Quotes About Knowledge

Read the dictionary from A to Izzard today. Get a vocabulary. Brush up on your diction. See whether wisdom is just a lot of language.

You see, a secret is not something untold. It's something which can't be told.

Nowhere is it writ that anthropoid apes should understand reality.

Don't worry. You don't know enough to worry. That's God's truth. Who do you think you are that you should worry, for crying out loud? It's a total waste of time. It presupposes such a knowledge of the situation that it is in fact a form of hubris.

What we call imagination is actually the universal library of what's real. You couldn't imagine it if it weren't real somewhere, sometime.

You have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your responsibility, because the only understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your own understanding

Children, in fact, spend more than fourteen thousand hours inside a school building over twelve years of schooling.

Truisms, my young friend, are the useless children of hindsight.

It is my job to know things, the cat said. Cats know lots of things about the world and its creatures, especially people. Cats watch and listen. It is what they do best.

After all, it was like that for all living things—they could never know everything they wished to know. That would never change.

There was that gap between adults and children that reserved to each secrets that were hidden from the other. When you were old enough, you became privy to the secrets that belonged only to adults and lost in turn those that belonged only to children. You did not ever gain all of one or lose all of the other; of each, some you kept and some you never gained.

Those they passed nodded politely or said hello, safe in the knowledge that all was right with the world, oblivious to the truth.

There is no objective scale by which to measure truth when that truth is not written down.

But knowing it and accepting it are two different things.

All those hours spent reading the Druid Histories. Just ancient legends and useless information from times dead and gone, the other Druids had scoffed. Nothing there will help you with the present. Studying the world around you is all that matters. There is nothing to be learned by studying what's over and done with. Except that those who fail to pay attention to the past are doomed to repeat it.

If you don't experience something firsthand, it's a lot harder to accept.

Truisms, my young friend, are the useless children of hindsight. Well

Life is an education, Drisker. It is learned mostly through what you discover on your own and not through what others tell you.

A] great deal of what we believe we do not know firsthand; instead we have faith in the knowledge of specialists.

All I can claim in this respect, alas, is that I think I may know just about enough theology to be able to spot when someone like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens—a couplet I shall henceforth reduce for convenience to the solitary signifier Ditchkins—is talking out of the back of his neck.

Literary works quite often 'know' things that the reader does not know, or does not know yet, or perhaps will never know.

The role of the intellectual, so it is said, is to speak truth to power. Noam Chomsky has dismissed this pious tag on two grounds. For one thing, power knows the truth already; it is just busy trying to conceal it. For another, it is not those in power who need the truth, but those they oppress.

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is 'The Book of British Birds,' and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.

An English Evangelical bishop wrote in 1991 that clear signs of Satanic possession included inappropriate laughter, inexplicable knowledge, a false smile, Scottish ancestry, relatives who have been coal miners, and the habitual choice of black for dress or car colour. None of this makes sense, but then that's how it is with evil. The less sense it makes, the more evil it is.