Quotes About Knowledge

For the first time, I felt my mind being stretched — and I loved it. I realized that thinking could be fun, and with that simple realization I was sent headlong into the lifelong discipline of reading. I

It is possible to hold a treasure in your hand but be ignorant of it and go for the wrapping instead. This proximity to truth and distance from its worth is repeated innumerable times in our lives.

A book is a loaded gun in the house next door...Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?

There's no use going to school unless your final destination is the library.

Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.

A stranger is shot in the street, you hardly move to help. But if, half an hour before, you spent just ten minutes with the fellow and knew a little about him and his family, you might just jump in front of his killer and try to stop it. Really knowing is good. Not knowing, or refusing to know is bad, or amoral, at least. You can't act if you don't know.

You're afraid of making mistakes. Don't be. Mistakes can be profited by. Man, when I was young I shoved my ignorance in people's faces. They beat me with sticks. By the time I was forty my blunt instrument had been honed to a fine cutting point for me. If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn.

Libraries raised me.

I ate them like salad, books were my sandwich for lunch, my tiffin and dinner and midnight munch. I tore out the pages, ate them with salt, doused them with relish, gnawed on the bindings, turned the chapters with my tongue! Books by the dozen, the score and the billion. I carried so many home I was hunchbacked for years. Philosophy, art history, politics, social science, the poem, the essay, the grandiose play, you name 'em, I ate 'em.

A book is a loaded gun.

The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are.

We have everything we need to be happy but we aren't happy. Something is missing... It is not books you need, it's some of the things that are in books. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.

His library was a fine dark place bricked with books, so anything could happen there and always did. All you had to do was pull a book from the shelf and open it and suddenly the darkness was not so dark anymore.

The beginning of wisdom, as they say. When you're seventeen you know everything. When you're twenty-seven if you still know everything you're still seventeen.

What's the point of having a library full of books you've already read?

For if we're destroyed, the knowledge is dead...We're nothing more than dust jackets for books...so many pages to a person...

Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change. Don't give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.

Do you ever read any of the books you burn? He laughed. That's against the law! Oh. Of course.

The problem in our country isn't with books being banned, but with people no longer reading. You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

Remember, the firemen are rarely necessary. The public itself stopped reading of its own accord.

Ignorance is fatal.

Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damm insane mistakes!

Most of us can't rush around, talk to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven't time, money or that many friends. The things you're looking for... are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book.

Garrett, said Stendahl, do you know why I've done this to you? Because you burned Mr. Poe's books without really reading them. You took other people's advice that they needed burning. Otherwise you'd have realized what I was going to do to you when we came down here a moment ago. Ignorance is fatal, Mr. Garrett.