Quotes About Knowledge

The love of libraries, like most loves, must be learned.

I have no feelings of guilt regarding the books I have not read and perhaps will never read; I know that my books have unlimited patience. They will wait for me till the end of my days.

I like to imagine that, on the day after my last, my library and I will crumble together, so that even when I am no more I'll still be with my books.

My books hold between their covers every story I've ever known and still remember, or have now forgotten, or may one day read; they fill the space around me with ancient and new voices.

If every library is in some sense a reflection of its readers, it is also an image of that which we are not, and cannot be.

But at night, when the library lamps are lit, the outside world disappears and nothing but the space of books remains in existence.

As centuries of dictators have known, an illiterate crowd is the easiest to rule; since the craft of reading cannot be untaught once it has been acquired, the second-best recourse is to limit its scope.

Life happened because I turned the pages.

Readers, censors know, are defined by the books they read.

Alcuin was my name: learning I loved.

O quam dulcis vita fuit dum sedabamus in quieti . . . inter liborum copias. : 'Oh how sweet life was when we sat quietly . . . midst all these books.

Man should accept that he does not know very much at all and knows even less, when he places barriers to truth.

Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth? The goose who trades his is soon a pile of feathers.

We grieve only for what we know.

Do not let anyone tell you that these people made work of play. They simply realized that the most fun lies in seeing and studying the unknown.

I am well content that it should remain a mystery. What a dull world if we knew all about geese.

In human history, we have learned (I hope) that the conqueror role is eventually self-defeating. Why? Because it is implicit in such a role that the conqueror knows, ex cathedra, just what makes the community clock tick, and just what and who is valuable, and what and who is worthless, in community life. It always turns out that he knows neither, and this is why conquests eventually defeat themselves.

Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth?

Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.

The pleasures of ignorance are as great, in their way, as the pleasures of knowledge.

Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.

Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.

Great scientific discoveries have been made by men seeking to verify quite erroneous theories about the nature of things.

From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.