quotations about knowledge
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 often cuts the root that supports it.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Knowledge will soon become folly, when good sense ceases to be its guardian.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
Knowledge without conscience is but the ruin of the soul.
FRANÇOIS RABELAIS
Pantagruel
Let no one, then, seek to know from me what I know that I do not know; unless he perhaps wishes to learn to be ignorant of that of which all we know is, that it cannot be known.
ST. AUGUSTINE
The City of God
Religion has treated knowledge sometimes as an enemy, sometimes as a hostage; often as a captive, and more often as a child: but knowledge has become of age; and religion must either renounce her acquaintance, or introduce her as a companion and respect her as a friend.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Sorrow is Knowledge: they who know the most
Must mourn the deepest o'er the fatal truth,
The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life.
LORD BYRON
Manfred
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
Those who have knowledge are more confident than those who have no knowledge, and they are more confident after they have learned than before.
PLATO
Protagoras
What we know is built on what we do not know.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
What we know is to what we do not know, as a grain of sand is to the beach.
IVAN PANIN
Thoughts
Information is the mortar that both builds and destroys empires.
TOBSHA LEARNER
The Witch of Cologne
Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.
GEORGE WASHINGTON
speech to Congress, Jan. 8, 1790
Seek knowledge from the purest source.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
That is the beginning of knowledge--the discovery of something we do not understand.
FRANK HERBERT
God Emperor of Dune
The knowledge of useful things is a purse seldom lost.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
The world grows more enlightened. Knowledge is more equally diffused.
JOHN ADAMS
Discourses on Davila
Yet with great toil all that I can attain
By long experience, and in learned schools,
Is for to know my knowledge is but vain,
And those that think them wise, are greatest fools.
SIR WILLIAM ALEXANDER
EARL OF STIRLING, The Tragedy of Croesus
Although humans have existed on this planet for perhaps 2 million years, the rapid climb to modern civilization within the last 200 years was possible due to the fact that the growth of scientific knowledge is exponential; that is, its rate of expansion is proportional to how much is already known. The more we know, the faster we can know more. For example, we have amassed more knowledge since World War II than all the knowledge amassed in our 2-million-year evolution on this planet. In fact, the amount of knowledge that our scientists gain doubles approximately every 10 to 20 years.
MICHIO KAKU
Hyperspace
Few can tell what they know without also showing what they do not know.
IVAN PANIN
Thoughts