Quotes About Knowledge

I don't want the books [...] to be too far away; they, also, have become friends. I even feel this way about books I don't own. In libraries, I find myself visiting the books I used before. I regard those rows of memoirs and letters as voices from the past, bound into books, and I like to make sure they are all there, alive and well. If they have collected dust, I take out the small towel I carry in my briefcase and wipe them off. -from 2012 NYT Book Review Essay

This story of human progress is a myth, however. If the last century has taught us anything, it is that scientific and technological progress and the expansion of knowledge, while capable of improving our lives materially, have brought no lasting improvement in human behavior.

New capabilities emerge just by virtue of having smart people with access to state-of-the-art technology.

We are already the most over informed, under reflective people in a history of civilisation. We already have a 24h news cycle, internet newspapers and continuous information about day to day unfolding of civic proceedings. Better informed people are not necessarily better educated people.

There is no greater burden than to be cursed with knowledge.

I know how to use the safety.-Andrea, the Walking Dead S3 finale

Academic qualifications are important and so is financial education. They're both important and schools are forgetting one of them.

Most men, it seemed to them, went through life never really knowing themselves. A man might consider himself noble or brave or just, they believed, but until he was truly tested it would always be mere opinion.

it was easy to get an incomplete picture of the world if one relied solely on experts, and how important is would be to further rely on oneself

History was a crystal ball that told as much about the future as it did about the past.

Social network research suggests that people gain knowledge and power by occupying specific positions in a network. Those who bridge relatively disconnected pockets of a network are promoted earlier and are more mobile in their careers because they hear about opportunities before others do.

That Light "enlightens every man that comes into the world, and . . . strives with the children of men, and will continue to strive with them, until it brings them to a knowledge of the truth and the possession of the greater light and testimony of the Holy Ghost."15

The Lord needs us. He needs us to be knowledgeable, dependable, and competent disciples. We need to know not only that the gospel is true but we need to know the gospel, better than we do right now. We need to be in the right place at the right time. We will thereby become the right person.

The conclusion of both modern physics and depth psychology is that things are not what they seem. What we experience as normal reality—about ourselves and nature—is only the tip of an iceberg that arises out of an unfathomable abyss. Knowledge of this hidden realm is the province of the Magician, and it is through the Magician energy that we will come to understand our lives with a degree of profundity not dreamed of for at least a thousand years of Western history.

In other words, what we know for sure is entirely limited, and all the rest is basically opinion.

While he values science he understands that apart from God there is no reliable basis for doing science.

And if we fail to recognize within the Scriptures our Master's voice speaking his infallible truth to us from his world to our world, we destroy ourselves not only epistemically but also personally, for we abandon the only foundation for the certainty of knowledge and the only "meaning base" by which we may truly know the One infinite, personal God and thereby ourselves as persons of dignity and worth.2

When Albert Einstein was in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, an eager young newspaper reporter approached him one day, notebook in hand. "Well, Professor Einstein," he asked, "what's new in science?" Einstein looked at him with his deep, soft eyes and replied, "Oh? Have you already written about all the old science?

A person obsessed with ultimate truth is a person asking to be relieved of money.

the burial practices in the Pharonic tradition were undertaken not merely to provide a receptacle for the physical body of the deceased, but also to make a place to retain the metaphysical knowledge which the person had mastered in his lifetime

All the learning in the world cannot replace instinct.

Knowledge was like candy: you never turned it down, especially if you didn't have to work too hard to get it.

I am a bookworm. For play, I bury myself in the corners of libraries and read.

Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.