quotations about knowledge
In the world we live in, what we know and what we don't know are like Siamese twins, inseparable, existing in a state of confusion.
HARUKI MURAKAMI
Sputnik Sweetheart
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance.
T. S. ELIOT
The Rock
Knowledge is a mimic creation.
HORACE MANN
Thoughts
I tried to think of my knowledge, but it was a squirrel's heap of winter nuts. There was no strength in my knowledge any more and I felt small and naked as a new-hatched bird.
STEPHEN VINCENT BENET
"By the Waters of Babylon"
The true method of knowledge is experiment.
WILLIAM BLAKE
All Religions are One
Of what a strange nature is knowledge! It clings to a mind when it has once seized on it like a lichen on a rock.
MARY SHELLEY
Frankenstein
Learned men fall into error oftenest by mistaking knowledge for wisdom.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Men are more readily contented with no intellectual light than a little; and wherever they have been taught to acquire some knowledge in order to please others, they have most generally gone on to acquire more, to please themselves.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
The knowledge of useful things is a purse seldom lost.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Human knowledge is the parent of doubt.
FULKE GREVILLE
Maxims
By enlarging your knowledge of things, you will find your knowledge of self is enlarged.
CHARLES DE LINT
"The Pochade Box", The Ivory and the Horn
Knowledge ... shall always bear witness like a clarion to its creator.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life
In things which we know, everyone will trust us ... and we may do as we please, and no one will like to interfere with us; and we are free, and masters of others; and these things will be really ours, for we shall turn them to our good.
PLATO
Lysis
The knowledge which we have acquired ought not to resemble a great shop without order, and without an inventory; we ought to know what we possess, and be able to make it serve us in need.
GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ
attributed, Day's Collacon
Man is an ignoramus athirst for knowledge.
CHARLES WAGNER
Justice
There's a vast difference between having a carload of miscellaneous facts sloshing around loose in your head and getting all mixed up in transit, and carrying the same assortment properly boxed and crated for convenient handling and immediate delivery.
GEORGE HORACE LORIMER
Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son
Oh Christ, the exhaustion of not knowing anything. It's so tiring and hard on the nerves. It really takes it out of you, not knowing anything. You're given comedy and miss all the jokes. Every hour you get weaker. Sometimes, as I sit alone in my flat in London and stare at the window, I think how dismal it is, how heavy, to watch the rain and not know why it falls.
MARTIN AMIS
Money: A Suicide Note
If you are truly wise, you will conceal your knowledge from the world, and let every fool think himself your superior, especially if you have anything to gain by him; for envy is the strongest passion of the weak, and mediocrity is the hot-bed on which all the meaner passions flourish.
CHARLES WILLIAM DAY
The Maxims
It is as though each of us investigated and made his own only a tiny circle of facts. Knowledge outside the day's work is regarded by most men as gewgaw. Still we are constantly in reaction against our ignorance. We rouse ourselves at intervals and speculate.
ROBERT WILSON LYND
The Pleasure of Ignorance
Information is the mortar that both builds and destroys empires.
TOBSHA LEARNER
The Witch of Cologne