Quotes About Knowledge

All things are filled full of signs, and it is a wise man who can learn about one thing from another.

The world is knowable, harmonious, and good.

When one has achieved the object of one's desires, it is evident that one's real desire was not the ignorant possession of the desired object but to know it as possessed--as actually contemplated, as within one.

He who has not even a knowledge of common things is a brute among men. He who has an accurate knowledge of human concerns alone, is a man among brutes. But he who knows all that can be known by intellectual energy is a God among men.

Knowledge has three degrees—opinion, science, illumination. The means or instrument of the first is sense; of the second dialectic; of the third intuition. To the last I subordinate reason. It is absolute knowledge founded on the identity of the mind knowing with the object known.

Spintharus, speaking in commendation of Epaminondas, says he scarce ever met with any man who knew more and spoke less.

I would rather excel in the knowledge of what is excellent, than in the extent of my power and possessions.

The process may seem strange and yet it is very true. I did not so much gain the knowledge of things by the words, as words by the experience I had of things.

A mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted.

take care, in reading the writings of philosophers or hearing their speeches, that you do not attend to words more than things, nor get attracted more by what is difficult and curious than by what is serviceable and solid and useful.

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. "For the mind does not require filling like a bottle, but rather, like wood, it only requires kindling to create in it an impulse to think independently and an ardent desire for the truth.

if the "Know thyself" of the oracle were an easy thing for every man, it would not be held to be a divine injunction.

I would rather excel in the knowledge of what is excellent than the extent of my power or possessions.

The mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting.

Lycurgus, who ordered that a great piece of money should be but of an inconsiderable value, on the contrary would allow no discourse to be current which did not contain in few words a great deal of useful and curious sense.

Being human and investigating the affairs of the gods is an extreme version of being tone-deaf and talking about music, or having never served in the army and talking about warfare: we resemble amateurs trying to use arguments from probability based on opinions and conjecture to unearth the ideas of experts. Given

The mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs kindling.

it is useful, or rather it is necessary, not to be indifferent about acquiring the works of earlier writers, but to make a collection of these, like a set of tools in farming. For the corresponding tool of education is the use of books, and by their means it has come to pass that we are able to study knowledge at its source.

The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.

Books delight to the very marrow of one's bones. They speak to us, consult with us, and join with us in a living and intense intimacy.

To be ignorant of the lives of the most celebrated men of antiquity is to continue in a state of childhood all our days

Barba non facit philosophum

When you act, you learn. That kind of wisdom beats the knowledge you read in a book, every time. To really seek answers, you need to act. To really develop your mind, run more experiments.

Fish can pass memories between generations. But maybe the better way to say it is that fish can pass experience learning through generations.