quotations about knowledge
Knowledge ... shall always bear witness like a clarion to its creator.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life
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
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance.
T. S. ELIOT
The Rock
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
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
Learned men fall into error oftenest by mistaking knowledge for wisdom.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Knowledge is the most democratic source of power.
ALVIN TOFFLER
Powershift
The knowledge of useful things is a purse seldom lost.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
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
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
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
Ultimately you want to have the entire world's knowledge connected directly to your mind.
SERGEY BRIN
Playboy, Sep. 2004
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
Human knowledge is the parent of doubt.
FULKE GREVILLE
Maxims
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
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
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