Quotes About Knowledge

In the present state of our knowledge, it would be useless to attempt to speculate on the remote cause of the electrical energy... its relation to chemical affinity is, however, sufficiently evident. May it not be identical with it, and an essential property of matter?

Exclusively oral cultures are unencumbered by dead knowledge, dead facts. Libraries, on the other hand, are full of them.

The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.

You can't understand anything unless you unless you understand everything.

Most of the book deals with things we already know yet never learn.

Lincoln Steffens has a fable of a man who climbed to the top of a mountain and, standing on tiptoe, seized hold of the Truth. Satan, suspecting mischief from this upstart, had directed one of his underlings to tail him; but when the demon reported with alarm the man's success—that he had seized hold of the Truth—Satan was unperturbed. "Don't worry," he yawned. "I'll tempt him to institutionalize it." That

It is necessary for us to learn from others' mistakes. You will not live long enough to make them all yourself.

Uneducated citizens are potentially as dangerous to the proper functioning of our democratic institutions as are uneducated workers when they handle complicated machinery.

Through concentrating on a specialty too early in life, a man becomes a kind of useful machine, but not a harmoniously developed personality. It is essential that the student acquire an understanding for, and a lively feeling for values. Otherwise, with his specialized knowledge, he more closely resembles a well-trained

Be ever questioning. Ignorance is not bliss. It is oblivion. You don't go to heaven if you die dumb. Become better informed. Lean from others' mistakes. You could not live long enough to make them all yourself.

Life is an unfoldment, and the further we travel the more truth we can comprehend. To understand the things that are at our door is the best preparation for understanding those that lie beyond.

The Nephite prophets stressed that charity is not a man-made quality in those who possess it, but an endowment of the Holy Spirit, bestowed in some measure upon those who are born into the kingdom of God and thereafter increased in man by the influence of the Holy Ghost, as he grows in grace and in the knowledge of God.

When you cross that chasm so that what you believe to be true merges into what is actually true, you have earned the right to inner peace.

The superior man acquaints himself with many sayings of antiquity and many deeds of the past, in order to strengthen his character thereby.

It's a library, only the stupid or the evil are afraid of those

In my small way, I preserved and catalogued, and dipped into the vast ocean of learning that awaited, knowing all the time that the life of one man was insufficient for even the smallest part of the wonders that lay within. It is cruel that we are granted the desire to know, but denied the time to do so properly. We all die frustrated; it is the greatest lesson we have to learn.

I have a theory that too much learning unbalances the mind.

Political scientists don't work at bankswhich is a problem. As political issues become more important for the markets, analysts at banks are asked all sorts of questions they don't have the ability to answer. And if you're getting paid to answer questionsas analysts at banks areyou never want to be in the position of saying you don't know.

Learning is a journal not a destination

I am skeptical about the idea that we can learn much from history, at least in the sense that knowledge of past follies will prevent us from making similar blunders in the future... And yet it is important to know what happened before, and to try and make sense of it. For if we don't, we cannot understand our own times.

People lie. People disagree. People make mistakes. To find out the truth, you have to know how to search for it.

The availability of books is not the same as reading them, nor reading the same as understanding them.

Reading never wears me out.

The main thing wrong with religion is that people have gotten it wrong. The goal is to understand religion as it should be understood, as traditions, myths, symbols, and practices intended to lead one to a deeper, more profound experience of human life. The desire for this knowledge is hard wired in us. That won't disappear. Unless of course we wipe each other out in the next holy war, in which case we've successfully screwed ourselves.