Quotes About Knowledge

Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has first experienced their desolations. And nothing is more desolating than a thorough knowledge of the private self.

To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel that discernment is but a hand playing with finely-ordered variety on the chords of emotion — a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. One may have that condition by fits only.

Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge...

A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape and significance of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him.

A proverb is much light condensed in one flash.

Proverbs are the literature of reason.

Proverbs are the lamps to words.

Proverbs bear age and he who should do well may view himself in them as in a looking-glass.

A man's life is often builded on a proverb.

A proverb is an exploding atom of wisdom.

Dost thou not, then, Prometheus, know this proverb, that "Words are the physicians of a mind diseased"?

Quotations will tell the full measure of meaning, if you have enough of them.

I suppose every old scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book which was significant to him, but which he could never find again. Sure he is that he read it there; but no one else ever read it, nor can he find it again, though he buy the book, & ransack every page.

A well-read writer, with good taste, is one who has the command of the wit of other men; he searches where knowledge is to be found; and though he may not himself excel in invention, his ingenuity may compose one of those agreeable books, the deliciæ of literature, that will out-last the fading meteors of his day.

But I can't forbear quoting the Advice of a great Author...

The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other very well.

An aphorism is never exactly true. It is either a half-truth or a truth and a half.

Quoter's curiosity is a disease whose only cure is more reading.

When a thing has been said and well said, have no scruple: take it and copy it.

An aphorism is a single sentence that totally exhausts its subject.

We have not the reverent feeling for the rainbow that a savage has, because we know how it is made. We have lost as much as we gained by prying into that matter.

Book lovers never go to bed alone.

Science is a cemetery of dead ideas, even though live ideas are born out of it. Worms, also, feed upon corpses.

Scientists should always state the opinions upon which their facts are based.