Quotes About Knowledge

Not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, does the enlightened man dislike to wade into its waters

He who considers more deeply knows that, whatever his acts and judgements may be, he is always wrong.

One always has exaggerated ideas about what one doesn't know.

Mathematics would certainly have not come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no actual circle, no absolute magnitude.

Wherever life and knowledge seemed to contradict each other, there was never any serious struggle: in such cases, denial and doubt amounted to madness.

It is still a metaphysical faith that underlies our faith in science—and we men seekers after knowledge today, we godless ones and anti-metaphysicians, we, too, derive our flame from the fire ignited by a faith millennia old, the Christian faith, which was also Plato's, that God is truth, that truth is divine.

O Voltaire! O humanity! O idiocy! There is something ticklish in the truth, and in the SEARCH for the truth; and if man goes about it too humanely—il ne cherche le vrai que pour faire le bien—I wager he finds nothing!

What is familiar is what we are used to; and what we are used to is most difficult to 'Know' - that is, to see as a problem; that is, to see as strange, as distant, as 'outside us'.

We have abolished the real world: what world is left? The apparent world perhaps? . . . But no! with the real world we have also abolished the apparent world.

Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion: that is the doctrine of Hamlet, not that cheap wisdom of Jack the Dreamer who reflects too much and, as it were, from an excess of possibilities does not get around to action. Not reflection, no—true knowledge, an insight into the horrible truth, outweighs any motive for action, both in Hamlet and in the Dionysian man.

Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity.

Do you believe then that the sciences would ever have arisen and become great if there had not beforehand been magicians, alchemists, astrologers and wizards, who thirsted and hungered after abscondite and forbidden powers?

The more thoroughly a person understands life, the less he will mock, though in the end he might still mock the thoroughness of his understanding.

It is not enough to prove something, one has also to seduce or elevate people to it. That is why the man of knowledge should learn how to speak his wisdom: and often in such a way that it sounds like folly!

Forgetfulness is a property of all action. The man of action is also without knowledge: he forgets most things in order to do one, he is unjust to what is behind him, and only recognizes one law - the law of that which is to be.

Ultimately, nobody can get more out of things, including books, than he already knows.

Prejudice of the learned. – The learned judge correctly that people of all ages have believed they know what is good and evil, praise- and blameworthy. But it is a prejudice of the learned that we now know better than any other age.

Or is it this: To feed on the acorns and grass of knowledge, and for the sake of truth to suffer hunger in one's soul?

Only when he has attained a final knowledge of all things will man have come to know himself. For things are only the boundaries of man.

What then in the last resort are the truths of mankind?--They are the irrefutable errors of mankind.

The tremendous historical need of our unsatisfied modern culture, the assembling around one of countless other cultures, the consuming desire for knowledge--what does all this point to, if not to the loss of myth, the loss of the mythical home, the mythical maternal womb?

synthetic judgments a priori should not be possible at all; we have no right to them; in our mouths they are nothing but false judgments.

Thereby men do not flee from being deceived as much as from being damaged by deception: what they hate at this stage is basically not the deception but the bad, hostile consequences of certain kinds of deceptions. In a similarly limited way man wants the truth: he desires the agreeable life-preserving consequences of truth, but he is indifferent to pure knowledge, which has no consequences; he is even hostile to possibly damaging and destructive truths.

We know that the destruction of an ideal does not necessarily produce a truth, but only one more piece of ignorance; it is the extension of our 'empty space,' an increase in our 'waste.