Quotes About Knowledge

As writers become more numerous, it is natural for readers to become more indolent whence must necessarily arise a desire of attaining knowledge with the greatest possible ease.

The properties which differentiate living matter from any kind of inorganic imitation may be instinctively felt, but can hardly be formulated without expert knowledge.

These last have been the men of science, the great and heaven-born men of science; and they are few. In

Archimedes, one of the greatest men of science there has ever been, and the father of physics.

About this time the tremendous invention of printing was achieved, and Columbus unwittingly discovered the New World. The

Copernicus lived from 1473 to 1543, and

Some men never recover from education.

It is the province of knowledge to speak, and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.

Even the wisest woman you talk to is ignorant of something you may know, but an elegant woman never forgets her elegance.

A goose flies by a chart which the Royal Geographical Society could not mend.

Controversy equalizes fools and wise men - and the fools know it.

The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts but learning how to make facts live.

Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.

Truth, when not sought after, rarely comes to light.

I hate facts. I always say the chief end of man is to form general propositions - adding that no general proposition is worth a damn.

A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience.

Any two philosophers can tell each other all they know in two hours.

The advice of their elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.

There are one-story intellects, two-story intellects, and three-story intellects with skylights. All fact collectors with no aim beyond their facts are one-story men. Two-story men compare reason and generalize, using labors of the fact collectors as well as their own. Three-story men idealize, imagine, and predict. Their best illuminations come from above through the skylight.

To be master of any branch of knowledge, you must master those which lie next to it; and thus to know anything you must know all.

Upon this point a page of history is worth a volume of logic.

It seems to me that at this time we need education in the obvious more than the investigation of the obscure.

Science is the topography of ignorance.

There are many things which we can afford to forget which it is yet well to learn.