Quotes About Knowledge

Causes are objects of knowledge, and child abuse could be the cause of an illness only if it was something like what is called a natural kind, a kind of event found in nature and hooked up to other events by laws of nature.

And the conviction stands that there must be knowledge to be had, if only we could get it. Perhaps that is what is wrong: an assumption about the possibility of knowledge and the kind of knowledge that it must be.

Only through history can we learn for the future.

In a tiny number of places I have added a personal recollection in a footnote. But I have kept them out of the text. Personal anecdote and historical evaluation are in my view best kept apart. Leaving aside the frailties of memory, most of what passes by on a daily basis has only ephemeral resonance. Assessment of the significance of major occurrences nearly always requires not just detailed knowledge but the passage of time in which to digest it.

There are too many books in the world.

Any AI smart enough to pass a Turing test is smart enough to know to fail it.

No one knows anything, really. It's all rented, or borrowed.

Strangulation. It was a fearful way to go, wrestling, kicking your way towards oblivion, panic, the fretful sucking for air, and the killer behind you most likely, so that you faced the fear of something totally anonymous, a death without knowledge of who or why. Rebus had been taught methods of killing in the SAS. He knew what it felt like to have the garotte tighten on your neck, trusting to the opponent's prevailing sanity. A fearful way to go.

Strip the veneer, and the world had moved only a couple of steps from the cave.

information was like a stone skimming across the surface of his brain, soon sinking, never to be retrieved.

If our brains were simple enough for us to understand them, we'd be so simple that we couldn't.

There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary numerals, and those who don't.

En realidad, una de las grandes fortalezas de la ciencia es la habilidad para inferir cosas que no podemos observar directamente a partir de las que sí podemos.

And we can't take absence of evidence as evidence of absence.

so long since my last stint in college, but my aptitude for academics came back to me quickly.

People today are in danger of drowning in information; but, because they have been taught that information is useful, they are more willing to drown than they need be. If they could handle information, they would not have to drown at all.

A real secret is something which only one person knows.

Inner Knowledge -- You want to become wise in one lesson: First become a real human being.

The more you look at 'common knowledge', the more you realise that it is more likely to be common than it is to be knowledge. No real knowledge is common.

They say: 'Seek wisdom while you have the strength, or you may lose the strength without gaining wisdom.

Knowledge is not gained, it is there all the time. It is the "veils" which have to be dissolved in the mind.

Wisdom is when you understand what, previously, at best you only knew.

Teaching: One hour's teaching is better than a whole night of prayer. Saying of the Prophet

Because there is a word for perfection, people will always imagine that they know it.