Quotes About Knowledge

What all of us know put together don't mean anything. Nothing don't mean anything. We are here for a spell and pass on. Anyone who thinks that civilization has advanced is an egotist.

We are made little wiser, tho much more vain and conceited in the Universitys... The University is the most fertile Nursery of Prejudices, whereof the greatest is, that we think there to learn every thing, when in reality we are taught nothing; only talk by Rote with mighty assurance the precarious Notions of our Systems, which if deny'd by another, we have not a word further to say out of our common Road, nor any Arguments left, to satisfy the Opposer or our selves."

If you have a college degree you can be absolutely sure of one thing — you have a college degree.

It seems a pity that Psychology should have destroyed all our knowledge of human nature. It is a natural enough catastrophe; for the very act of changing it from a matter of common sense to a matter of scientific enquiry, labelled and separated as a science, involves a change which nobody has adequately noted.

Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton asked why.

Good decisions come from experience, and experience comes from bad decisions.

I prefer books that don't need batteries.

Despise school and remain a fool.

Nothing is as stupid as an educated man if you get him off the thing he was educated on.

There is no such thing as complete education, and I hope we have heard the last of the girl who is going to Boston to complete her education.

We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it — and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again — and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one any more.

Experience makes more timid men than it duz wise ones.

The trouble with using experience as a guide is that the final exam often comes first and then the lesson.

Experience is what you got by not having it when you need it.

There's only one thing more painful than learning from experience, and that is not learning from experience.

[T]he person that had took a bull by the tail once had learnt sixty or seventy times as much as a person that hadn't, and said a person that started in to carry a cat home by the tail was gitting knowledge that was always going to be useful to him, and warn't ever going to grow dim or doubtful.

To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom, in the pursuit of truth as in the endeavor after a worthy manner of life.

Word by word the big books are made.

Confucius perspired out more knowledge than the U.S. Senate has vocalized out in the last 50 years.

If truth is beauty, how come no one has their hair done in a library?

They're not gray hairs — they're wisdom highlights.

It is better to have your nose in a book than in someone else's business.

What we have done for ourselves alone, dies with us; what we have done for others and the world, remains and is immortal. No man, however lofty and however humble, can isolate himself from his kind, and, shutting himself up in the dark cell of his exclusiveness, determine to live for himself alone. No man, however obscure, can truly say that he is so unknown, and so unimportant, that he can contribute nothing to enlighten and benefit Humanity... Let us grow in Love as well as in Knowledge...

Whether the succeeding generation is to be more virtuous than their predecessors I cannot say; but I am sure they will have more worldly wisdom, and enough, I hope, to know that honesty is the 1st chapter in the book of wisdom.