Quotes About Knowledge

She hears him, and understands. This is science, and worth a million times more than anything any person might ever swear to you.

You can't see what you don't understand. But what you think you already understand, you'll fail to look at.

He loved the benevolence that the stacks held out, their map of the known world. He loved the all-you-can-eat buffet of borrowing. He loved the lending histories stamped into the front of each book, the record of strangers who checked them out before him. The library was the best dungeon crawl imaginable: free loot for the finding, combined with the joy of leveling up.

It had been a long day, and the thing he wanted to know would take ten years of coursework to grasp. But a child's question was the start of all things.

It's a bang on the head that births up whole sciences.

The library was the best dungeon crawl imaginable: free loot for the finding, combined with the joy of leveling up.

A woman in the coda of life, raising her eyes and lifting her hands in that moment just before fear turns into knowledge.

Science grew out of the craft tradition

two examiners, said simply that hardly anyone in Denmark was well enough informed on the subject to judge the candidate's work.

It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them. Robert Oppenheimer It

Kapitza frequently opened discussions with deliberate howlers so that even the youngest would speak up to correct him, loosening the grip of tradition on their necks.

Chaim Weizmann gives some measure of that totality in the harsher world of the Russian Pale when he writes that "the acquisition of knowledge was not for us so much a normal process of education as the storing up of weapons in an arsenal by means of which we hoped later to be able to hold our own in a hostile world.

does not even try to give us complete information about the events around us—it gives information about the correlations between

Nor can you have only benevolent knowledge; the scientific method doesn't filter for benevolence. Knowledge has consequences, not always intended, not always comfortable, not always welcome.

TRUTH It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them. Robert Oppenheimer It is still an unending source of surprise for me to see how a few scribbles on a blackboard or on a sheet of paper could change the course of human affairs. Stanislaw Ulam

And most generally and profoundly: "The very fact that knowledge is itself the basis for civilization points directly to openness as the way to overcome the present crisis.

It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them. Robert Oppenheimer

A mystic doesn't say "I believe." They say "I know." A true mystic will ironically speak with that self-confidence but at the same time with a kind of humility. So when you see that combination of calm self-confidence, certitude, and humility all at the same time you have the basis for mysticism in general.

Try to say that: "I don't know anything". We used to call it "tabula rasa" in Latin. Maybe you could think of yourself as an erased blackboard, ready to be written on. For by and large, what blocks spiritual teaching is the assumption that we already know, or that we don't need to know. We have to pray for the grace of beginner's mind. We need to say with the blind man, "I want to see".

Being informed is different from being formed, and the first is a common substitute for the second.

All theologies are blasphemous in so far as they attempt to reduce God to something that can be known through the understanding by which we know other things.

Both Catholics and Protestants have failed our people by mystifying the very notion of mysticism. The word itself has become relegated to a "misty" and distant realm that implies it is only available to very few and something not to be trusted, much less attractive or desirable. For me, the word "mysticism" simply means experiential knowledge of spiritual things, as opposed to book knowledge, secondhand knowledge, or even church knowledge.

Remember, mystery isn't something that you cannot understand—it is something that you can endlessly understand!

Great spiritual teachers learn to balance knowing with not knowing, as illustrated in this oft-quoted aphorism: 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. The true biblical notion of faith, which balances knowing with not knowing, is rather rare today, especially among many religious folks who think faith is being certain all the time--when the truth is the exact opposite. But we have little theology of darkness today.