Quotes About Knowledge

There is no knowledge that is not power.

Years teach much which the days never knew.

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst...They are for nothing but to inspire.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education, but the means to an education.

The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide.

He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds.

O Day of days when we can read! The reader and the book, either without the other is naught.

Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar's idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men's transcripts of their readings.

There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent.

Life is a festival only to the wise.

I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of the globe, for the purposes of art, of study, and benevolence, so that the man is first domesticated, or does not go abroad with the hope of finding somewhat greater than he knows. He who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat which he does not carry, travels away from himself, and grows old even in youth among old things

Books are the best type of influence of the past...Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this.

a man only knows what he's experienced

Why covet a knowledge of new facts? Day and night, house and garden, a few books, a few actions, serve us as well as would all trades and all spectacles. We are far from having exhausted the significance of the few symbols we use. We can come to use them yet with a terrible simplicity.

The soul is the perceiver and revealer of truth. We know the truth when we see it, let skeptic and scoffer say what they choose.

Our knowledge is the amassed thought and experience of innumerable minds.

The soul is superior to its knowledge; wiser than any of its works.

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.

It could be said that a single person has written all the books in the world such central unity is in them that they are undeniably the work of a single all-knowing master.

A great man quotes bravely, and will not draw on his invention when his memory serves him with a word just as good.

Thought and knowledge are natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns, and pecuniary foundations, though of towns of gold, can never countervail the least sentence or syllable of wit. Forget this, and out American colleges will recede in their public importance whilst they grow richer every year.

The learned and the studious of thought have no monopoly of wisdom. Their violence of direction in some degree disqualifies them to think truly. We owe many valuable observations to people who are not very acute or profound, and who say the thing without effort which we want and have long been hunting in vain.

Foolish people ask you, when you speak what they do not wish to hear, How do you know it is the truth, and not an error of your own? We know the truth when we see it, from opinion, as we know when we are awake that we are awake.