Quotes About Knowledge

Education should not be intended to make people comfortable; it is meant to make them think.

exercise his brain and keep him fed, but how to gain any traction? Books, he thought. Books, books, books. Books to get him somewhere. Books to turn him into someone. Books to grab hold of on his way up. Books as a way to be alone without feeling so alone.

There may be mistakes in the choice of means to attain an end. But success or failure also involves much that lies beyond our power. We are not responsible for the inevitable, nor for a knowledge that is beyond our reach. Solely the ends, honestly chosen, and consistently sought, determine the moral quality of a life.

There are no metaphysics.

I gained an insight, a purloined-letter kind of thing.

The tragedy of being old is you can no longer apply whats taken you so long to learn (Kissing The Beehive)

The truth is the truth. What changes is what we know about it and what we're willing to believe.

It's important to know the past, but your survival depends on knowing the present.

I cling to this notion now because it is what allows me to feel a connection to a vast body of knowledge of which I am not master, much as I am able to live in a society bursting with information that I will never wholly comprehend. I take comfort from a lesson that seems implicit in the Talmud itself, which is that not knowing Torah is part of the lesson of Torah.

But I still couldn't figure out what it all meant. The more I found out, the less I understood.

Once you hear something, you can never return to the time before you heard it.

Grandfather informs me that is not possible.

It was getting hard to keep all the things I didn't know inside me.

I'm not smarter than you, I'm more knowledgeable than you, and that's only because I'm older than you. Parents are always more knowledgeable than their children, and children are always smarter than their parents.

I know a lot about birds and bees, but I don't know very much about the birds and the bees. Everything I do know I had to teach myself on the Internet, because I don't have anyone to ask. For example, I know that you give someone a blowjob by putting your penis in their mouth.

When he pulled her out to feed her or just hold her, her body was tattooed with the newsprint . . . Sometimes he would rock her to sleep in his arms, and read her left to right, and know everything he needed to know about the world. If it wasn't written on her, it wasn't important to him.

Sometimes I wonder if she knows, I wonder in my Nothingest moments if she's testing me, if she types nonsense all day long, or types nothing at all, just to see what I'll do in response, she wants to know if I love her, that's all anyone wants from anyone else, not love itself but the knowledge that love is there, like new batteries in the flashlight in the emergency kit in the hall closet.

We are breeding creatures incapable of surviving in any place other than the most artificial settings. We have focused the awesome power of modern genetic knowledge to bring into being animals that suffer more.

It is dangerous to pretend that we know more than we do. But it is even more dangerous to pretend that we know less.

She always saw through him, as if he were just another window. She always felt that she knew everything about him that could be known. Not that he was simple, but that he was knowable, like a list of errands, like an encyclopedia.

Before you rush off trying to see everything you can, educate yourself.

I invented a book that listed every word in every language. It wouldn't be a very useful book, but you could hold it and know that everything you could possibly say was in your hands.

We dramatically overstate the role of science deniers, because it allows science acceptors to feel righteous without challenging us to act on the knowledge we accept. Only 14 percent of Americans deny climate change, which is a significantly lower percentage than who deny evolution, or that the earth orbits the sun. Sixty-nine percent of American voters—including the majority of Republicans—say that the United States should have remained in the Paris climate accord.

Wir können uns nicht mit Unwissenheit herausreden, nur mit Gleichgültigkeit.