Quotes About Knowledge

William snapped, 'Drop it; we're looking for a Greek book!' 'This?' I asked, showing him a work whose pages were covered with abstruse letters. And William said, 'No, that's Arabic, idiot! Bacon was right: the scholar's first duty is to learn languages!' 'But you don't know Arabic, either!' I replied, irked, to which William answered, 'At least I understand when it IS Arabic!

Si Dieu existait, il serait une bibliothèque.

Binele unei c?rÅ£i const? în a fi citit?. O carte este f?cut? din semne, care vorbesc de alte semne, carele, la rândul lor, vorbesc despre lucruri. F?r? un ochi care s? le citeasc?, o carte poart? semne care nu produc concepte, ÅŸi deci mut?.

Qué hermoso era el espectáculo de la naturaleza aún no tocada por el saber, a menudo perverso, del hombre! Vi

We'll pass over that one . . . Anyway, I happen to know from a reliable source that those present at the signing of the contract," and here his voice fell to a whisper, "were Avvocato Riccardi and General Negri di Saint Front." "And who the hell are they?

Les perdants, comme les autodidactes, ont toujours des connaissances plus vastes que les gagnants, pour gagner il faut savoir une seule chose et ne pas perdre son temps à les connaître toutes. Le plaisir de l'érudition est réservé aux perdants.

4 El que trata de penetrar en la Rosaleda de los Filósofos sin la clave es como el hombre que pretenda caminar sin los pies. Michael Maier, Atalanta Fugiens, Oppenheim

Los perdedores y los autodidactas siempre saben mucho más que los ganadores. Si quieres ganar, tienes que concentrarte en un solo objetivo, y más te vale no perder el tiempo en saber más: el placer de la erudición está reservado a los perdedores.»

there was nothing to do but to dig away at the base of this mountain of ignorance and prejudice. You must keep at the poor fellow; you must hold your temper, and argue with him, and watch for your chance to stick an idea or two into his head. And the rest of the time you must sharpen up your weapons- you must think out new replies to his objections and provide yourself with new facts to prove to him the folly of his ways.

You have many advantages over him, but there's one advantage he has over you. He knows a lot more about you than you know about him. Also, he understands your ideas better than you understand his.

telling you things which he not merely knew were not true, but which he knew that you knew were not true. A bitter lesson you had to learn, soon or late, that truth had no meaning to any Communist; the only question that concerned him was the advancement of his cause.

Montesquieu had said that to love reading was to exchange hours of boredom for hours of delight; Laharpe had said that a book is a friend that never deceives.

defect in education for democracy, that the people knew so much about the politicians and so little about the men who made the politicians and paid their fares on the bandwagon.

he had read in an encyclopedia article entitled "Obstetrics." From boyhood he had had the habit of looking up things in that dependable work; but

You mustn't fool yourself with the idea that you could hire experts to attend to things; for how could you know that a man was an expert, unless you knew as much as he did? Some day your foreman might drop dead, or some other fellow would buy him away from you, and then where would you be? Be your own expert, said Dad!

Go forth, my son, and learn with how little wisdom the world is governed!

Actually, we owe a great deal to those British officers and men and scholars who went deep into our literature, to translate the texts which the brahmins didn't want known outside their own coterie.

I had to do the books I did because there were no books about those subjects to give me what I wanted. I had to clear up my world, elucidate it, for myself.

Stephen Jay Gould

Veda means originally knowing or knowledge, and this name is given

trained in arts and versed in law; High-souled

we will not succeed if our actions are based on myths and misinformation.

Obviously, this atomization of knowledge has not made any public decision-making easier.

Honestly, Mum, how can you say someone's a great writer if you've got a stack of reference books next to you? It's just showing off. If I behaved like that in front of other people, you'd totally tell me off when we got home. So.why is it alright for T. S. Eliot to swagger about like a complete know it all and make the rest of us feel stupid?