“Do not confuse understanding with a larger vocabulary, sacred writings are beneficial in stimulating desire for inward realization, if one stanza at a time is slowly assimilated. Continual intellectual study results in vanity and the false satisfaction of an undigested knowledge.”

— Yukteswar Giri

Autobiography of a Yogi (1946)

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Yukteswar Giri 15

Indian yogi and guru 1855–1936

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“In this way things, external objects, are assimilated to more or less ordered motor schemas, and in this continuous assimilation of objects the child's own activity is the starting point of play. Not only this, but when to pure movement are added language and imagination, the assimilation is strengthened, and wherever the mind feels no actual need for accommodating itself to reality, its natural tendency will be to distort the objects that surround it in accordance with its desires or its fantasy, in short to use them for its satisfaction. Such is the intellectual egocentrism that characterizes the earliest form of child thought.”

Jean Piaget (1896–1980) Swiss psychologist, biologist, logician, philosopher & academic

Source: The Moral Judgment of the Child (1932), Ch. 2 : Adult Constraint and Moral Realism

“I do not wish for my satisfaction the name of prophet. Generally that title is accompanied with such a burden, that if there is satisfaction for your vanity there is a check to it.”

Louis Riel (1844–1885) Canadian politician

Address to Grand Jury (1885)
Context: I prefer to be called one of the flock. I am no more than you are, I am simply one of the flock, equal to the rest. If it is any satisfaction to the doctor to know what kind of insanity I have, if they are going to call my pretensions insanity, I say, humbly, through the grace of God I believe I am the prophet of the New World.
I wish you to believe that I am not trying to play insanity, there is in the manner, in the standing of a man, the proof that he is sincere, not playing. You will say, what have you got to say? I have to attend to practical results. Is it practical that you be acknowledged as a prophet? Is it practical to say it. I think if the Half-breeds. have acknowledged me, as a community, to be a prophet. I have reason to believe that it is beginning to become practical. I do not wish for my satisfaction the name of prophet. Generally that title is accompanied with such a burden, that if there is satisfaction for your vanity there is a check to it.

“No sincere assertion of fact is essentially unaccompanied by feelings of intellectual satisfaction or of a persuasive desire and a sense of personal responsibility.”

Michael Polanyi (1891–1976) Hungarian-British polymath

Source: Personal Knowledge (1958), p. 27

“For centuries knowledge meant proven knowledge… Einstein's results again turned the tables and now very few philosophers or scientists still think that scientific knowledge is, or can be, proven knowledge. But few realize that with this the whole classical structure of intellectual values falls in ruins and has to be replaced.”

Imre Lakatos (1921–1974) Hungarian mathematician, philosopher

Source: Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, 1970, p. 92 as cited in: Anthony C. Thiselton (2007) The Hermeneutics of Doctrine. p. 166.

“In mysteries what we know, and our realization of what we do not know, proceed together; the larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.”

Huston Smith book The World's Religions

Part of this quote may actually be by Ralph Washington Sockman.
The World's Religions (1991)
Source: Beyond the Post-Modern Mind: The Place of Meaning in a Global Civilization
Context: In mysteries what we know, and our realization of what we do not know, proceed together; the larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder. It is like the quantum world, where the more we understand its formalism, the stranger that world becomes.