Knowledge Quotes

Hold fast to dreams,
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird,
That cannot fly.

Any fool can know. The point is to understand.

I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn’t know.

No thief, however skillful, can rob one of knowledge, and that is why knowledge is the best and safest treasure to acquire.

Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

Great minds are always feared by lesser minds.

Confidence is ignorance. If you're feeling cocky, it's because there's something you don't know.

I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think

The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.

Knowing too much of your future is never a good thing.

Jace?"
"Yeah?"
"How did you know I had Shadowhunter blood? Was there some way you could tell?"
The elevator arrived with a final groan. Jace unlatched the gate and slid it open. The inside reminded Clary of a birdcage, all black metal and decorative bits of gilt. "I guessed," he said, latching the door behind them. "It seemed like the most likely explanation."
"You guessed? You must have been pretty sure, considering you could have killed me."
He pressed a button in the wall, and the elevator lurched into action with a vibrating groan that she felt all through the bones in her feet. "I was ninety percent sure."
"I see," Clary said.
There must have been something in her voice, because he turned to look at her. Her hand cracked across his face, a slap that rocked him back on his heels. He put a hand to his cheek, more in surprise than pain. "What the hell was that for?"
The other ten percent," she said, and they rode the rest of the way down to the street in silence.

For me, I am driven by two main philosophies: know more today about the world than I knew yesterday and lessen the suffering of others. You'd be surprised how far that gets you.

It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.

Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in.

Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.

All knowledge hurts.

Last night I lost the world, and gained the universe.

Doctor Who: You want weapons? We're in a library. Books are the best weapon in the world. This room's the greatest arsenal we could have. Arm yourself!
(from Tooth and Claw in Season 2)

I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teaching my blood whispers to me.

I mean, you could claim that
anything's
real if the only basis for believing in it is that nobody's
proved
it doesn't exist!

For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you'd be doomed. You'd be ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to.

Knowledge is power. Power to do evil...or power to do good. Power itself is not evil. So knowledge itself is not evil.

Inventory:
"Four be the things I am wiser to know:
Idleness, sorrow, a friend, and a foe.
Four be the things I'd been better without:
Love, curiosity, freckles, and doubt.
Three be the things I shall never attain:
Envy, content, and sufficient champagne.
Three be the things I shall have till I die:
Laughter and hope and a sock in the eye.

Knowledge, like air, is vital to life. Like air, no one should be denied it.

I have a friend who's an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don't agree with very well. He'll hold up a flower and say "look how beautiful it is," and I'll agree. Then he says "I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing," and I think that he's kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is ... I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it's not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there's also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts.

It takes a very long time to become young.

The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.

I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow, it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I'm a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally, I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time.

I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian god may exist; so may the gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them.

Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social enviroment. Most people are incapable of forming such opinions."
(
Essay to Leo Baeck
, 1953)

An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.

Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.

It was better to know the worst than to wonder.

What is now proved was once only imagined.

A little Learning is a dangerous Thing.

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow.

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.

The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.

To learn which questions are unanswerable, and
not to answer them
: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.

The hardest thing of all is to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if there is no cat.

Learning does not make one learned: there are those who have knowledge and those who have understanding. The first requires memory and the second philosophy.

It is sometimes easier to be happy if you don't know everything.

Remember it all, every insult, every tear. Tattoo it on the inside of your mind. In life, knowledge of poisons is essential. I've told you, nobody becomes an artist unless they have to.

Don't fuck with an English major. They keep lots of useless crap trapped in their heads. Once in a while they let some of it out and it bites you square on the ass.

I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies but not the madness of people.

The time will come when diligent research over long periods will bring to light things which now lie hidden. A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not be enough for the investigation of so vast a subject... And so this knowledge will be unfolded only through long successive ages. There will come a time when our descendants will be amazed that we did not know things that are so plain to them... Many discoveries are reserved for ages still to come, when memory of us will have been effaced.

You can't know, you can only believe - or not.

The knowledge of all things is possible