Quotes About Knowledge

Socrates. The wise are doubtful, and I should not be singular if, like them, I also doubted.

The Wisdom of W.E.B. Du Bois

Perhaps the most extraordinary characteristic of current America is the attempt to reduce life to buying and selling. Life is not love unless love is sex and bought and sold. Life is not knowledge save knowledge of technique, of science for destruction. Life is not beauty except beauty for sale. Life is not art unless its price is high and it is sold for profit. All life is production for profit, and for what is profit but for buying and selling again?

Either America will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States.

There is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know.

I am sure it is everyone's experience, as it has been mine, that any discovery we make about ourselves or the meaning of life is never, like a scientific discovery, a coming upon something entirely new and unsuspected; it is rather, the coming to conscious recognition of something, which we really knew all the time but, because we were unwilling to formulate it correctly, we did not hitherto know we knew.

A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep.

Time will say nothing but I told you so, Time only knows the price we have to pay; If I could tell you I would let you know.

For the others, like me, there is only the flash Of negative knowledge, the night when, drunk, one Staggers to the bathroom and stares in the glass To meet one's madness

For a desert island, one would choose a good dictionary rather than the greatest literary masterpiece imaginable, for, in relation to its readers, a dictionary is absolutely passive and may legitimately be read in an infinite number of ways.

An appetite for knowledge is apt to rush one off one's feet, like any other appetite if not curbed. I often stand in the in the centre of the Library here and think despairingly how impossible it is ever to become possessed of all the wealth of facts and ideas contained in the books surrounding me on every hand.

Aunque sea una gran hazaña añadir algo, aunque sólo sea una pizca, a la suma del conocimiento humano, más grande todavía es añadir un pensamiento. Para un hombre, es mejor intentar ser a la vez poeta y naturalista que ser demasiado naturalista y pasar por alto la belleza de las cosas, o demasiado poeta y no entenderlas o no poder ver siquiera las bellezas escondidas que sólo se revelan tras una observación atenta.

As though it had always been forbidden to remember each of us grew up knowing nothing about the beginning

all I did not know went on beginning around me I had thought it would come later but it had been waiting

When I don't know the answer to something, I write a book about it because it gives me a chance to explore it and go to some people who do have the answers.

I haven't had a chance to really view the pitches straight up.

Wherever we are, we can improve our chances of getting ahead by keeping a book in hand

When I got the chance I asked them a slew of questions. They offered to burn me; it was the only thing they knew.

I think that artists have a better chance at making great art if they know as much about every different area in the industry as they can.

Let's read as if books were to disappear tomorrow!

All people have one chance, if there is possibility of other life. It's again one chance your knowledge from the knees up to the head is reset like the games.

In the field of observation chance favours the prepared mind.

One of the joys of writing historical fiction is the chance to read as much as you like on a pet subject - so much that you could easily bore your friends senseless on the topic.

Don't give me books for Christmas; I already have a book.