Quotes About Knowledge

A man who has learnt little grows old like an ox: his flesh grows, but his knowledge does not grow.

The fool who knows his foolishness is wise so far, at least; but a fool who thinks himself wise, he is called a fool indeed.

Books educate people and educated people ask awkward questions of those who govern them. The educated, in short, are considered ungovernable. Better to keep people ignorant of the past and to concentrate their minds on the utopia that lies ahead.

The lips of the wise are as the doors of a cabinet; no sooner are they opened, but treasures are poured out before thee. Like unto trees of gold arranged in beds of silver, are wise sentences uttered in due season.

A man eminent in learning has not even a little virtue if he fears to practise it. What precious things can be shown to a blind man when he holds a lamp in his hand?

Amongst all possessions knowledge appears pre-eminent. The wise call it supreme riches, because it can never be lost, has no price, and can at no time be destroyed.

The interval is immense between corporeal qualifications and sciences: the body in a moment is extinct, but knowledge endureth to the end of time.

You can keep your secrete hidden from people but you can't hide the sun with your thump.

He alone is poor who does not possess knowledge.

He that is ambitious of fame destroys it. He that increaseth not his knowledge diminishes it. He that uses the crown of learning as an instrument of gain will pass away.

He who has more learning than goodness is like a tree with many branches and few roots, which the first wind throws down; whilst he whose works are greater than his knowledge is like a tree with many roots and fewer branches, which all the winds of heaven cannot uproot.

If we value the pursuit of knowledge, we must be free to follow wherever that search may lead us. The free mind is no barking dog to be tethered on a one-foot chain.

The only philosophy that can be practiced responsibly in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, that reveal its fissures and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will one day appear in the Messianic light.

Today the order of life allows no room for the ego to draw spiritual or intellectual conclusions. The thought which leads to knowledge is neutralized and used as a mere qualification on specific labor markets and to heighten to commodity value of the personality.

In the general tendency toward specialization, philosophy too has established itself as a specialized discipline, one purified of all specific content. In so doing, philosophy has denied its own constitutive concept: the intellectual freedom that does not obey the dictates of specialized knowledge.

Knowledge, which is power, knows no limits, either in its enslavement of creation or in its deference to worldly masters.

Philosophy ... must not bargain away anything of the emphatic concept of truth.

A thinking that approaches it objects openly, rigorously ... is also free toward its objects in the sense that it refuses to have rules prescribed to it by organized knowledge. It ... rends the veil with which society conceals them, and perceives them anew.

The utopia of knowledge would be to open up the non-conceptual with concepts, without making it their equal.

If in keeping with Hegel's insight all feeling related to an aesthetic object has an accidental aspect, usually that of psychological projection, then what the work demands from its beholder is knowledge, and indeed, knowledge that does justice to it: The work wants its truth and untruth to be grasped.

The un-naïve thinker knows how far he remains from the object of his thinking, and yet he must always talk as if he had it entirely. This brings him to the point of clowning. He must not deny his clownish traits, least of all since they alone can give him hope for what is denied him.

Il faut abandonner l'illusion qu'elle [la philosophie] pourrait retenir l'essence dans la finitude de ses déterminations.

A ciência ela própria não tem consciência de si, ela é um instrumento, enquanto o esclarecimento é a filosofia que identifica a verdade ao sistema científico.

The detached observer is as much entangled as the active participant; the only advantage of the former is insight into his entanglement, and the infinitesimal freedom that lies in knowledge as such.