Quotes About Knowledge

socrates. There's one proposition that I'd defend to the death, if I could, by argument and by action: that as long as we think we should search for what we don't know, we'll be better people—less faint-hearted and less lazy—than if we were to think that we had no chance of discovering what we don't know and that there's no point in even searching for it. Meno 86bc

If we treat Socrates as an internalized feature of the mind, then this is its first and constant order of business: uprooting false conceits of knowledge.

Aporia can not only prepare you to learn but make you want to learn.4 It feels frustrating. In effect Socrates says: good—now get going on the search for an answer, this time with a better sense of the work it takes. You are made hungry for knowledge by discovering how little you have.

If you would attain real freedom, you must be the slave of philosophy. Epicurus, quoted in Seneca, Epistles 8.7

You ask what the finest life span would be? To live until you reach wisdom.

On a Socratic view it's never time to give up. We do better by accepting that the search probably has no end but going on anyway as if it might. For even if you can't possess the truth, you can get closer to it.

He explained what he saw in her eyes, which was not sadness or disappointment but understanding. Sympathy, he said, and wit. At some level sympathy implied knowledge and knowledge had a melancholy aspect. He believed that was universally true, no exceptions. When you knew too much you felt a natural distress but that was something quite different from fundamental personal sadness, sadness as a trait, like blue eyes. Her distress was not temperamental but intellectual.

Axel smiled. "They say that good judgment comes from experience. And experience come from bad judgment." Alec laughed...

It also helps to have a wide base of knowledge on all sorts of things that might seem to be unrelated to the problem—the more eclectic your storehouse of information, the more possibilities for unexpected connections.

The designer George Lois, who claims some of his best ideas have come while meandering through the Metropolitan Museum, says, "Museums are the custodians of epiphanies.")

or flashlights that, in the words of Dan Rothstein of the Right Question Institute (RQI), "shine a light on where you need6 to go.

In Hal Gregersen's study of business leaders who question, he found that they exhibited an unusual "blend of humility and confidence"15—they were humble enough to acknowledge a lack of knowledge, and confident enough to admit this in front of others.

nonexperts or outsiders are often better at questioning than the experts. No one would argue that expert knowledge isn't valuable—but when it's time to question, it can get in the way.

What makes you think you know more than the experts? (The answer is that you don't know more, you know less—which sometimes is a good thing.) Another

In some ways, it can be more difficult or risky for those in authority to question. In Hal Gregersen's study of business leaders who question, he found that they exhibited an unusual "blend of humility and confidence"15—they were humble enough to acknowledge a lack of knowledge, and confident enough to admit this in front of others.

In a time when so much of what we know is subject to revision or obsolescence, the comfortable expert must go back to being a restless learner.

If we're born to inquire, then why must it be taught?

One of the most important things questioning does is to enable people to think and act in the face of uncertainty. As Steve Quatrano of the Right Question Institute puts it, forming questions helps us "to organize our thinking around18 what we don't know.

You don't learn unless you question.

Don't just teach your children to read. Teach them to question what they read. Teach them to question everything." After

We arrive at originality because the dendrites have reached out and made contact with the branches of faraway "trees," thereby enabling us to combine thoughts, bits of knowledge, and influences that normally do not mix.

If past history was all there was to the game, the richest people would be librarians.

The smarter the journalists are, the better off society is. For to a degree, people read the press to inform themselves - and the better the teacher, the better the student body.

Read 500 pages every day. That's how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will do it."