Quotes About Knowledge

Books are masters who instruct us without rods or ferules, without words or anger, without bread or money. If you approach them, they are not asleep; If you seek them, they do not hide; If you blunder, they do not scold; if you are ignorant, they do not laugh at you.

In books I meet the dead as if they were alive in books I see what is yet to come... All things decay and pass in time... All fame would fall into oblivion if God had not given mortal men the book to aid them

Books appear to be the most immediate instruments of speculative delight.

Again, all who are smitten with the love of books think cheaply of the world and wealth; as Jerome says to Vigilantius: The same man cannot love both gold and books.

A dire il vero, quei laici che guardano un libro piegandolo a rovescio, come se fosse quello il suo verso normale, sono indegni di avere contatti con libri di qualsiasi genere.

Come insegna Seneca ammaestrando i suoi discepoli, l'ozio senza le lettere è la morte e la tomba dell'uomo mentre ancora vive; così, per la ragione opposta, ne deduciamo che la frequentazione delle lettere e dei libri è per l'uomo la vita.

The power of knowing the future could corrupt even the most noble heart. - Marcus Bennett

We need to get back to reasoning and thinking things through. The future generation is being brought up in greed and without a true understanding of civics. There is no more emphasis on knowledge and time. As a society we need to process ideas and understand what certain principles are based upon.

the fundamental purpose of school is learning, not teaching.

It is what man does not know of GodComposes the visible poem of the world.

What did you ask at school today

Philosophers say a great deal about what is absolutely necessary for science, and it is always, so far as one can see, rather naive, and probably wrong.

What I cannot create, I do not understand.

You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing -- that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.

It is a wholly deplorable state of affairs when specialists in any discipline talk only to each other, and accordingly I have sought to write a book which will communicate some of the fruits of research in a manner which will make them accessible to all.

Happiness for me is getting to write about the most important things I know.

I believe profoundly in the importance of museums; I would go as far as to say that you can judge a society by the quality of its museums.

You must not lie about trilobites, nor yet about time.

I attempted in vain to calculate the size of the holdings on the shelves, floor on floor, only to boggle hopelessly, baffled by bibliographic boundlessness.

There is no final truth in palaeontology. Every new observer brings something of his or her own: a new technique, a new intelligence, even new mistakes. The past mutates. The scientist is on a perpetual journey into a past that can never be fully known, and there is no end to the quest for knowledge.

In this fashion, knowledge begets questions which beget new technology which provides answers--which in turn beget questions. This is the implacable carousel of research.

German professors of that time were like God, only more frightening.

There has been a revolution in our understanding over the last forty years, and the gains in knowledge are permanent. But we will never know everything, and that is as it should be. From the obscuring mist of the past, science has ensured that some of the mountains have emerged into clear view, but as soon as that happens the misty shadows of further peaks are glimpsed in the distance, rank upon rank: so many other heights to climb, so many mysteries to investigate.

A common response to research findings in the social sciences is for people to say they are obvious, and then perhaps to add a little scornfully, that there was no need to do all that expensive work to tell us what we already knew. Very often, however, that sense of knowing only seeps in with the benefit of hindsight, after research results have been made known.