Quotes About Knowledge

I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.

He wasn't smart enough to see it, said Jason Bourne. He couldn't think geometrically.

It is easier to believe a lie that one has heard a thousand times than to believe a fact that one has never heard before.

History may be read as the story of the magnificent rearguard action fought during several thousand years by dogma against curiosity.

action in an absence of information is wasted effort

ancestors.… If these things are lost or broken or destroyed, we lose a valuable part of our knowledge about our forefathers. No age lives entirely alone; every civilisation is formed not merely by its own achievements but by what it has inherited from the past. If these things are destroyed, we have lost a part of our past, and we shall be the poorer for it. —British Monuments Man Ronald Balfour, draft lecture for soldiers, 1944 All

What I know concerns me. What I don't know concerns me even more. What people aren't telling me worries me the most.

A book of quotations . . . can never be complete.

No one has ever died, from an overexposure to education.

The college graduate is presented with a sheepskin to cover his intellectual nakedness.

The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives.

To put an end to the spirit of inquiry that has characterized the West it is not necessary to burn the books. All we have to do is to leave them unread for a few generations.

Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty thousand page menu, and no food.

The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for the truth," and so it goes away. Puzzling.

The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure nature hasn't misled you into thinking you know something you actually don't know.

And what is good, Phaedrus, And what is not good— Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?

But if subjective pietism is not the real crux of this all-important Gospel, if it is instead belief in the plan of salvation, how are we not dealing with "salvation by (cognitive) works" and Gnosticism (salvation by special knowledge)? Fundamentalists hotly deny it, but isn't it finally a matter of believers in the right religion being saved and everyone else being disqualified?

I once sheepishly asked a prominent Evangelical apologist, with his PhD in New Testament, if he had ever chanced to read Strauss's Life of Jesus Critically Examined. He had not. Things began to become clear to me. He didn't know that all his trusty arguments had been thoroughly refuted many decades before he was born.

Stephanie knew mat in many things

become a bastion of willful ignorance

Where Einstein was pushing the boundaries of knowledge forward, in the hope of learning ever more, Rashid was studying the past, in the hope of gleaning from it what man might, to his sorrow, have forgotten.

But how could she have forgotten who he was—a man who could lose himself in a single book, not to mention a world-class, open-stack library, for hours on end?

Robert Masello

Gödel freely admitted that the intuition of a concept was not proof; he argued that it was the opposite. "We do not analyze intuition to see a proof, but by intuition we see something without a proof." Recently, however, he'd gone beyond that conclusion, too, and asserted that there must then logically be a realm unknowable to our simple senses, where ultimate truth resided.