Quotes About Knowledge

My Latin teacher would say, "We must be grateful that we don't know what the great books were that perished in Alexandria, because if we knew what they were, we'd be inconsolable.

Habla el autor] A los cuatro años descubrí que sabía leer. (...) No aprendí a escribir hasta mucho después, cumplidos los siete años. Quizá pudiese vivir sin escribir. No creo que pudiera vivir sin leer. (...)

Literature is not dogma: it offers questions, not conclusive answers. Libraries are essentially places of intellectual freedom: any constraints imposed upon them are our own. Reading is, or can be, the open-ended means by which we come to know a little more about the world and about ourselves, not through opposition but through recognition of words addressed to us individually, far away, and long ago.

the satisfaction of one answer merely leads to asking another question, and so on into infinity.

What we put into words are the shadows of shadows, and every book confesses the impossibility of holding fully onto whatever it is that our experience seizes. All our libraries are the glorious records of that failure.

Every library both embraces and rejects. Every library is by definition the result of choice, and necessarily limited in its scope. And every choice excludes another, the choice not made. The act of reading parallels endlessly the act of censorship.

Aprendí pronto que la lectura es acumulativa y que avanza por progresión geométrica; cada lectura nueva se construye sobre lo que el lector ha leído antes.

Pero no sólo los gobiernos totalitarios le temen a la lectura. En los patios de las escuelas y en los vestuarios de los clubes deportivos se intimida a los lectores tanto como en los despachos gubernamentales y en las prisiones.

Along its walls were endless bibliothekai, a term which originally designated not the room but the shelves or niches for the scrolls. Above the shelves there was an inscription: The place of the cure of the soul.

The idea persists even today: our books will bear witness for or against us, our books reflect who we are and who we have been, our books hold the share of pages granted to us from the Book of Life. By the books we call ours we will be judged.

Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.

The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the non-intellectuals have never stirred.

The more a man knows about himself in relation to every kind of experience, the greater his chance of suddenly, one fine morning, realizing who in fact he is...

Back to culture. Yes, actually to culture. You can't consume much if you sit still and read books.

Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful.

I know the outer world as well as you do, and I judge it. You know nothing of my inner world, and yet you presume to judge that world.

Everyone who knows how to read has it in their power to magnify themselves, to multiply the ways in which they exist, to make their life full, significant, and interesting.

Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.

He was a philosopher, if you know what that was.' 'A man who dreams of fewer things than there are in heaven and earth,' said the Savage promptly. 'Quite so…

I used to think I had no will to power. Now I perceive that I vented it on thoughts, rather than people. Conquering an unknown province of knowledge. Getting the better of a problem. Forcing ideas to associate or come apart. Bullying recalcitrant words to assume a certain pattern. All the fun of being a dictator without any risks and responsibilities.

science has explained nothing; ...the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness....

Knowledge is a function of being. When there is a change in the being of the knower, there is a corresponding change in the nature and amount of knowing.

Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.

Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hallmark of true science.