Quotes About Knowledge

The weight of absence is as much a feature of any library as the constriction of order and space.

Sartre, in his memoirs, confessed to much the same experience. Like Plato, I passed from knowledge to its subject. I found more reality in the idea than in the thing because it was given to me first and because it was given for a thing. It was in books that I encountered the universe: digested, classified, labelled, mediated, still formidable.

It is likely that libraries will carry on and survive, as long as we persist in lending words to the world that surrounds us, and storing them for future readers.

Alexandria and its scholars […] never mistook the true nature of the past; they knew it to be the source of an ever-shifting present in which new readers engaged with old books which became new in the reading process. Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth.

I quickly learned that reading is cumulative and proceeds by geometrical progression: each new reading builds upon whatever the reader has read before.

For Borges, the core of reality lay in books; reading books, writing books, talking about books. In a visceral way, he was conscious of continuing a dialogue begun thousands of years before and which he believed would never end.

I have no feeling of guilt regarding the books I have not read and perhaps will never read; I know that my books have unlimited patience. They will wait for me till the end of my days. They don't require that I pretend to know them all, nor do they urge me to become one of the professional book-handlers ... who greedily collect books but do not read them....

Libraries are not, never will be, used by everyone.

Every book can be, for the right reader, an oracle, responding on occasion even to questions unasked..

Books are our best possessions in life, they are our immortality.

We read to understand, or to begin to understand

I've often felt that my library explained who I was, gave me a shifting self that transformed itself constantly throughout the years.

And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them anything, you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they will know nothing. And as men filled not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellow-men.

The books on my shelves do not know me until I open them, yet I am certain that they address me — me and every other reader — by name; they await our comments and opinions. I am presumed in Plato as I am presumed in every book, even in those I'll never read.

A library is not only a place of both order and chaos; it is also the realm of chance. Books, even after they have been given a shelf and a number, retain a mobility of their own.

Each reader is but one chapter in the life of a book, and unless he passes his knowledge on to others, it is as if he condemned the book to be buried alive.

Noter nos impressions sur Hamlet après une relecture annuelle, écrivait Virginia Woolf, reviendrait à rédiger notre autobiographie puisque dès que nous en savons plus de la vie, Shakespeare commente ce que nous savons.

Like Petrach's, my books know infinitely more than I do, and I'm grateful that they even tolerate my presence. At times I feel that I abuse the privilege.

The love of libraries, like most loves, must be learned. Books are transformed by the sequence in which they are read.

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Imensamente generosos, os meus livros, não me fazem nenhuma exigência, antes me oferecem todo tipo de iluminação.

Tal como os livros de Petrarca, os meus sabem infinitamente mais do que eu e agradeço-lhes por sequer tolerarem a minha presença. Por vezes, sinto que abuso desse privilégio.

The existence of any library, even mine, allows readers a sense of what their craft is truly about, a craft that struggles against the stringencies of time by bringing fragments of the past into their present. It grants them a glimpse, however secret or distant, into the minds of other human beings, and allows them a certain knowledge of their own condition through the stories stored here for their perusal.

I could perhaps live without writing. I don't think I could live without reading.