Quotes About Knowledge

Bill Dickey is learning me his experience.

A library is not to be read completely, but to be consulted. Here there are books which are around just in case. I have read all my life, but there are many things about which I know nothing. What's important is not to have everything in one's head but to know where to find it. The difference between someone who's vain and someone who's wise is that the vain man only appreciates what he already knows, and the wise man searches for what he doesn't yet know.

To Laver, Crowley insisted upon magic as "something we do to ourselves," a rational use of one's mental capacities: "It is more convenient to assume the objective existence of an Angel who gives us new knowledge than to allege that our invocation has awakened a supernatural power in ourselves.

People are torn between the pathetic safety of not knowing, and the desire to know.

No man had ever heard a nightingale, When once a keen-eyed naturalist was stirred To study and define -- what is a bird.

In itself, the practice of deception is not particularly exacting; it is a matter of experience, of professional expertise, it is a facility most of us can acquire.

No matter how intelligent a man is, he can't see what he doesn't know how to see.

Well, we think that time "passes," flows past us, but what if it is we who move forward, from past to future, always discovering the new? It would be a little like reading a book, you see. The book is all there, all at once, between its covers. But if you want to read the story and understand it, you must begin with the first page, and go forward, always in order. So the universe would be a very great book, and we would be very small readers.

Belief is the wound that knowledge heals.

If I had to pick a hero, it would be Charles Darwin--the size of his mind, which included all that scientific curiosity and knowledge seeking, and the ability to put it all together. There is a genuine spirituality about Darwin's thinking.

To claim power over what you do not understand is not wise, nor is the end of it likely to be good.

A realist is a man who knows both the world and his own dreams.

Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren't real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.

You know, many a man realizes late in life that if when he was a boy he had known what he knows now, instead of being what he is he might be what he won't; but how few boys stop to think that if they knew what they don't know instead of being what they will be, they wouldn't be?

It is one of the commonest of mistakes to consider that the limit of our power of perception is also the limit of all there is to perceive.

In England, coffeehouses were dubbed penny-universities, because for the admission price of one cent, a person could sit and be edified all day long by scholars, merchants, travelers, community leaders, gossips, and poets.

The ignorance we're ignorant of is the ignorance most difficult to remedy.

The ability to know one's limitations, to recognize the bounds of one's own comprehension—this is a kind of knowing that approaches wisdom.

A self without a shelf remains cryptic; a home without books naked.

RE: Kindle, iPad, et cetera: For a researcher, these new ways of accessing information are just extraordinary. I thing it introduces the possibility of a new standard of cognitive exactness and precision. ~ Rebecca Goldstein, author of Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal and Quantum Physics.

Someone started taking notes, Steve said, 'You don't need to takes notes. If it's important, you'll remember it'.

Before I continue with the scholarly account of tribalography, I want to tell you a Choctaw story. My tribe's language has a mysterious prefix that, when combined with other words, represents a form of creation. It is nuk or nok, and it has to do with the power of speech, breath, and mind. Things with nok or nuk attached to them are so powerful they create. For instance, nukfokechi brings forth knowledge and inspiration. A teacher is a nukfoki, the beginning of action.

Intelligence is power; it is the flame behind the spark of intrigue. Find out all the facts and stamp out the fire. Demystify.

We are dealing with the best-educated generation in history. They are a hundred times better educated than their grandparents, and ten times more sophisticated. There has never been such an open-minded group. The problem is that no one is giving them anything fresh. They've got a brain dressed up with nowhere to go.