knows who wrote it. When an author's identity is known, that knowledge is often marvelously fortuitous.

It is fairly amazing to reflect that at the beginning of the twentieth century, and for some years beyond, the best scientific minds in the world couldn't actually tell you, in any meaningful way, where babies came from.

They can tell us not only what Shakespeare wrote but what he read. Geoffrey Bullough devoted a lifetime, nearly, to tracking down all possible sources for virtually everything mentioned in Shakespeare, producing eight volumes of devoted exposition revealing not only what Shakespeare knew but precisely how he knew it.

By the middle of the nineteenth century most learned people thought the Earth was at least a few million years old, perhaps even some tens of millions years old, but probably not more than that. So

In fact, of course, the world was about to enter a century of science where many people wouldn't understand anything and none would understand everything.