Quotes About Knowledge

Don't fuck with an English major. They keep lots of useless crap trapped in their heads. Once in a while they let some of it out and it bites you square on the ass.

He [his uncle, Pliny the Elder] used to say that there was no book so bad that it was not useful at some point. Pliny the Younger, Epistula III.5.10

My definition of an expert in any field is a person who knows enough about what's really going on to be scared.

The worm hissed. "You said it couldn't see!" shouted Oates, forgetting Umber's instruction to be silent. He shook a fist. "We all heard it, Umber! You specifically said, it couldn't see!" "I know-isn't it wonderful to learn something new?" Umber laughed.

when something seems complicated, we do not understand it, but when we do understand something, it has become simple.

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.

Os militares não dão cultura ao povo, porque se o povo tivesse cultura não os aceitaria.

la creencia de que se vive en la posesión de un librito que solo conoce de la verdad. Hombres peligrosos los del cavernario fanatismo, que no creen en el valor de la duda, en las virtudes del desconcierto, en la pesadumbre del error propio repetido.

You don't have to be a philosopher; you just have to want to know who you are

Agitation due to circumstances occurs when because of an external incident, you follow a thought, and your mind becomes agitated and scatters into a disturbing emotion. When that happens, keep the attitude of "There is no need to do anything!" Train in loving kindness and compassion, disenchantment, means and knowledge, and devotion. Following that, persevere in the practice as at the time of the view. That will clear it.

Paladin: age is the price of living.

It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." —MARK TWAIN, AMERICAN AUTHOR

have always needed to know.

Honey, if we could cure stupid, I'd be out of a job.

in the past, respect for the wisdom of the elders was a central tenet of human societies ... whose elders served as keepers of the cultures' knowledge. But today, in technological countries such as ours, respect has faded into bare tolerance, as we demand that older people act, look, and talk young.

Look," said Janet, irritated, "if the thing you liked best to do in the world was read, and somebody offered to pay you room and board and give you a liberal arts degree if you would just read for four years, wouldn't you do it?

Jesse swallowed and looked around the field. Roe could see him struggling with his thoughts, trying to put them in a coherent order. "It takes me a long time to learn things," he told Roe finally. "When I learn 'em, I try to hold on real tight. It's kindy scary for me to try to unlearn 'em.

This is every reader's catch-22: the more you read, the more you realize you haven't read; the more you yearn to read more, the more you understand that you have, in fact, read nothing. There is no way to finish, and perhaps that shouldn't be the goal.

At this point, there is no human way that I could read even those books I've deliberately marked as absolute must-reads. [ . . . ] This is every reader's catch-22: the more you read, the more you realize you haven't read; the more you yearn to read more, the more you understand that you have, in fact, read nothing

The novelist Umberto Eco famously kept what the writer Nassim Taleb called an "anti-library," a vast collection of books he had not read, believing that one's personal trove should contain as much of what you don't know as possible. Some

We are all late all the time even though we know the time better than ever before.

Children are notoriously literal readers, and I was no exception. Books, I believed, contained the entire truth about everything, and if you could just read every book or even a good chunk of the Truly Important Ones, you would know what you needed to know about real life. And you could be a part of it. Naturally, I got a lot of things wrong.

At the dinner table, make "what you're reading" as regular a part of conversation

We all love remembering the satisfaction, the joy, the almost giddy exhilaration of seeing the world of letters, and as a consequence the entire world, open up to us.