quotations about knowledge
I am conscious of my inability to grasp, in all its details and positive developments, any very large portion of human knowledge. The greatest intelligence would not be equal to a comprehension of the whole.
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
God and the State
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
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance.
T. S. ELIOT
The Rock
Very few beings really seek knowledge in this world. Mortal or immortal, few really ask. On the contrary, they try to wring from the unknown the answers they have already shaped in their own minds -- justifications, confirmations, forms of consolation without which they can't go on.
ANNE RICE
The Vampire Lestat
The knowledge of useful things is a purse seldom lost.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Knowledge ... shall always bear witness like a clarion to its creator.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life
Learned men fall into error oftenest by mistaking knowledge for wisdom.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
The highest knowledge can be nothing more than the shortest and clearest road to truth; all the rest is pretension, not performance, mere verbiage and grandiloquence, from which we can learn nothing.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Information is the mortar that both builds and destroys empires.
TOBSHA LEARNER
The Witch of Cologne
Knowledge is the most democratic source of power.
ALVIN TOFFLER
Powershift
Ultimately you want to have the entire world's knowledge connected directly to your mind.
SERGEY BRIN
Playboy, Sep. 2004
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
Mathematicians have sought knowledge in figures, Philosophers in systems, Logicians in subtleties, and Metaphysicians in sounds. It is not in any nor in all of these. He that studies only men, will get the body of knowledge without the soul, and he that studies only books, the soul without the body.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Knowledge is twofold and consists not only in an affirmation of what is true, but in the negation of what is false.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
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
Knowledge gropes but meets not Wisdom's face.
SRI AUROBINDO
Gems from Sri Aurobindo
Humans crave knowledge, and when that craving ends, we are no longer human.
TIM LEBBON
Fallen
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
There is, perhaps, one universal truth about all forms of human cognition: the ability to deal with knowledge is hugely exceeded by the potential knowledge contained in man's environment. To cope with this diversity, man's perception, his memory, and his thought processes early become governed by strategies for protecting his limited capacities from the confusion of overloading. We tend to perceive things schematically, for example, rather than in detail, or we represent a class of diverse things by some sort of averaged "typical instance."
JEROME S. BRUNER
Art as a Mode of Knowing
When intelligent and sensible people despise knowledge in their old age, it is only because they have asked too much of it and of themselves.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe