Quotes About Knowledge

Man is fed with fables through life, and leaves it in the belief he knows something of what has been passing, when in truth he has known nothing but what has passed under his own eye.

The bulk of mankind are schoolboys through life.

The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.

This institution will be based upon the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.

Honesty is the first chapter of the book wisdom.

The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

There is no reason to believe that we are now on a higher intellectual or spiritual level than during ancient times.

Every man naturally desires knowledge; but what good is knowledge without fear of God? Indeed a humble rustic who serves God is better than a proud intellectual who neglects his soul to study the course of the stars.He who knows himself well becomes mean in his own eyes and is not happy when praised by men.

historians are not often appreciated because their research tends to destroy myths. I

We do NOT know the past in chronological sequence. It may be convenient to lay it out anesthetized on the table with dates pasted on here and there, but what we know we know by ripples and spirals eddying out from us and from our own time.

historians are not often appreciated because their research tends to destroy myths.

Women, Thumps decided years ago, had a need to know what people around them were doing every minute of the day. It wasn't curiosity exactly, and it wasn't control. It was more as though they were keeping track of the world so that if anyone hit them with a pop quiz, they'd have the right answer.

The thinkers and works of the past are studied here not as dated museum pieces or objects of antiquarian curiosity; they are confronted as powerful voices that challenge us to join in searching debates. The point is not to learn about these thinkers and texts, but from them.

Le Verrier left the solar system larger than he found it - one both better and less completely understood.

The enterprise of making sense of the material world turns on a key question: what happens when something observed in nature doesn't fit within the established framework of existing human knowledge?

Science is unique among human ways of knowing because it is self-correcting. Every

You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.

From them I had nothing to learn—one cannot cease to know what one does know.

might just as well ask how you knew how to do the things you did.

Question: How could we know we were keeping certain truths from ourselves regarding how things truly are in this world at its deepest level? Answer: Because we have done it before.

Consciousness makes it seem as if (1) there is something to do; (2) there is somewhere to go; (3) there is something to be; (4) there is someone to know.

You see how I live: shadows and silence, leaving things as I find them because I have no reason to disturb them. But there are things that I have known, even though I never wished to know them and cannot give them a name.

Of course, there's also the basic problem that some people just aren't very bright. And as we'll see, the people who are the most certain about being right tend to be the people with the least reason to have such self-confidence.