Quotes About Knowledge

Old men are always young enough to learn, with profit.

Trust my folly then, since it is best for a man truly wise to be thought a fool.

How fain I'd speak to those who know mythought, And silence keep to those who yet know nought.

You have learned the lesson by experience.

Time in its aging course teaches all things.

Write what I tell you in your book of memory.

Old age that's quick to learn is always young.

It is always in season for old men to learn.

Vilna Gaon was also an expert in nearly all secular wisdom of his time, for he felt that such knowledge enhanced the understanding of many aspects of Torah and Kabbalah; he even left several volumes which deal with mathematics and astronomy (personal testimony of the Vilna Gaon's children in the introduction of the Hebrew text of this book)/

Do not malign the words of a sage even if they seem trivial, for they contain the loftiest wisdom.

I cannot live without reading.

I don't know, I can't quite get it. Don't try. It's just words. Just words? Just words! We love them so much, you and me. But in the end, they fail us. Because there are truths beyond words.

These days people don't search for the Truth. People study simply in order to find knowledge necessary to make a living, raise families and look after themselves, that's all. To them, being smart is more important than being wise!

I've learned one thing-people who know the least anyways seem to know it the loudest.

We are sensitized by the books we read. And the more books we read, and the deeper their lessons sink into us, the more pairs of glasses we have. And those glasses enable us to see things we would have otherwise missed.

Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.

The important books should be those that leave us wondering, with relief and gratitude, how the author could possibly have known so much about our lives. But

Curiosity takes ignorance seriously, and is confident enough to admit when it does not know. It is aware of not knowing, and it sets out to do something about it

We start trying to be wise when we realize that we are not born knowing how to live, but that life is a skill that has to be acquired

Academic masochism reflects a metaphysical prejudice that the truth should be a hard-won treasure, that what is read or learnt easily must therefore be flighty and inconsequential. The truth should be like a mount to be scaled, it is dangerous, obscure and demanding. Under the light of the library reading room, the academics' motto reads: the more a text makes me suffer, the truer it must be.

It's clear to me that there is no good reason for many philosophy books to sound as complicated as they do.

It is not the contented or the glowing who have left many of the profound testimonies of what it means to be alive. It seems that such knowledge has usually been the privileged preserve of, and the only blessing granted to, the violently miserable.

We feel guilty for all that we have not yet read, but overlook how much better read we already are than Augustine or Dante, thereby ignoring that our problem lies squarely with our manner of absorption rather than with the extent of our consumption.

To grow interested in any piece of information, we need somewhere to 'put' it, which means some way of connecting it to an issue we already now how to care about.