Quotes About Knowledge

They came into being simultaneously in a garden, Eve and Adam, fully grown and naked and enjoying you could say the first Big Bang, and they had no idea how they got there until a snake led them to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and when they ate its fruit they both simultaneously came up with the idea of a creator-god, a good- and-evil decider, a gardener-god who made the garden, otherwise where did the garden come from, and then planted them in it like rootless plants. And

The lessons one learns at school are not always the ones the school thinks it's teaching.

unkept secrets always manage to escape, under a door, through a keyhole or an open window, until everyon knows everything and nobody knows how ... (...)

If one had never had the good fortune of meeting Borges, then meeting his library was the next best thing

Saladin had been seized by the melancholy notion that the garden had been a better place before he knew its names, that something had been lost which he would never be able to regain.

Now the only person you think is lying to you is the expert who actually knows something. He's the one not to believe because he's the elite and the elites are against the people

Pagas lo que debes. He hecho de ti un hombre.» Pero ¿qué hombre? Eso es algo que los padres nunca saben. No lo saben de antemano; no lo saben hasta que ya es tarde.)

In the evenings they sat in pools of yellow light, books on their laps, lost in words. They looked like figures in a Rembrandt painting, Two Philosophers Deep in Meditation, and they were more valuable than any canvas; maybe members of the last generation of their kind, and we, we who are post-, who come after, will regret we did not learn more at their feet.

description of the world contains facts, certainly, and facts, as we've seen, are fluttery, elusive creatures, but there are armies of fact lepidopterists chasing after them, and sometimes they do get nailed to the wall, like moths.

I told you so',was Abdullah Noman's favourite song,because he was cursed with the curse of knowing too much and the double curse of being unable to avoid pointing this out even though it made Firdus Begum threaten to hit him on the head with a stone.

If faith is what you have to go on, if faith is the link between your beliefs and the world at large, your beliefs are very likely to be wrong. Beliefs can be right or wrong. If you believe you can fly, that belief is only true if indeed you can fly. Somebody who thinks he can fly, and is wrong about it, will eventually discover there's a problem with his view of the world.

Faith does not offer a strong link between our beliefs and actual states of the world.

Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance. [...] By failing to live by the letter of the texts [scripture], while tolerating the irrationality of those who do, religious moderates betray faith and reason equally.

It is also true that the less competent a person is in a given domain, the more he will tend to overestimate his abilities. This often produces an ugly marriage of confidence and ignorance that is very difficult to correct for.

What is the alternative to religion as we know it? As it turns out, this is the wrong question to ask. Chemistry was not an "alternative" to alchemy; it was a wholesale exchange of ignorance at its most rococo for genuine knowledge. We will find that, as with alchemy, to speak of "alternatives" to religious faith is to miss the point.

Anyone being flown to a distant city for heart-bypass surgery has conceded, tacitly at least, that we have learned a few things about physics, geography, engineering, and medicine since the time of Moses.

Imagine that we could revive a well-educated Christian of the fourteenth century. The man would prove to be a total ignoramus, except on matters of faith. His beliefs about geography, astronomy, and medicine would embarrass even a child, but he would know more or less everything there is to know about God.

In fact, we can directly experience that consciousness is never improved or harmed by what it knows. Making this discovery, again and again, is the basis of spiritual life.

Religious moderation springs from the fact that even the least educated person among us simply knows more about certain matters than anyone did two thousand years ago.

You don't get anything worth getting by pretending to know things you don't know.

One thing each of us knows for certain is that reality vastly exceeds our awareness of it.

Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance—and it has no bona fides, in religious terms, to put it on a par with fundamentalism.

What we need to become happier and to make the world a better place is not more pious illusions but a clearer understanding of the way things are.

It is time we admitted, from kings and presidents on down, that there is no evidence that any of our books was authored by the Creator of the universe.