Quotes About Knowledge

Man's most valuable trait is a judicious sense of what not to believe.

Flexibility and choice for workers create higher levels of trust, ownership of work, and productivity among knowledge workers than work arrangements defined by constant monitoring and set hours and locations.

If there's one thing every good novelist understands, it's that our inner world is unreliable and yet there's no getting beyond it. Every sense is subject to deception, including the moral sense. What seems at first like the hard surface of spiritual reality is really fathomless when you dive down into it. There is no bottom. We neve know anything for sure. (p. xvi)

This, finally, is the model of all radicalism, in the grip of which men reenact the fall of man as adults so often reenact their childhood traumas. Radicals transgress the paradox of virtue because they claim the knowledge of good and evil for themselves and strip the power to freely choose virtue from others. In this way, they transform their imagined paradise into a living hell.

That was the trouble with searching for the truth. It wasn't always pleasant. It wasn't always something you wanted to find.

I could head east from Fifth Avenue and reliably reach Madison, turn south from 53rd and get to 52nd every single time. The scientist—or the Buddhist—might declare such perceptions were illusions, but not one of them would head uptown to get to the Bowery. They knew what they knew. They saw what they saw. So

the very fact that the mind can be deceived implies that it can be not deceived, that it can know things rightly—deep things—beauty, truth—just as they are.

Knowledge can be acquired systematically, wisdom cannot.

Young men, especially in America, write to me and ask me to recommend "a course of reading." Distrust a course of reading! People who really care for books read all of them. There is no other course.

You can cover a great deal of country in books.

Here stand my books, line upon line They reach the roof, and row by row, They speak of faded tastes of mine, And things I did, but do not, know.

So labour at your Alphabet, For by that learning shall you get To lands where Fairies may be met.

I guess we've had a very close relationship because I don't pretend to know about cinema and I think I do know a bit about theatre but he does, he respected that and so we really just had a collaboration which went completely like this.

We humans have been brilliantly clever... almost as clever as we think we are, though not, perhaps, as wise.

So much one man can do,That does both act and know.

A mistake we make too often in science is thinking that having a name for something is the same as understanding it. A skeleton in a museum or a drop of blood

How do you weigh the known versus the unknown? You can't. It all comes down to what statistics you choose to believe.

one of the gifts of science: when you discover a new truth, you also gain a new way of looking at things that can change your perspective.

People tend to think that scientists are experts in all things, when in fact we can be so specialized we know less than a layperson about many scientific topics—like bear behavior.

People tend to think that scientists are experts in all things, when in fact we can be so specialized we know less

A mistake we make too often in science is thinking that having a name for something is the same as understanding it.

you want to get as close to the data as you can get, because it's the questions you don't know to ask that will make all the difference.

The only thing intelligent people hate almost as much as making mistakes is being wrong.

I save him my diatribe about people with bullshit EdDs and PsyDs that I've run into in academia who couldn't pass a fifth-grade science exam all insisting that they be addressed with the same reverence as the head of oncology at a research hospital.