Quotes About Knowledge

Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?

The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.

Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors.

I don't want to believe. I want to know.

And how should a beautiful, ignorant stream of water know it heads for an early release — out across the desert, running toward the Gulf, below sea level, to murmur its lullaby, and see the Imperial Valley rise out of burning sand with cotton blossoms, wheat, watermelons, roses, how should it know?

The library is the temple of learning, and learning has liberated more people than all the wars in the history.

The library is the temple of learning and learning has liberated more people than all the wars in history.

Knowledge in war is very simple, being concerned with so few subjects, and only with their final results at that. But this does not make its application easy.

My thoughts kept going back to what I had seen. I couldn't comprehend where all that hate came from, the desire to harm him. He was totally defenceless. But maybe that's exactly what attracted them. The knowledge that there wouldn't be any consequences. It was like he didn't exist, a creature like him . . . a merman . . . couldn't exist.

Ma non sa lei che cosa è il "De Officiis"?» chiese improvvisamente a Gigi, e come in un tono di rimprovero. Gigi, ora, tagliuzzava una gomma con la punta del temperino: levò il viso, atteggiandolo a profondo interesse. «Ma è la grande Etica della latinità!» proclamò Frugoni entusiasta, con voce piena, potente.

La sua anima-bestia, di ibrido, non era che un vuoto crocicchio, dove le strade del dolore e della conoscenza si intersecavano senza tensione vitale, lontanando nel tempo, verso deserti di stupidità.

Il mondo è un bel libro, ma poco serve a chi non lo sa leggere.

The world is a beautiful book, but of little use to him who cannot read it.

Here, on the edge of what we know, in contact with the ocean of the unknown, shines the mystery and beauty of the world. And it's breathtaking.

There are frontiers where we are learning, and our desire for knowledge burns. They are in the most minute reaches of the fabric of space, at the origins of the cosmos, in the nature of time, in the phenomenon of black holes, and in the workings of our own thought processes. Here, on the edge of what we know, in contact with the ocean of the unknown, shines the mystery and the beauty of the world. And it's breathtaking.

The ability to understand something before it's observed is at the heart of scientific thinking.

Human beings often cling to their certainties for fear that their opinions will be proven false. But a certainty that cannot be called into question is not a certainty. Solid certainties are those that survive questioning. In order to accept questioning as the foundation for our voyage toward knowledge, we must be humble enough to accept that today's truth may become tomorrow's falsehood.

Science is a continual exploration of ways of thinking. Its strength is its visionary capacity to demolish preconceived ideas, to reveal new regions of reality, and to construct new and more effective images of the world. This adventure rests upon the entirety of past knowledge, but at its heart is change.

The incompleteness and the uncertainty of our knowledge, our precariousness, suspended over the abyss of the immensity of what we don't know, does not render life meaningless: it makes it interesting and precious.

The most credible answers are the ones given by science, because science IS the search for the most credible answers available, not for answers pretending to certainty.

Science is born from this act of humility: not trusting blindly in our past knowledge and our intuition. Not believing what everyone says. Not having faith in the accumulated knowledge of our fathers and grandfathers. We learn nothing if we think that we already know the essentials, if we assume that they were written in a book or known by the elders of the tribe. The centuries in which people had faith in what they believed were the centuries in which little new was learned.

Science is about reading the world from a gradually widening point of view.

Those who criticize the usefulness of philosophy for science, Aristotle has noticed, are not doing science: they are doing philosophy.

A university student attending lectures on general relativity i the morning and others on quantum mechanics in the afternoon might be forgiven for thinking that his professors are fools, or have neglected to communicate with each other for at least a century.