quotations about knowledge
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
Man is an ignoramus athirst for knowledge.
CHARLES WAGNER
Justice
What we know is to what we do not know, as a grain of sand is to the beach.
IVAN PANIN
Thoughts
The surest way of concealing from others the boundaries of one's own knowledge is not to overstep them.
GIACOMO LEOPARDI
Leopardi: Poems and Prose
The greatest piece of folly is that every man thinks himself compelled to hand down what people think they have known.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
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
Knowledge is the most democratic source of power.
ALVIN TOFFLER
Powershift
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
The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.
STEPHEN HAWKING
attributed, The Prism and the Rainbow
Men have hunger, sleep, fear and carnal intercourse in common with the lower animals. It is only knowledge that a man has more than they. Those men who have not it may be regarded as beasts.
CHANAKYA
Vridda-Chanakya
Is not the fraction which you know, in relation to their totality, what a single number is to infinity?
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
Information is the mortar that both builds and destroys empires.
TOBSHA LEARNER
The Witch of Cologne
Everybody knows something, and nobody knows everything.
DUSTY BAKER
Esquire, Apr. 2004
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
What we know is built on what we do not know.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
The one thing we do not know is the limit of the knowable.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU
Emile
The knowledge of useful things is a purse seldom lost.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Knowledge often cuts the root that supports it.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
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