“Under Aristotle the "Reader," whose knowledge of Trojan aretê seems conspicuously absent, forms and substances dominate all. The Good is a relatively minor branch of knowledge called ethics; reason, logic, knowledge are his primary concerns. Aretê is dead and science, logic and the University as we know it today have been given their founding charter: to find and invent an endless proliferation of forms about the substantive elements of the world and call these forms knowledge, and transmit these forms to future generations. As "the system."”

— Robert M. Pirsig, book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 29

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Robert M. Pirsig164

American writer and philosopher 1928–2017

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“Self-knowledge will reveal the elements of biological human nature from which modern social life proliferated in all its strange forms.”

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“All relatively complete knowledge is formed in two stages: the first stage is perceptual knowledge, the second is rational knowledge, the latter being the development of the former to a higher stage.”

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“Positivism : knowledge is hard, real, and capable of being transmitted in a tangible form.”

Robert L. Flood (1959) British organizational scientist

Source: Dealing with Complexity (1988), p. 247.

“Normative concepts form a fundamental category-like, say, temporal or logical concepts. We should not expect to explain time, or logic, in non-temporal or non-logical terms. Similarly, normative truths are of a distinctive kind, which we should not expect to be like ordinary, empirical truths. Nor should we expect our knowledge of such truths, if we have ay, to be like our knowledge of the world around us.”

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Source: Derek Parfit, ‘Reasons and Motivation’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supp. vol. 71 (1997), p. 121

“Logic is the science not of external forms of thought, but of the laws of development "of all material, natural and spiritual things", i. e., of the development of the entire concrete content of the world and of its cognition, i. e., the sum-total, the conclusion of the History of knowledge of the world.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

“In an ideal University, as I conceive it, a man should be able to obtain instruction in all forms of knowledge, and discipline in the use of all the methods by which knowledge is obtained.”

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

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1870s
Context: In an ideal University, as I conceive it, a man should be able to obtain instruction in all forms of knowledge, and discipline in the use of all the methods by which knowledge is obtained. In such a University, the force of living example should fire the student with a noble ambition to emulate the learning of learned men, and to follow in the footsteps of the explorers of new fields of knowledge. And the very air he breathes should be charged with that enthusiasm for truth, that fanaticism of veracity, which is a greater possession than much learning; a nobler gift than the power of increasing knowledge; by so much greater and nobler than these, as the moral nature of man is greater than the intellectual; for veracity is the heart of morality.

“The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of The Word.”

T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) 20th century English author

Choruses from The Rock (1934)
Context: O perpetual revolution of configured stars,
O perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,
O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying!
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of The Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Brings us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.

“What is now called ‘knowledge organisation’ in this context has a long history. The simplest forms of a knowledge organisation system (KOS) are, after all, the contents list and the index of a textbook. The knowledge is in the text; the KOS is a supplementary tool that helps the reader to find his way around the text. But as such finding aids have become more complex, and taken on wider functions, they have acquired grander names, such as retrieval languages, taxonomies, categorisations, lexicons, thesauri, or ontologies. They are now seen as schemes that organize, manage, and retrieve information.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

B.C. Vickery (2008) " On ‘knowledge organisation’ http://web.archive.org/web/20100125050134/http://www.lucis.me.uk/knowlorg.htm" published on lucis.me.uk, 2008.

“The disconnected impressions which we derive from life form a kind of knowledge ‘in growth,’ as Bacon called it; an over-early and peremptory attempt to digest this knowledge into a system tends, as he suggests, to falsify and distort it.”

Logan Pearsall Smith (1865–1946) British American-born writer

“English Aphorists,” p. 103
Reperusals and Recollections (1936)

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