Quotes About Knowledge

Age is not always the best judge of competence.

The generation that had information, but no context. Butter, but no bread. Craving, but no longing.

Inteligente. For years it had been enough to be the intelligent one. All that had meant, in the beginning, was that you could answer the kinds of questions that your teachers asked. The whole world appeared to be fact-based, and that had been a relief to Greer, who could dredge up facts with great ease, a magician pulling coins from behind any available ear. Facts appeared before her, and the she simply articulated them, and in this way she became known as the smartest one in her glass.

When you looked closely at anything, you could almost faint, Jules thought, although you had to look closely if you wanted to have any knowledge at all in life.

I think having the knowledge, plus the experiences you've lived through, make you definitely not fragile. They make you brave.

But maybe in life, she thought later, there are not only moments of strangeness but moments of knowledge, which don't appear at the time as knowledge at all

knew everything about him, the way wives do. I even knew the inside of him, having been there that day in Dr. Ruffner's office to review the footage of Joe's colon. We sat and watched light travel through his most intimate inner tubing, and after that we were really bound together for life.

You're all equipped for the world, for adulthood, in a way that most people aren't," she continues. "So many people don't even know what hits them when they grow up. They feel clobbered over the head the minute the first thing goes wrong, and they spend the rest of their lives trying to avoid pain at all costs. But you all know that avoiding pain is impossible. And I think having that knowledge, plus the experiences you've lived through, make you definitely not fragile. They make you brave.

When I learned to read, it changed everything.

She sometimes said, "I don't know," even when she did know. What she meant was that it was more comfortable to stay in vagueness than to leave it.

I was seventeen and there were so many things I didn't know yet, but I knew about hiding.

You looked like you knew a thing or two, she told me later. But were ready to learn a lot more.

Logic only tells us what's there; it can't really address what isn't. Even the most devoted empiricist must admit that we have no hope of understanding the universe. Some things are unknowable.

I thought I knew everything. There's the challenge fate loves best, isn't it? I was ripe for a fall and so … the apple.

Omnia Mundi Fumus et Umbra All in the World is Smoke and Shadow –Latin motto

I've never been a big believer in formal education.

There are many things I don't know, but quite a few I do. I know you can't be lost if you know where you are. I know that life is full of precious and fragile things, and not all of them are pretty. I know that the sun follows the moon and makes days, one after another. Time passes. The world turns, and we turn with it, and though we can never go back to the beginning, sometimes, we can start again.

At thirty-six, Margaret believed her "mind and character" were already "too much formed" through "a liberal communion with the woful struggling crowd of fellow men." She had instead worked for a living and reaped the "fruits of spiritual knowledge" these past ten years, seeking common cause with the laborer, the immigrant, the prostitute.

they "come to the business of life & the application of knowledge they find that they are inferior—& all their studies have not given them that practical good sense & mother wisdom & wit which grew up with our grandmothers at the spinning wheel,

All great acquisitions come from voluntary thought" was Elizabeth's guiding principle. She would not cultivate any motive for learning in her students besides curiosity, claiming that study for the sake of reward or in fear of punishment produced "superficial rather than profound" knowledge.

mind has no sex": there was no limit to what Sophia or any girl might learn. Yet gender did affect the uses of knowledge.

The higher my GPA gets the more I realize high school is useless

I don't know anything about anything. The only difference between then and now is this: I may know more than I used to but my wisdom pales in comparison to that which I have yet to learn

I didn't know anything about anything. And the only difference between then and now is this: I may know more than I used to, but my wisdom pales in comparison to that which I've yet to learn.