Quotes About Knowledge

Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory is too good.

Close beside my knowledge lies my black ignorance.

No one dies of fatal truths nowadays: there are too many antidotes.

The more abstract the truth you wish to teach, the more you need to seduce the senses to it.

He who speaks a bit of a foreign language has more delight in it than he who speaks it well; pleasure goes along with superficial knowledge.

We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge - and with good reason. We have never sought ourselves - how could it happen that we should ever find ourselves? It has rightly been said: Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also; our treasure is where the beehives of our knowledge are.

Your educators can only be your liberators.

I consist of body and soul - in the worlds of a child. And why shouldn't we speak like children? But the enlightened, the knowledgealbe would say: I am body through and through, nothing more; and the soul is just a word for something on the body.

In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering among innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge.

Ultimately no one can hear in things?books included?more than he already knows. If you have no access to something from experience, you will have no ear for it.

Whoever knows he is deep, strives for clarity; whoever would like to appear deep to the crowd, strives for obscurity. For the crowd considers anything deep if only it cannot see to the bottom: the crowd is so timid and afraid of going into the water.

What does our great historical hunger signify, our clutching about us of countless cultures, our consuming desire for knowledge, if not the loss of myth, of a mythic home, the mythic womb?

No one can draw more out of things, books included, than he already knows. A man has no ears for that to which experience has given him no access.

Only ideas won by walking have any value.

Indeed, at hearing the news that 'the old god is dead', we philosophers and 'free spirits' feel illuminated by a new dawn; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, forebodings, expectation - finally the horizon seems clear again, even if not bright; finally our ships may set out again, set out to face any danger; every daring of the lover of knowledge is allowed again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; maybe there has never been such an 'open sea'.

In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the haughtiest and most mendacious minute of world history- yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die.

One thing a man must have: either a naturally light disposition or a disposition lightened by art and knowledge.

It was a subtle refinement of God to learn Greek when he wished to write a book – and that he did not learn it better.

None of the people have any real interest in a science, who only begin to be enthusiastic about it when they themselves have made discoveries in it.

Even the most courageous among us only rarely has the courage to face what he already knows.

Mystical explanations are considered deep. The truth is that they are not even superficial.

Every acquisition, every step forward in knowledge is the result of courage, of severity toward oneself, of cleanliness with respect to oneself.

He who does not lie does not know what truth is.

Great intellects are skeptical.