Quotes About Knowledge

People greatly value knowledge and intelligence, but not wisdom.

Chuang Tzu's message for us is not to completely discard books but to put them in their proper place by understanding the limitation of words. Reading a description of how to make wheels can never give you the skills you will gain by actually making them. Similarly, reading a book about the Tao can never give you the wisdom you will gain by actually living life.

The senior disciple is your creative mind, your ability to absorb knowledge, solve problems and invent new solutions. The second disciple is your ability to organize your world and channel your energy in constructive ways. The junior disciple is your social charisma—just as every organization needs some way to interact with the outside world, this organism known as you also requires an interface with other people.

You can always use intuition and observation to bring out the truth.

Philosophers should not only interpret our beliefs; when they are false, they should change them.

You see, between us and God's wisdom is a valley, a place of humility. We have to lay aside worldly wisdom. We have to become fools in the eyes of the world in order that we may really enter into God's wisdom.

Even a brief glimpse of what we were is valuable to help understand what we are

All that we know is nothing, we are merely crammed wastepaper baskets,unless we are in touch with that which laughs at all our knowing.

It's always better to know. It is. That's the great thing about being a detective. Information makes you stronger. And if it's bad news, it makes you even stronger.

Overall, the library held a hushed exultation, as though the cherished volumes were all singing soundlessly within their covers.

You could tell from the books whether a library was meant for show or not. Books that were used had an open, interested feel to them, even if closed and neatly lined up on a shelf in strict order with their fellows. You felt as though the book took as much interest in you as you did in it and was willing to help when you reached for it.

Jamie felt a strong desire to go across and see what the open books were, to go to the shelves and run his knuckles gently over the leather and wood and buckrum of the bindings until a book should speak to him and come willingly into his hand.

He shook his head, absorbed in one of his feats of memory, those brief periods of scholastic rapture where he lost touch with the world around him, absorbed completely in conjuring up knowledge from all its sources.

Could it be possible that he really did have enough imagination to be able to grasp the truth?

How many 'inventions' are really memories, of the things we once knew?

Not the historians. No, not them. Their greatest crime is that they presume to know what happened, how things come about, when they have only what the past chose to leave behind—for the most part, they think what they were meant to think, and it's a rare one that sees what really happened, behind the smokescreen of artifacts and paper.

Faith is as powerful a force as science-- but far more dangerous

It wasn't the tree of good and evil in the Garden of Eden, after all; it was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Knowledge might be a poisoned gift—but it was still a gift, and few people would voluntarily give it back.

Life among academics had taught me that a well-expressed opinion is usually better than a badly expressed fact

Faith is as powerful a force as science, he concluded, voice soft in the darkness, but far more dangerous.

Well, I say it is the place of science only to observe, he said. To seek cause where it may be found, but to realize that there are many things in the world for which no cause shall be found; not because it does not exist, but because we know too little to find it. It is not the place of science to insist on explanation---but only to observe, in hopes that explanation will manifest itself.

Doom, or save. That I cannot do. For I have no power beyond that of knowledge, no ability to bend others to my will, no way to stop them doing what they will. There is only me.

Faith is as powerful a force as science," he concluded, voice soft in the darkness, "—but far more dangerous.

A forced oath canna bind a man, though, or keep him from his knowledge of right.