Quotes About Knowledge

What is this place? Who are you, and how did you know I was coming here?" "We know many things, son of Crydee. You are here because it is time for you to face that greatest of terrors, what you call the Enemy. You are here to learn. We are here to teach.

Among our people we have the recognition, the sudden knowledge that a mate is before you. Not all our people know this certainty, and to them falls the difficult task of slowly building a bond with another who has also not known the recognition. With Calis and Elien, it is the difficult way. But often it ends in a love as profound as the first.

time is coming, soon, when I will tell you things you will wish I had never told you.

the knowable community—to

Reality is infinite and we are finite and so there is a necessary mismatch between our knowledge of the world and the world itself.

In a field like philosophy, where understanding involves not so much the reception of knowledge but rather a transformation of the receiver itself, so that the receiver, which is to say the student, can generate the knowledge for him- or herself, then the physical presence of the teacher is essential.

If we don't understand our tools, then there is a danger that we will become the tool of our tools, Plato said, which I thought was a very astute observation, especially considering how little it turned out that he actually knew about Google or really anything about the Internet. I

In fact, it's the very impersonality of impersonal knowledge that renders such knowledge the most ethically potent of all.

Philosophical progress is invisible because it is incorporated into our points of view. What was tortuously secured by complex argument becomes widely shared intuition, so obvious that we forget its provenance. We don't see it, because we see with it.

What is it precisely, that they are doing when they are doing science. Are they refining their instruments for observation or discovering new aspects of reality?

Conclusions that philosophers first establish by way of torturous reasoning have a way, over time, of leaking into shared knowledge.

If we don't understand our tools, then there is a danger that we will become the tool of our tools

We're tied to our heritage in a powerful way, and if we want to change our individual behavior or beliefs and heal ourselves, knowledge about our history becomes perhaps the most important data we need. In order to move forward, we must know what our forebears have passed on to us and what they've communicated to each other, both consciously and unconsciously, throughout the years.

We know less when we erroneously think we know than when we recognize that we don't.

But explaining men still assume I am, in some sort of obscene impregnation metaphor, an empty vessel to be filled with their wisdom and knowledge. A Freudian would claim to know what they have and I lack, but intelligence is not situated in the crotch—even if you can write one of Virginia Woolf's long mellifluous musical sentences about the subtle subjugation of women in the snow with your willie.

No matter how deeply you come to know a place, you can keep coming back to know it more.

If it's not clear enough in the piece, I love it when people things to me they know and I'm interested in but don't yet know. It's when they explain things to me I know and they don't that the conversation goes awry.

Always, just beyond all these things, was the silver sea, the lace border around all land like the silence around sounds or the unknowns beyond all knowledge.

explaining men still assume I am, in some sort of obscene impregnation metaphor, an empty vessel to be filled with their wisdom and knowledge.

We know less when we erroneously think we know than when we recognize that we don't. Sometimes I think these pretenses at authoritative knowledge are failures of language: the language of bold assertion is simpler, less taxing, than the language of nuance and ambiguity

Comfort is often a code word for the right to be unaware.

Whose maps are we trying to read? And what are we trying to draw? It's so common to live in a place without truly knowing its history, its systems, and the people who are different from you and who move through different versions of the city.

Men explain things to me, still. And no man has ever apologized for explaining, wrongly, things that I know and they don't.

You furnish your mind with readings in somewhat the same way you furnish a house with books.