Quotes About Knowledge

Que sçais-je? (What do I know?)

We need to interpret interpretations more than to interpret things.

Whoever will be cured of ignorance, let him confess it.

We are all blockheads.

If I am a man of some reading, I am a man of no retentiveness.

Eduquer, c'est allumer un feu

We take other men's knowledge and opinions upon trust; which is an idle and superficial learning. We must make them our own. We are just like a man who, needing fire, went to a neighbor's house to fetch it, and finding a very good one there, sat down to warm himself without remembering to carry any back home. What good does it do us to have our belly full of meat if it is not digested, if it is not transformed into us, if it does not nourish and support us?

Philosophy is a hallow bone with no flesh on it

Platon, Devlet'inde ak?lca ve ruhça zay?f olanlara tart??may? yasak etmiÅŸtir. DoÄŸru dürüst ad?m at?p yürümesini bilmeyen bir insanla gerçeÄŸi aramaya ç?kman?n anlam? var m??

There is nothing so beautiful and legitimate as to play the man well and properly, no knowledge so hard to acquire as the knowledge of how to live this life well and naturally; and the most barbarous of our maladies is to despise our being.

I, who make no other profession, find in myself such infinite depth and variety, that what I have learned bears no other fruit than to make me realize how much I still have to learn. To my weakness, so often perceived, I owe my inclination to coolness in my opinions and any hatred for that aggressiveness and quarrelsome arrogance that believes and trusts wholly in itself, a mortal enemy of discipline and truth.

Better to be tentative than to be recklessly sure- to be an apprentice at sixty, than to present oneself as a doctor at ten.

How do you strike fire without flint?" Connla wanted to know.  "The sun has no flints," Blathine replied. "Yet each day it brings fire to warm the earth."  Shaking his head ruefully, Connla said, "I see I will get no simple answers from you."  "There are no simple answers!" she chortled. "How quickly you are learning!

Books are absent teachers.

The path of true learning is strewn with rocks, not roses.

Finally, do not try to understand every word or page of a difficult book the first time through. This is the most important rule of all; it is the essence of inspectional reading. Do not be afraid to be, or to seem to be, superficial. Race through even the hardest book. You will then be prepared to read it well the second time.

Even when you have been somewhat enlightened by what you have read, you are called upon to continue the serach for significance.

All books will become light in proportion as you find light in them.

You must tackle books that are beyond you, or, as we have said, books that are over your head. Only books of that sort will make you stretch your mind. And unless you stretch, you will not learn.

To use a good book as a sedative is conspicuous waste.

We do not have to know everything about something in order to understand it; too many facts are often as much of an obstacle to understanding as too few. There is a sense in which we moderns are inundated with facts to the detriment of understanding.

When we speak of someone as "well-read," we should have this ideal in mind. Too often, we use that phrase to mean the quantity rather than the quality of reading. A person who has read widely but not well deserves to be pitied rather than praised. As Thomas Hobbes said, "If I read as many books as most men do, I would be as dull-witted as they are.

We must also realize-students, teachers, and laymen alike-that even when we have accomplished the task that lies before us, we will not have accomplished the whole task. We must be more than a nation of functional literates. We must become a nation of truly competent readers, recognizing all that the word competent implies. Nothing less wil satisfy the needs of the world that is coming.

Getting more information is learning, and so is coming to understand what you did not understand before. But there is an important difference between these two kinds of learning.