Quotes About Knowledge

She doesn't know geometry. Just enough to pilot a ship in and out of the folds." "Only that much?" I should have stuck to advanced finger-painting and never let Dad lure me into trying for an education. There isn't any end—the more you learn, the more you need to learn.

Hit anything hard enough, strike sparks. Elementary physics, known to everybody but intelligentsia

The beginning of wisdom is a firm grasp of the obvious.

Clement of Alexandria says in the Paedagogus: "Therefore, as it seems, it is the greatest of all disciplines to know oneself; for when a man knows himself, he knows God.

The stories of Saul and David interlock antithetically on the theme of knowledge. Saul, from first to last, is a man deprived of the knowledge he desperately seeks.

How many times... have you encountered the saying, 'When the student is ready, the Master speaks?' Do you know why that is true? The door opens inward . The Master is everywhere, but the student has to open his mind to hear the Masters Voice.

Nothing of any importance can be taught. It can only be learned, and with blood and sweat.

help conquer the IQ shortage worry less and think more

Belief in the traditional sense, or certitude, or dogma, amounts to the grandiose delusion, My current model -- or grid, or map, or reality-tunnel -- contains the whole universe and will never need to be revised. In terms of the history of science and knowledge in general, this appears absurd and arrogant to me, and I am perpetually astonished that so many people still manage to live with such a medieval attitude.

Wishing to prove oneself right is the usual motive for scholarship.

Certitude belongs exclusively to those who only own one encyclopedia.

There is no complete theory of anything.

I'm sorry There are some jokes you cannot understand until you have been a fool many, many years and thought yourself finally cured and then found out that you had just become a different kind of fool.

A labyrinth -- that's Joyce's metaphor, too. Somebody could write a good Ph.D. dissertation on the metaphor of the labyrinth in James Joyce, Philip K. Dick, and Robert Anton Wilson. We all regard the universe as a maze that we're running around in and trying to figure out.

From the Sufi: Mullah Nasrudin once entered a store and asked the proprietor, "Have you ever seen me before?" "No," was the prompt answer. "Then," cried Nasrudin, "how do you know it is me?

As Charlie Chaplin said once in a morbid context, Numbers sanctify. The more I pile up such monstrosities, the more likely it is that some readers will start to believe them.

This book is a mirror. When a monkey looks in, no philosopher looks out.—Lichtenstein. Does that refer to one book only, or to all books?

And of course, this is the traditional theme in romantic poetry. I'm very science oriented in many ways. So much so that a lot of people who hate science dislike my books because they dislike the scientific emphasis. But, at the same time I am science oriented, I don't reject other modes of knowledge. When I find something repeated over and over, my thought is, if enough people have thought this over for many centuries, it's worth looking at no matter how wild it sounds.

If perception is not absolute, no deduction from perception can be absolute. No matter how ingeniously one juggles with approximations, they do not magically turn into certainties; at best, they become the most accurate possible approximations.

Oh yes, there are a lot of things that have been known for centuries before we had a scientific explanation for them. Medieval grimoires tell about witches using bee balm for people with heart disease and, of course, bee balm contains digitalis. It's just what modern doctors use. Somehow the witches had learned empirically over millenniums of being village herbalists what herbs really work.

Time magazine, with their usual dummheit, once did a cover story entitled, "The Occult: A Substitute Faith." If this was all that could be found in occultism, I would not touch the subject with the proverbial ten-foot pole. The world already has enough "faith" to guarantee that the Idiots are always, as Ambrose Bierce said, the largest and most influential political party in any society. Occultism interests me, not as a substitute faith, but as a substitute for faith.

The Fool sees not the same tree the wise man sees.

That's why Einstein had to remind us, Common sense tells us the earth is flat.

What the skeptic really seems to be claiming is that he knows what the subject feels better than the subject knows – i.e., that the subject doesn't feel what he feels but feels something else. This is the kind of verbal metaphysics that made the medieval theologians become the laughing-stocks of Voltaire and other rationalist critics.