Quotes About Knowledge

Why were cabdrivers so insistent on educating their passengers?

All babies had that same wise look, as if they'd just come from another realm where they'd learned some beautiful truth they couldn't share.

People thought that tragedy made you wise, that it automatically elevated you to a higher, more spiritual level, but it seemed to Rachel that just the opposite was true. Tragedy made you petty and spiteful. It didn't give you any great knowledge or insight. She didn't understand a damned thing about life except that it was arbitrary and cruel,

This coupling of erudite (scholarly) knowledges and embodied (popular) knowledge is what Foucault refers to as genealogy.

Anyone who acquires more than the usual amount of knowledge concerning a subject is bound to leave it as his contribution to the knowledge of the world.

One's happiness depends less on what he knows than on what he feels.

Libraries: The medicine chest of the soul.

Most historians agree that the decline of the Great Library of Alexandria was due to what endangers libraries of the present day--general indifference and bureaucratic neglect.

library catalogs are a tangible example of humanity's effort to establish and preserve the possibility of order.

He who understands the wise is wise already.

To grow wiser means to learn to know better and better the faults to which this instrument with which we feel and judge can be subject.

Useful knowledge, practical kindness, and beneficent laws -- these are not the Gospel; but, like philosophy, they are, or may be, its handmaids. They may make its task smooth and grateful; they may associate themselves with its victories, or they may prepare its way.

As all true virtue, wherever found, is a ray of the life of the All-Holy; so all solid knowledge, all really accurate thought, descends from the Eternal Reason, and ought, when we apprehend it, to guide us upwards to Him.

Truth has her sterner responsibilities sooner or later in store for those who have known anything about her.

We may rightly shrink from saying that any given individual is certainly so unfaithful to light and grace as to incur the eternal loss of God, we do know that many are so. God knows who they are.

It is some disaster for any mind to hold any one thing for truth that is untrue, however insignificant it be, or however honestly it be held. It is a greater disaster when the false prejudice bars the way to some truth behind it, which, but for it, would find an entrance to the soul; and the greatness of the disaster will in this case be measured by the importance of the excluded truth.

When the fields of human knowledge are so various and so vast as is the case in our day, the utmost that can be done by single minds not of encyclopedic range, is to master one subject or branch of subject as thoroughly as possible, and to rest content with knowing that others are working in regions where neither time nor strength will permit us to enter.

Always and Everywhere a Book Is Waiting for Me

My writings are an exploration, and I think a lot of writers would tell you this, but in writing, you're not simply putting down things that are already known to you. You're actually discovering in the writing process, you're actually creating knowledge.

As human beings, don't we need questions without answers as well as questions with answers, questions that we might someday answer and questions that we can never answer?

A library card is the start of a lifelong adventure.

Someday, Dante, I will discover how your mind works

I just . . . knew, the way you know how to breathe or to pull your hand back from a hot stove.

The girl's body dropped into the rhythm of a canter —and what girl doesn't love a horse, doesn't already know how to ride? The knowledge lurks in them, breath and bone, part of an ancient copact between big grazing beasts and the women who patiently tamed them, knowing brutality might work for a short while but true partnership can never be forced.