Quotes About Knowledge

widening gap between knowledge and the moral maturity of mankind. And he foresaw disaster if the gap was not narrowed.

not say and Max had known better than to ask.

Learning became her. She loved the smell of the book from the shelves, the type on the pages, the sense that the world was an infinite but knowable place. Every fact she learned seemed to open another question, and for every question there was another book.

She thought of her life, her patchwork quilt of a life, pieced together from castoff scraps of this and that; experience, knowledge, clairvoyance. None of it made any sense to her.

For every question, there is a book.

Nothing is real for me until I've read about it.

Colleges are places where pebbles are polished and diamonds are dimmed.

There is no harmony between religion and science. When science was a child, religion sought to strangle it in the cradle. Now that science has attained its youth, and superstition is in its dotage, the trembling, palsied wreck says to the athlete: "Let us be friends." It reminds me of the bargain the cock wished to make with the horse: "Let us agree not to step on each other's feet.

Science does not persecute. It does not shed blood—it fills the world with light. It cares nothing for heresy; it develops the mind, and enables man to answer his own prayers.

Few fallacies are more dangerous or easier to fall into than that by which, having read a given book, we assume that we will continue to know its contents permanently, or having mastered a discipline in the past, we assume that we control it in the present. Philosophically speaking, "to learn" is a verb with not legitimate tense.

All great experience has a guarded entrance and a windowless facade.

Young people err through ignorance; but older people err through oblivion to dramatic but simple truths, learned and forgotten a hundred times. The ignorance of the young has the inviting vacancy of the outdoors; but the oblivion of the old is a noxious void behind a sneer of wisdom.

A monstrous fallacy of time, so ingrained that it is almost automatic, is the idea that we necessarily learn more and more about important human experiences as time passes.

historian C. V Wedgwood, "History is lived forwards but it is written in retrospect. We know the end before we consider the beginning and we can never wholly recapture what it was to know the beginning only."43

Free advice is worth the price.

We are to seek wisdom and understanding only in the length of days.

People perish. Books are immortal.

People will perish, but books are immortal. (Pompeii)

You can always spot a fool, for he is a man who will tell you he knows who is going to win an election.

Imagination runs through the places where we live like water. We need both things-a living knowledge of the land and a live imagination of it and our place in it- if we are going to preserve it.

If the keepers of books, journals, films, compact discs, and software do not vigilantly defend free expression and intellectual freedom, who will?

There is weakness in pretending to know more than you know or in stating less than you know.

There is all the difference in the world between knowing that a catastrophe is going to happen, and knowing that it has happened.

Ignorance may be bliss, but it certainly is not freedom, except in the minds of those who prefer darkness to light and chains to liberty. The more true information we can acquire, the better for our enfranchisement.