Quotes About Knowledge

In a thousand years, if humans survive that long, everything you know will have been disproved. And replaced by even bigger myths.

It turned out to be near impossible to stand in a library and not want to pull things from the shelves.

Librarians have knowledge. They guide you to the right books. The right worlds. They find the best places. Like soul-enhanced search engines." "Exactly. But you also have to know what you like. What to type into the metaphorical search box. And sometimes you have to try a few things before that becomes clear.

So most of what we know now will be disproved or reassessed in the future. That is how science works, not through blind faith, but continual doubt.

Illness has a lot to teach wellness. But when I am ill I forget these things. The trick is to keep hold of that knowledge. To turn recovery into prevention. To live how I live when I am ill, without being ill.

Be curious. Question everything. A present fact is just a future fiction.

To read, to seek, to know.

Where there were books, there was always the temptation to open them.

I craved knowledge. I craved facts. I searched for them like lifebuoys in the sea. But statistics are tricky things.

No wonder they were a species of primitives. By the time they have read enough books to actually reach a state of knowledge where they can do anything with it, they are dead.

Maybe once you had known fear and love and beauty, you could never unknow them.

This was interesting knowledge: you could only ask questions in certain rooms. There were rooms for sitting and thinking and rooms for inquisition.

If you live long enough you realise that every proven fact is later disproved and then proven again.

The purpose of science is to find out where the limits of possibility end. When we have achieved that – and we shall – there will be no more magic, no more superstition, there will just be what is.

That is what history is, the teaching and telling of it. It is a way to control it and order it. To turn it into a pet. But history you have lived is different to history you read in a book or on a screen. And some things in the past can't be tamed.

Every time I read a great book I felt I was reading a kind of map, a treasure map, and the treasure I was being directed to was in actual fact myself. But each map was incomplete, and I would only locate the treasure if I read all the books, and so the process of finding my best self was an endless quest. And books themselves seemed to me to reflect this idea. Which is why the plot of every book ever can be boiled down to 'someone is looking for something'.

A book is a map .... There will be times in your life when you will feel lost and confused. The way back to yourself is through reading. There is not a problem in existence that has not been eased, somewhere and at some time, by a book. ... The answers have all been written. And the more you read, the more you will know how to find your way through those difficult times.

it is perfectly possible for anyone to feel old. All they need to do is become a teacher.

But where there were books, there was always the temptation to open them.

Reading is love in action.

By the time they [humans] had read enough books to actually reach a state of knowledge where they can do anything with it they are dead

What if there was never a way? What if I am . . . trapped?' 'So long as there are still books on the shelves, you are never trapped. Every book is a potential escape.' 'I just don't understand life,' sulked Nora. 'You don't have to understand life. You just have to live it.

She didn't correct his knowledge of diamonds. She didn't tell him that while coal and diamonds are both carbon, coal is too impure to be able, under whatever pressure, to become a diamond. According to science, you start off as coal and you end up as coal. Maybe that was the real-life lesson.

In every life there is a moment, A crisis. One that says, what I believe is wrong. It happens to everyone, the only difference being how that knowledge changes them.