Quotes About Knowledge

Actually Wall Street thinks just as the Greeks did. The early Greeks used to sit around for days and debate how many teeth a horse has. They thought they could figure it out by just sitting there, instead of checking the horse. A lot of investors sit around and debate whether a stock is going up, as if the financial muse will give them the answer, instead of checking the company.

In fact, most great investors I know (Warren Buffett, for starters) are technophobes. They don't own what they don't understand, and neither do I.

Organizations learn only through individuals who learn.

The more you learn, the more acutely aware you become of your ignorance

Systems thinking is a conceptual framework, a body of knowledge and tools that has been developed over the past fifty years, to make the full patterns clearer, and to help us see how to change them effectively.

Huntin too hard for the truth ain't a good idea, y'know," he added. "By the time you stumble over it, it ain't the truth no more. Unless there's death in it. I reckon death is about as close to truth as a man can come.

knowing freedom was dangerous.

In this very breath that we now take Lies the secret that all great teachers try to tell us.

Some of what we learned early on turned out to be true (the earth is round; if you want a friend be a friend; cleanliness is next to impossible) and some of it turned out to be false (Santa Claus; the Tooth Fairy; Kansas is more fun than Oz).

Well, it certainly seems that mankind learns nothing from history, so why should individuals learn anything from their own experience?" "I'm no expert, but that sounds like spurious logic to me.

Knowledge is the capacity for effective action.

If you look at four-year-olds, they are constantly asking questions and wondering how things work," Gregersen observed generally. "But by the time they are six and a half years old they stop asking questions because they quickly learn that teachers value the right answers more than provocative questions.

When much is known, procedural planning approaches work perfectly well. When much is unknown, they do not.

Beginning to reason is like stepping onto an escalator that leads upwards and out of sight. Once we take the first step, the distance to be travelled is independent of our will and we cannot know in advance where we will end.

Beginning to reason is like stepping onto an escalator that leads upward and out of sight. Once we take the first step, the distance to be travelled is independent of our will and we cannot know in advance where we shall end.

You're a scholar, and this here is your school. Your lessons are hard—hard—but you gotta learn 'em. Most people don't learn what you bein' taught until they a lot older. Nothing is safe, that's what you been learnin'.

To learn how to read any map is to be indoctrinated into that mapmaker's culture.

Nearly our entire intellectual education originates from the Greeks. A thorough knowledge of their origin is the indisputable prerequisite for freeing ourselves from their overwhelming influence.

Pietro Pompanazzi (1462–c. 1525)

Our century has been dominated intellectually by a coming to terms with science.

This was due to the intervention of a benevolent ruler, King Sejong, who in 1403 issued an extraordinary decree, which sounds enlightened even today and must have been extremely so at the time. 'To govern well,' he said, 'it is necessary to spread knowledge of the laws and the books, so as to satisfy reason and to reform men's evil nature; in this way peace and order may be maintained.

Books have led some to learning and others to madness.

Gold, silver, jewels, purple garments, houses built of marble, groomed estates, pious paintings, caparisoned steeds, and other things of this kind offer a mutable and superficial pleasure; books give delight to the very marrow of one's bones. They speak to us, consult with us, and join with us in a living and intense intimacy.

Shame is the fruit of my vanities, and remorse, and the clearest knowledge of how the world's delight is a brief dream.