Quotes About Knowledge

To live automatically and uncritically is to be assured of at least a minimum share of the programmed cultural heroics—what we might call "prison heroism": the smugness of the insiders who "know.

man can never securely know what absolute reality is.

never has there been an age in which so little knowledge is securely possessed, so little a part of the common understanding.

At what cost do we purchase the assurance that we are heroic? No doubt, one of the reasons Becker has never found a mass audience is because he shames us with the knowledge of how easily we will shed blood to purchase the assurance of our own righteousness.

Even a mole may instruct a philosopher in the art of digging.

We must know the facts and be guided by them...nature does not forgive fools nor does she spare them the penalties of their folly

But the whole idea of knowledge, even, or especially, of oneself and one's own inner states, attained by direct contact and not dependent on theoretical and conceptual assumptions, is absurd.

Naively, one may suppose those at the Top who take decisions are poly­mathic supermen, somehow qualified to assess the many-sided implications of their decisions. Acquaintance with any of them dispels such illusions.

How little we know of what there is to know. I wish that I were going to live a long time instead of going to die today because I have learned much about life in these four days; more, I think than in all other time. I'd like to be an old man to really know. I wonder if you keep on learning or if there is only a certain amount each man can understand. I thought I knew so many things that I know nothing of. I wish there was more time.

I don't feel any way,' the girl said. 'I just know things.

No; that doesn't interest me.' 'That's because you never read a book about it.

The great thing is to last and get your work done and see and hear and learn and understand; and write when there is something that you know; and not before, and not too damned much after.

There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man's life to know them the little that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave.

He had always known what I did not know and what, when I learned it, I was always able to forget. But I did not know that then, although I learned it later.

We never get anything. We are born with all we have and we never learn. We never get anything new. We all start complete.

Love is all the dirty little tricks you taught me that you probably got out of some book.

There is seven-eights of it under water for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn't show. If a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story. (Interview with Paris Review , 1958)

Good writing is true writing. If a man is making a story up it will be true in proportion to the amount of knowledge of life that he has and how conscientious he is; so that when he makes something up it is as it would truly be.

He knew everything when he started. The others can't ever learn what he was born with.

How little we know of what there is to know.

if I had waited long enough I probably never would have written anything at all since there is a tendency when you really begin to learn something about a thing not to want to write about it but rather to keep on learning about it always and at no time, unless you are very egotistical, which, of course, accounts for many books, will you be able to say: now I know all about this and will write about it.

I'm always reading books—as many as there are. I ration myself on them so that I'll always be in supply.

Here's the reason why the peasant is wise. He's wise because he's beaten from the very start. Give him power and then you'll see how wise he is.

If you had stars inside your brain cells, you'd probably understand what I am talking about.