Quotes About Knowledge

An understanding of people's hidden motives is the single greatest piece of knowledge you can have in acquiring power.

There is much to be known, life is short, and life is not life without knowledge. It is therefore an excellent device to acquire knowledge from everybody. Thus, by the sweat of another's brow, you win the reputation of being an oracle. (Baltasar Gracián, 1601-1658)

you must begin with the assumption that you are ignorant and that you have natural biases that will make you judge people incorrectly.

Some 2,600 years ago the ancient Greek poet Pindar wrote, "Become who you are by learning who you are.

He who asks fortune-tellers the future unwittingly forfeits an inner intimation of coming events that is a thousand times more exact than anything they may say. WALTER BENJAMIN, 1892-1940

Knowledge, experience, and theory have limitations: no amount of thinking in advance can prepare you for the chaos of life, for the infinite possibilities of the moment.

Let us call this sensation mastery—the feeling that we have a greater command of reality, other people, and ourselves. Although it might be something we experience for only a short while, for others—Masters of their field—it becomes their way of life, their way of seeing the world.

Learning never exhausts the mind.—Leonardo da Vinci

This book is an attempt to gather together this immense storehouse of knowledge and ideas from different branches (see the bibliography for the key sources), to piece together an accurate and instructive guide to human nature, basing itself on the evidence, not on particular viewpoints or moral judgments. It is a brutally realistic appraisal of our species, dissecting who we are so we can operate with more awareness.

On the other hand, there is the opposing tendency of the brain to want to make connections between everything. This generally occurs among individuals who pursue knowledge far enough that these associations come to

Quien pregunta a un adivino cuál será su futuro, sin querer ignora una intuición interior de las cosas por venir, que es mil veces más exacta que cualquier cosa que el adivino pueda decirle. WALTER BENJAMIN, 1892-1940

In the beginning, strategy indeed belonged to a select few—a general, his staff, the king, a handful of courtiers. Soldiers were not taught strategy, for that would not have helped them on the battlefield. Besides, it was unwise to arm one's soldiers with the kind of practical knowledge that could help them to organize a mutiny or rebellion.

Si tropiezas con un rasgo especial de maldad o estupidez, […] no permitas que te enfade o te perturbe; velo como una adición a tu conocimiento, un dato nuevo a tomar en cuenta en el estudio del carácter de la humanidad. Tu actitud será la del mineralogista que tropieza con un muy peculiar espécimen de un mineral. —ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it. —Albert Einstein

Empathy plays an enormous role in learning and knowledge.

A ghost who has only a lay knowledge of the subject will be able to keep asking the same questions as the lay reader, and will therefore open up the potential readership of the book to a much wider audience.

History has always fascinated me. As Cicero himself once wrote: 'To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?' I quickly forgot the cold and could have spent all day happily unwinding that roll, poring over the events of more than sixty years before.

he tried to visualise her apartment, but he couldn't do it, he didn't know enough about her.

This is the trouble with internet research, in my experience. The proportion of what's useful to what's dross dwindles very quickly, and suddenly it's like searching for something dropped down the back of a sofa and coming up with handfuls of old coins, buttons, fluff, and sucked sweets. What's important is to ask the right question, and

The vulgar always assumed it was best to try to know everything; in his experience it was often better to know as little as possible. "Before

shall never forget as long as I live the sensation of unrolling each of the eight books of Aristotle's Politics: tiny cylinders of minute Greek characters, the edges slightly damaged by damp from the caves in Asia Minor where they had been hidden for many years. It was like reaching back through time and touching the face of a god.

YOU CAN ALWAYS SPOT A FOOL, for he is the man who will tell you he knows who is going to win an election

The vulgar always assumed it was best to try to know everything; in his experience it was often better to know as little as possible.

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history? —Cicero, Orator, 46 BC