Quotes About Knowledge

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.

It is easy to write off childlike faith in the universe and childlike wonder at the world as simply a lack of knowledge about "how life really is." Well, how is life, really? Do we know—we who have been denying life, life's beauty and its true challenges, for such a long time? Or did we know better as children, when the whole world seemed to be filled with meaning and possibility, both good and bad?

We are, by our very human nature, limited in what we can know or do or control or change.

for the purposes of my own spirituality, it is far more useful to recognize the limitations of my knowledge; to humble myself, not before a deity, but simply to be humble; to surrender, again, not to a God but simply to surrender; and to accept. Not accept certain facts; but simply to train myself in the practice of acceptance.

I still bought many books, but more and more I read in them, rather than being whisked away by them. At some time impossible to pinpoint, I had begun to read more to be informed than to be immersed, much less to be transported.

Before two years of age, human interaction and physical interaction with books and print are the best entry into the world of oral and written language and internalized knowledge, the building blocks of the later reading circuit.

Deep reading is always about *connection*: connecting what we know to what we read, what we read to what we feel, what we feel to what we think, and how we think to how we live out our lives in a connected world.

An insight is a fleeting glimpse of the brain's huge store58 of unknown knowledge. The cortex is sharing one of its secrets. —Jonah Lehrer

Harvard physicist John Huth writes about the more universal importance of knowing where we are in time and space and what happens when we fail to connect the details of that knowledge into a larger picture. "Sadly, we often atomize knowledge32 into pieces that don't have a home in a larger conceptual framework. When this happens, we surrender meaning to guardians of knowledge and it loses its personal value.

Anyone who still believes the archaic canard that we use only a tiny portion of our brains hasn't yet become aware of what we do when we read.

Just as I worry that in their overreliance on external sources of information, our young will not know what they do not know, I worry equally that we, their guides, do not realize the insidious narrowing of our own thinking, the imperceptible shortening of our attention to complex issues, the unsuspected diminishing of our ability to write, read, or think past 140 characters. We must all take stock of who we are as readers, writers, and thinkers.

In the first quarter of our century we daily conflate information with knowledge and knowledge with wisdom—with the resulting diminution of all three.

Num meio que nos defronta continuamente com um excesso de informações, a grande tentação de muitos é se retirar para depósitos conhecidos de informações facilmente digeríveis, menos densas, intelectualmente menos exigentes. A ilusão de estarmos informados por um dilúvio diário de informações dimensionadas eletronicamente para o olho pode dificultar uma análise crítica de nossas realidades complexas.

Who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria37 of experiences, information, books we have read.

We seem to be moving as a society from a group of expert readers with uniquely personal, internal platforms of background knowledge to a group of expert readers who are increasingly dependent on similar, external servers of knowledge. I want to understand the consequences and costs of losing these uniquely formed internal sources of knowledge without losing sight of the extraordinary gifts of the abundant information now at our fingertips.

Just as I worry that in their overreliance on external sources of information, our young will not know what they do not know, I worry equally that we, their guides, do not realize the insidious narrowing of our own thinking, the imperceptible shortening of our attention to complex issues, the unsuspected diminishing of our ability to write, read, or think past 140 characters.

But what if our capacity to perceive is actually decreasing because we are confronted with too much information, as the philosopher Josef Pieper once wrote?

But it was Aldo's pen that became his most forceful tool. He started a newsletter for rangers called the Carson Pine Cone. Aldo used it to "scatter seeds of knowledge, encouragement, and enthusiasm." Most of the Pine Cone's articles, poems, jokes, editorials, and drawings were Aldo's own. His readers soon realized that the forest animals were as important to him as the trees. His goal was to bring back the "flavor of the wilds.

In the words of Agatha Swanburne, founder of Swanburne Academy, "Every book is judged by its cover until it is read.

Humanity knows nothing at all. There is no intrinsic value in anything, and every action is a futile, meaningless effort.

In the process of falling to the earth, seeping into the ground, and then emerging, water obtain information from various minerals and becomes wise.

It's foolish to fear what we've yet to see and know.

In order to survive, we cling to all we know and understand. And label it reality. But knowledge and understanding are ambiguous. That reality could be an illusion. All humans live with the wrong assumptions. Isn't that another way of looking at it? That sharingan how much can you really se?

Drum lest mit Maß, doch lest genug, Dann wird's euch wohl ergehen. Bloß Bücher fressen macht nicht klug. Man muss sie auch verstehen.