Quotes About Knowledge

Public memory: what every half-educated member of a culture knows in her sinews, for it seeped into them in ways she can hardly remember.

inexhaustible effort that philosophers devote to a subject that brings no results.

You can find out anything you want about a car now, and especially every bit of information about the price, without relying on the dealers.

Knowledge is a beautiful thing, but there are a few things I wish I didn't know.

Taking books away from a culture is to take away its shared memory. It's like taking away the ability to remember your dreams. Destroying a culture's books is sentencing it to something worse than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never lived.

They formed a human chain, passing the books hand over hand from one person to the next, through the smoky building and out the door. It was as if, in this urgent moment, the people of Los Angeles formed a living library. They created, for that short time, a system to protect and pass along shared knowledge, to save what we know for each other, which is what libraries do every day.

I loved wandering around the bookshelves, scanning the spines until something happened to catch my eye. Those visits were dreamy, frictionless interludes that promised I would leave richer than I arrived. It wasn't like going to a store with my mom, which guaranteed a tug-of-war between what I wanted and what my mother was willing to buy me; in the library I could have anything I wanted.

It wasn't that time stopped in the library. It was as if it were captured here, collected here, and in all libraries—and not only my time, my life, but all human time as well. In the library, time is dammed up—not just stopped but saved. The library is a gathering pool of narratives and of the people who come to find them. It is where we can glimpse immortality; in the library, we can live forever.

The library is a whispering post. You don't need to take a book off a shelf to know there is a voice inside that is waiting to speak to you, and behind that was someone who truly believed that if he or she spoke, someone would listen.

In many towns, the library is the only place you can browse through physical books.

They created, for that short time, a system to protect and pass along shared knowledge, to save what we know for each other, which is what libraries do every day.

It was as if, in this urgent moment, the people of Los Angeles formed a living library. They created, for that short time, a system to protect and pass along shared knowledge, to save what we know for each other, which is what libraries do every day.

It is as if the city has a bloodstream flowing through it, oxygenated by books.

The library is a gathering pool of narratives and of the people who come to find them.

You read and read and read and read," she said, "and then what?

In 1925, a man named Harry Pidgeon completed a solo sailing trip around the world, becoming only the second person ever to do so. He had gotten the building plans for his boat and most of his nautical knowledge from books he had borrowed from the Los Angeles Public Library. His boat, The Islander, was nicknamed The Library Navigator.

The first recorded instance of book burning was in 213 BC, when Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang decided to incinerate any history books that contradicted his version of the past. In addition, he buried more than four hundred scholars alive.

The fire in the library was colorless.

The last and final burning, which erased it from history forever, occurred in AD 640. By that time, the library was awe-inspiring and a little scary. People had begun to believe it was a living thing—an enormous, infinite communal brain containing all the existing knowledge in the entire world, with the potential for the sort of independent intelligence we now fear in supercomputers.

but there is no money to be made by burning libraries. Instead, libraries are usually burned because they contain ideas that someone finds problematic.

German poet Heinrich Heine [warned], 'There where one burns books, one in the end burns men.

There are a lot of surprising things in the library; a lot of things you don't think of when you try to imagine all of what a library might contain.

There are so many things in a library, so many books and so much stuff, that I sometimes wondered if any one single person could possibly know what all of it is. I preferred thinking that no one does - I liked the idea that the library is more expansive and grand than one single mind, and that it requires many people together to form a complete index of its bounty.

People wanted so much from the library. They wanted it to solve things for them. They wanted the library to fix them and teach them how to fix their lives.