Quotes About Knowledge

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

Fear always springs from ignorance.

The years teach much the days never know.

We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation -rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.

In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.

There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant

A man is known by the books he reads.

We are wiser than we know.

Every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side.

Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him.

When I read a good book, I wish my life were three thousand years long.

Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science.

I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship.

Science does not know its debt to imagination.

A man's library is a sort of harem.

Meek young men grow up in libraries believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote those books.

there is no planet, sun, or star could hold you if you but knew what you are.

We are by nature observers, and thereby learners. That is our permanent state.

We mark with light in the memory the few interviews we have had with souls that made our souls wiser, that spoke what we thought, that told us what we knew, that gave us leave to be what we inly are.

When we are young, we spend much time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that, in the course of a few years, we shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories at which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get no completeness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola, whose arcs will never meet.

Before we acquire great power we must acquire wisdom to use it well.

The years teach us much, which the days never knew.

The man who knows how will always have a job. The man who knows why will always be his boss.

Only so much of life do I know as I have lived.