Quotes About Knowledge

Do empenho vem a sabedoria e a pureza; da preguiça a ignorância e a sensualidade

Quienes no conocen otras fuentes de verdad más puras, quienes no han seguido su curso hasta sus orígenes, están, y con razón, del lado de la Biblia y la Constitución y beben de ellas con reverencia y humildad. Pero aquellos que van más allá y buscan el origen del agua que gotea sobre el lago o la charca, se ciñen los lomos una vez más y siguen su peregrinación en busca del manantial.

Why should our life be in any respect provincial? If we will read newspapers, why not skip the gossip of Boston and take the best newspaper in the world at once?—

Wir haben heute Professoren der Philosophie, aber keine Philosophen.

Cómo podría recordar su ignorancia —según requiere su crecimiento— quien ha de usar tanto su conocimiento?

instant. Confucius said, To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.

It is only when we forget our learning, do we begin to know.

A man's ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful—while his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides being ugly. Which is the best man to deal with—he who knows nothing about a subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows nothing, or he who really knows

Books are the treasured wealth of the world.

No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true to-day may turn out to be falsehood to-morrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields.

Siempre he deplorado no ser tan sabio como lo era el día en que nací

A grain of gold will gild a great surface, but not so much as a grain of wisdom.

There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. T

I think that having learned our letters we should read the best that is in literature, and not be forever repeating our a b abs, and words of one syllable, in the fourth or fifth classes, sitting on the lowest and foremost form all our lives. Most men are satisfied if they read or hear read, and perchance have been convicted by the wisdom of one good book, the Bible, and for the rest of their lives vegetate and dissipate their faculties in what is called easy reading.

The best books are not read even by those who are called good readers.

Confucius said, "To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.

It is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men and women. It is time that villages were universities, and their elder inhabitants the fellows of universities, with leisure — if they are, indeed, so well off — to pursue liberal studies the rest of their lives.

Most people do not read; those who read do not understand; those who understand forget.

People have been taught to believe that human knowledge is a box of tricks, which they have only to open to draw on it for what they want, so to make all well for themselves or their class or for the world.

It is as possible for a man to know something without having been at school, as it is to have been at school and to know nothing. Henry Fielding, Tom Jones

The reader will pardon a digression in which so invaluable a secret is communicated, since every gamester will agree how necessary it is to know exactly the play of another, in order to countermine him.

he commonly gave them a hint that he knew much more than he thought proper to disclose. This last circumstance alone may, indeed, very well account for his character of wisdom; since men are strangely inclined to worship what they do not understand. A grand secret, upon which several imposers on mankind have totally relied for the success of their frauds.

What men do not know about they take for granted. Knowledge furnishes problems, and the discovery of problems itself constitutes an intellectual advance.

As Morris R. Cohen has remarked: "The notion that we can dismiss the views of all previous thinkers surely leaves no basis for the hope that our own work will prove of any value to others."1