Quotes About Knowledge

Some things can't be explained. They just are. And after a while they disappear, usually forever, or become interesting in another way. Literature's consolations are always temporary, while life is quick to begin again. It is better not even to look so hard, to leave off explaining. Nothing makes me more queasy than to spend time with people who don't know that and who can't forget, and for whom such knowledge isn't a cornerstone of life.

Something draws you... An impatience with your own ignorance.

It is we ourselves who are responsible for knowing the truth

The purpose of computation is insight, not numbers.

What you learn from others you can use to follow. What you learn for yourself you can use to lead.

I need to discuss science vs. engineering. Put glibly: In science if you know what you are doing you should not be doing it. In engineering if you do not know what you are doing you should not be doing it.

Vicarious learning from the experiences of others saves making errors yourself, but I regard the study of successes as being basically more important than the study of failures. There are so many ways of being wrong and so few of being right, studying successes is more efficient.

It is not easy to become an educated person.

The applications of knowledge, especially mathematics, reveal the unity of all knowledge. In a new situation almost anything and everything you ever learned might be applicable, and the artificial divisions seem to vanish.

Almost all professionals are slow to use their own expertise for their own work.

don't believe 2+2=4. I know it. I am certain of

Cognitive sorting continues from the time that students enter college to the time they get a degree

A true cognitive elite requires a technological society.

merely bringing up facts that were well known in the scientific community, but perhaps best not discussed in public. A Papua New Guinea language has a term for this, Mokita. It means 'truth that we all know, but agree not to talk about.

Why would a guy spend five years writing a book when he can buy one for ten bucks?

Everyone's afraid of what they don't understand, Ringil said quietly.

from the discomfort of truth there is only one refuge and that is ignorance. i do not need to be comfortable, and i will not take refuge. i demand to KNOW.

The way I see it, anyone who's proud of their country is either a thug or just hasn't read enough history yet.

Given enough traces of continuity, you could make a leap that enabled you to see the whole as a kind of premonition of real knowledge.

There isn't actually any escape. Once you understand this, you are empowered.

the truth was far more complex, and ultimately far more scary. But who in this universe wants the truth?

who knows how the data behind these metaphors has traveled, from where and for how long.

Half the things we dig up, we have no idea what they are, and we still sell them as fucking coffee-table trinkets. Right now, someone back on Latimer has probably got the encoded secret of a faster-than-light drive mounted on their fucking living room wall." She paused. "And it's probably upside down.

Man can learn nothing except by going from the known to the unknown. CLAUDE BERNARD