Knowledge Quotes - Knowledge is power
“The
way of success is the way of continuous pursuit of knowledge.”
―
Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich
“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. To really ask is to open the door
to the whirlwind. The answer may annihilate the question and the questioner.”
―
Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat
“Nothing
is so firmly believed as that which we least know.”
―
Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays
“I
thought to myself: I am wiser than this man; neither of us probably knows
anything that is really good, but he thinks he has knowledge, when he has not,
while I, having no knowledge, do not think I have.”
―
Plato, Apology
“Do
not think of knocking out another person's brains because he differs in opinion
from you. It would be as rational to knock yourself on the head because you
differ from yourself ten years ago.”
―
Horace Mann
“To
learn is not to know; there are the learners and the learned. Memory makes the
one, philosophy the others.”
―
Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
“Small
minds have always lashed out at what they don't understand.”
―
Dan Brown
“I
think a lot of psychopaths are just geniuses who drove so fast that they lost
control.”
―
Criss Jami, Killosophy
“You
differ from a great man in only one respect: the great man was once a very
little man, but he developed one important quality: he recognized the smallness
and narrowness of his thoughts and actions. Under the pressure of some task
that meant a great deal to him, he learned to see how his smallness, his
pettiness endangered his happiness. In other words, a great man knows when and
in what way he is a little man. A little man does not know he is little and is
afraid to know. He hides his pettiness and narrowness behind illusions of
strength and greatness, someone else's strength and greatness. He's proud of
his great generals but not of himself. He admires an idea he has not had, not
one he has had. The less he understands something, the more firmly he believes
in it. And the better he understands an idea, the less he believes in it.”
―
Wilhelm Reich, Listen, Little Man!
“Scientia
potentia est.
Knowledge
is power.”
―
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
“He
was twenty. I remembered twenty. I'd known everything at twenty. It took me
another year to realize I knew nothing. I was still hoping to learn something
before I hit thirty, but I wasn't holding my breath.”
―
Laurell K. Hamilton, Circus of the Damned
“Would
you like to know your future?
If
your answer is yes, think again. Not knowing is the greatest life motivator.
So
enjoy, endure, survive each moment as it comes to you in its proper sequence --
a surprise.”
―
Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration
“The
only defense against the world is a thorough knowledge of it.”
―
John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education
“True
ignorance is not the absence of knowledge, but the refusal to acquire it.”
―
Karl R. Popper
“The
relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we
see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the
knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.”
―
John Berger, Ways of Seeing
“I
know that the molecules in my body are traceable to phenomena in the cosmos.
That makes me want to grab people on the street and say: ‘Have you HEARD THIS?”
―
Neil deGrasse Tyson
“Herein
lies the tragedy of the age: not that men are poor, — all men know something of
poverty; not that men are wicked, — who is good? not that men are ignorant, —
what is Truth? Nay, but that men know so little of men.”
― W.
E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk
“Faith,
n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge,
of things without parallel.”
―
Ambrose Bierce, The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary
“She
was heartily ashamed of her ignorance - a misplaced shame. Where people wish to
attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a well−informed mind is to
come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a
sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman especially, if she have the
misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.”
―
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
“Life
is like a sandwich!
Birth
as one slice,
and
death as the other.
What
you put in-between
the
slices is up to you.
Is
your sandwich tasty or sour?
Allan
Rufus.org”
―
Allan Rufus
“We
are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable
that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the
future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the
solutions, and pass them on.”
―
Richard P. Feynman
“I
don't pretend to know everything; I just only speak on matters I know I'll
win.”
―
Criss Jami, Killosophy
“New
knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to
work with, the richer we become.”
―
Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions
“...What
I have denied and what my reason compels me to deny, is the existence of a
Being throned above us as a god, directing our mundane affairs in detail,
regarding us as individuals, punishing us, rewarding us as human judges might.
When
the churches learn to take this rational view of things, when they become true
schools of ethics and stop teaching fables, they will be more effective than
they are to-day... If they would turn all that ability to teaching this one
thing – the fact that honesty is best, that selfishness and lies of any sort
must surely fail to produce happiness – they would accomplish actual things.
Religious faiths and creeds have greatly hampered our development. They have
absorbed and wasted some fine intellects. That creeds are getting to be less
and less important to the average mind with every passing year is a good sign,
I think, although I do not wish to talk about what is commonly called theology.
The
criticisms which have been hurled at me have not worried me. A man cannot
control his beliefs. If he is honest in his frank expression of them, that is
all that can in justice be required of him. Professor Thomson and a thousand
others do not in the least agree with me. His criticism of me, as I read it,
charged that because I doubted the soul’s immortality, or ‘personality,’ as he
called it, my mind must be abnormal, ‘pathological,’ in other, words,
diseased... I try to say exactly what I honestly believe to be the truth, and
more than that no man can do. I honestly believe that creedists have built up a
mighty structure of inaccuracy, based, curiously, on those fundamental truths
which I, with every honest man, must not alone admit but earnestly acclaim.
I
have been working on the same lines for many years. I have tried to go as far
as possible toward the bottom of each subject I have studied. I have not
reached my conclusions through study of traditions; I have reached them through
the study of hard fact. I cannot see that unproved theories or sentiment should
be permitted to have influence in the building of conviction upon matters so
important. Science proves its theories or it rejects them. I have never seen
the slightest scientific proof of the religious theories of heaven and hell, of
future life for individuals, or of a personal God. I earnestly believe that I
am right; I cannot help believing as I do... I cannot accept as final any
theory which is not provable. The theories of the theologians cannot be proved.
Proof, proof! That is what I always have been after; that is what my mind
requires before it can accept a theory as fact. Some things are provable, some
things disprovable, some things are doubtful. All the problems which perplex
us, now, will, soon or late, be solved, and solved beyond a question through
scientific investigation. The thing which most impresses me about theology is
that it does not seem to be investigating. It seems to be asserting, merely,
without actual study.
...Moral
teaching is the thing we need most in this world, and many of these men could
be great moral teachers if they would but give their whole time to it, and to
scientific search for the rock-bottom truth, instead of wasting it upon
expounding theories of theology which are not in the first place firmly based.
What we need is search for fundamentals, not reiteration of traditions born in
days when men knew even less than we do now.
[Columbian
Magazine interview]”
―
Thomas A. Edison
