Quotes About Knowledge

One may almost doubt if the wisest man has learned anything of absolute value by living.

I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience.

My desire for knowledge is intermittent, but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. The highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence.

Live free, child of the mist—and with respect to knowledge we are all children of the mist.

What we call knowledge is often our positive ignorance; ignorance our negative knowledge.

Throw one arch at least over the darker gulf of ignorance which surrounds us.

It is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men and women.

He has no time to be anything but a machine. How can he remember well his ignorance—which his growth requires—who has so often to use his knowledge? We should feed and clothe him gratuitously sometimes, and recruit him with our cordials, before we judge of him. The

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.

This man is still a fisher, and belongs to an era in which I myself have lived. Perchance he is not confounded by many knowledges, and has not sought out many inventions, but how to take many fishes before the sun sets, with slender birchen pole and flaxen line, that is invention enough for him.

If it is necessary, omit one bridge over the river, go round a little there, and throw one arch at least over the darker gulf of ignorance which surrounds us.

To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise...

One who has just come from reading perhaps one of the best English books will find how many with whom he can converse about it? Or suppose he comes from reading a Greek or Latin classic in the original, whose praises are familiar even to the so-called illiterate; he will find nobody at all to speak to, but must keep silence about it.

Books which are books are all that you want, and there are but half a dozen in any thousand.

Who shall distinguish between the law by which a brook finds its river, the instinct by which a bird performs its migrations, and the knowledge by which a man steers his ship round the globe? The globe is the richer for the variety of its inhabitants.

What we will call beautiful Knowledge, a knowledge useful in a higher sense: for what is most of our boated so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance?

Der Mensch behauptet, viel zu wissen; Doch seht nur, wie sie überschießen, Die Künste und die Wissenschaften, Die tausend Errungenschaften; Der Wind, der weht, Ist alles, was er versteht.

We shall see but little if we require to understand what we see. How few things can a man measure with the tape of his understanding! How many greater things might he be seeing in the meanwhile!

Most men have learned to read to serve a paltry convenience, as they have learned to cipher in order to keep accounts and not be cheated in trade; but of reading as a noble intellectual exercise they know little or nothing.

A man, any man, will go considerably out of his way to pick up a silver dollar; but here are golden words, which the wisest men of antiquity have uttered, and whose worth the wise of every succeeding age have assured us of...

Když do sebe se zhloubi zahledíÅ¡, bezpo?et krajin uvidíÅ¡ – le? neobjevených. Nu, projdi je a sta? se znalcem vlastní kosmografie!

Those things for which the most money is demanded are never the things which the student most wants. Tuition, for instance, is an important item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable education which he gets by associating with the most cultivated of his contemporaries no charge is made. The

books are the society we keep... Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.

We should seek to be fellow students with the pupil, and should learn of, as well as with him, if we would be most helpful to him.