Quotes About Knowledge

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 and speculation.

Men explain things to me, still. And no man has ever apologized for explaining, wrongly, things that I know and they don't. Not yet, but according to the actuarial tables, I may have another forty-something years to live, more or less, so it could happen. Though I'm not holding my breath.

Pero los hombres que explican cosas aún asumen que soy, en una obscena metáfora fecundadora, un recipiente vacío que debe ser rellenado con su sabiduría y conocimiento.

We know less when we erroneously think we know than when we recognize that we don't...the language of bold assertion is simpler, less taxing, than the language of nuance and ambiguity and speculation.

Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present, or will decline from it; despair is a confident memory of the future...Optimism is similarly confident about what will happen. Both are grounds for not acting. Hope can be the knowledge that we don't have that memory, and that reality doesn't necessarily match our plans

the Men Who Knew came out of the woodwork.

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.

He was already telling me about the very important book--with that smug look I know so well in a man holding forth, eyes fixed on the fuzzy far horizon of his own authority.

knowledge can numb as well as awaken feeling.

Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don't— and it surprises me, even in myself, how much we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown.

However beautiful the stars of a suddenly visible night sky, few nowadays could find their way by them.

Perhaps it's not that knowledge is power, but that some knowledge has power and some is stripped of the power it deserves. The powerful lack the knowledge; the knowledge lacks the power.

I understand that there is a writer named Jonathan Franzen, but I have not read him.

Science doesn't reduce things, or explain mysteries away; it just discovers stranger and stranger things.

It's only when you've pieced together a story in several different ways that you realise where the holes are, discover the knowledge that is still missing, the questions you still need to ask.

I wish I knew then what I know now - and still had those thighs!

It appeared possible that these other men were good fathers only because they knew too little of the world to grow frenzied against it.

Mamma was aware that there were many people who read what she called trashy books, but it was news to her that there were people who read nothing at all.

Reading a few books can be helpful in pointing the direction - but again, these are all just fingers, fingers pointing to the moon.

What can I say? Librarians rule.

De ontdekking van de toekomst is de ontdekking van het verleden.

Denn Erkenntnis – auch über uns selbst – lässt sich nicht im Gänsemarsch gewinnen. Und eine Gesellschaft, die das Suchen oder Forschen nicht zulässt, ist dem Untergang geweiht.

Unser Wissen vom Leben beschränkt sich auf den Tod.

The terrible thing about the quest for truth is that you find it.