Quotes About Knowledge

the ray of light has to know where it will ultimately end up before it can choose the direction to begin moving in.

What if the experience of knowing the future changed a person? What if it evoked a sense of urgency, a sense of obligation to act precisely as she knew she would?

since I already know it would work, and it wouldn't illuminate any new gestalts.

Aquéllos que han leído el Libro del tiempo nunca lo admiten

if you want to create the common sense that comes from twenty years of being in the world, you need to devote twenty years to the task. You can't assemble an equivalent collection of heuristics in less time; experience is algorithmically incompressible.

Science is not just the search for the truth," he said. "It's the search for purpose." And I had no response. I had always assumed those were one and the same, but what if they aren't? I don't know what to think now. It frightens me to imagine that you have never been listening at all.

Albert Einstein once said, "Insofar as the propositions of mathematics give an account of reality they are not certain; and insofar as they are certain they do not describe reality.

Blinding, joyous, fearful symmetry surrounds me. So much is incorporated within patterns now that the entire universe verges on resolving itself into a picture. I'm closing in on the ultimate gestalt: the context in which all knowledge fits and is illuminated, a mandala, the music of the spheres, kosmos.

Science is not just the search for the truth," he said. "It's the search for purpose." And I had no response.

experience isn't merely the best teacher; it's the only teacher. If she's learned anything raising Jax, it's that there are no shortcuts; if you want to create the common sense that comes from twenty years of being in the world, you need to devote twenty years to the task. You can't assemble an equivalent collection of heuristics in less time; experience is algorithmically incompressible.

For the heptapods, all language was performative. Instead of using language to inform, they used language to actualize. Sure, heptapods already knew what would be said in any conversation; but in order for their knowledge to be true, the conversation would have to take place.

There are no shortcuts. If you want to create the common sense that comes from twenty years of being in the world, you need to devote twenty years to the task... experience is algorithmically incompressible.

Do you now understand why I say the future and the past are the same? We cannot change either, but we can know both more fully.

Some find irony in the fact that a study of our brains revealed to us not the secrets of the past but what ultimately awaits us in the future.

He means the Word: the sentence that, when uttered, would destroy the mind of the listener.

But what happened, it was almost as if I were a theologian proving that there was no God. Not just fearing it, but knowing it for a fact. [...] It's a feeling I can't convey to you. It was something that I believed deeply, implicitly, and it's not true, and I'm the one who demonstrated it.

I hope that you were motivated by a desire for knowledge, a yearning to see what can arise from a universe's exhalation. Because even if a universe's life span is calculable, the variety of life that is generated within it is not. The buildings we have erected, the art and music and verse we have composed, the very lives we've led: none of them could have been predicted, because none of them was inevitable.

If mathematical thinking is defective, where are we to find truth and certitude?

And these were conducive to a teleological interpretation of events: by viewing events over a period of time, one recognized that there was a requirement that had to be satisfied, a goal of minimizing or maximizing. And one had to know the initial and final states to meet that goal; one needed knowledge of the effects before the causes could be initiated.

But for me, science is the true modern cathedral, an edifice of knowledge every bit as majestic as anything made of stone.

It has long been said that air (which others call argon) is the source of life. This is not in fact the case, and I engrave these words to describe how I came to understand the true source of life and, as a corollary, the means by which life will one day end.

Das Vorhandensein des freien Willens bedeutet also, dass wir die Zukunft nicht kennen können. Und dass es einen freien Willen gibt, wissen wir, weil wir ihn unmittelbar erleben. Willensentscheidungen sind ein wesentlicher Bestandteil unseres Bewusstseins. Stimmt das wirklich? Was wäre, wenn dieses Wissen ein dringliches Verlangen zur Folge hätte, ein Gefühl der Verpflichtung, genau so zu handeln, wie die Person wusste, dass sie handeln würde?

The problem with any philosophical consideration is that once you open a door in your mind, you can never close it. Once you learn something, you can never convince your mind that you didn't learn it. If you learn the world is round, you can never fit in with a world that thinks it's flat.

As one of Descartes's disciples, Nicolas de Malebranche, wrote: [I]n animals, there is neither intelligence nor souls as ordinarily meant. They eat without pleasure, cry without pain, grow without knowing it; they desire nothing, fear nothing, know nothing: and if they act in a manner that demonstrates intelligence,