Quotes About Knowledge

Study the past if you would define the future. —Confucius O

Whether or not it's moral to let language extinction occur, it is the case that languages are irreplaceable records of the development of human societies and alternate windows into the human mind. When a language dies, we lose the knowledge that was encoded in it. Though we assume that when knowledge is lost, it has been superseded by a superior version, a dead language, with all its unique ways of carving up the world, is as irreplaceable as the dodo or the Tyrannosaurus rex.

A child's ability to learn many words is so completely different from anything observed in other species that many researchers propose that some neural mechanism must be especially dedicated to this acquisition of linguistic knowledge.

There is something splendid about innocence; but what is bad about it, in turn, is that it cannot protect itself very well and is easily seduced. Because of this, even wisdom - which otherwise consists more in conduct than in knowledge - still needs science, not in order to learn from it but in order to provide access and durability for its precepts.

But … even if I did – which I didn't – how could I have found them myself, found them old and faded? If I only wrote them down myself – later? How can Sebastian have found them a hundred years ago – if I hadn't even written them yet? And where did the information come from?

there is but a single reality out there, and science is getting increasingly better at describing it.

Ignorance is a right! Education is eroding one of the few democratic freedoms remaining to us.

Zal wasn't sure whether it would help an uninformed

The intercourse between the Mediterranean and the North or between the Atlantic and Central Europe was never purely economic or political it also meant the exchange of knowledge and ideas and the influence of social institutions and artistic and literary forms.

The man who is fond of books is usually a man of lofty thought, and of elevated opinions.

Even those who were ignorant of the word of God were not entirely deprived of divine light,

Do you enjoy reading?' 'I enjoyed Fifty Shades of Grey.' Bryant quailed at the thought. 'That's not really reading, is it? More like staring at an assortment of words.' 'It is very popular.' 'So is taking photographs of your dinner for Facebook, but that doesn't mean it adds to the total sum of human knowledge.

She has never learnt to yawn And so she hasn't the smallest comprehension Of those who can.

Let me share what I've learned about Thai politics. Keep a distance from those doing a victory dance in the end zone unless you understand their game, how it's scored and how many players each side has. If you can't figure out the rules of the game, you won't know when the game has started and when it's over. Don't put a bet on a game you don't understand.

A great city is not something that should be judged by our elders... We should learn from our mistakes, not look back on them, we should use the knowledge that we have to move forward....

imagine anybody having lived forty-five or fifty years without knowing Hamlet! One might as well spend one's life in a coal mine.

They who would isolate themselves from the world and its duties must cease to know and to care, as well as to act, and be content to let things take their course. This in effect they cannot do; this they never do; and the only result is a struggle in which they neither live nor die — neither live as they wish, in the past, nor do their duty in the working world.

In a political system where nearly every adult may vote but where knowledge, wealth, social position, access to officials, and other resources are unequally distributed, who actually governs? —ROBERT A. DAHL, Who Governs?

Mein eigentliches Werk besteht, allen Ernstes, nicht aus Prosa oder Vers: sondern in der Erkenntnis meiner Dummheit.

La plus grande chute est celle qu'on fait du haut de l'innocence.

Optimismus ist nur ein Mangel an Information.

Magic is a faculty of wonderful virtue, full of most high mysteries, containing the most profound contemplation of most secret things, together with the nature, power, quality, substance and virtues thereof, as also the knowledge of whole Nature, and it doth instruct us concerning the differing and agreement of things amongst themselves, whence it produceth its wonderful effects, by uniting the virtues of things through the application of them one to the other.

Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.

There are more fools in the world than there are people.