“Vulgarized knowledge characteristically gives birth to a feeling that everything is understandable and explained.”
The Captive Mind (1953)
Context: Vulgarized knowledge characteristically gives birth to a feeling that everything is understandable and explained. It is like a system of bridges built over chasms. One can travel boldly ahead over these bridges, ignoring the chasms. It is forbidden to look down into them; but that, alas, does not alter the fact that they exist.
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Czeslaw Milosz 106
Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator 1911–2004Related quotes
Source: The Wretched of the Earth
"Poetry is Not a Luxury"
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
“Explain to me what loving feels like, Beth. I want to understand.”
Source: The Madness of Lord Ian Mackenzie
“Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.”
Foreword to the book A=B http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~wilf/AeqB.html (1996)
Source: Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About
George C. Homans (1962), "Autobiographical introduction", in: Sentiments & activities; essays in social science https://archive.org/stream/sentimentsactivi00homa#page/34/mode/2up, p. 35
Cosmic Religion : With Other Opinions and Aphorisms (1931) by Albert Einstein, p. 97; also in Transformation : Arts, Communication, Environment (1950) by Harry Holtzman, p. 138. This may be an edited version of some nearly identical quotes from the 1929 Viereck interview below.
1930s
Context: I believe in intuition and inspiration. … At times I feel certain I am right while not knowing the reason. When the eclipse of 1919 confirmed my intuition, I was not in the least surprised. In fact I would have been astonished had it turned out otherwise. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research.
Source: The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (1877), IV
Context: Well, granted that it was only a dream, yet the sensation of the love of those innocent and beautiful people has remained with me for ever, and I feel as though their love is still flowing out to me from over there. I have seen them myself, have known them and been convinced; I loved them, I suffered for them afterwards. Oh, I understood at once even at the time that in many things I could not understand them at all … But I soon realised that their knowledge was gained and fostered by intuitions different from those of us on earth, and that their aspirations, too, were quite different. They desired nothing and were at peace; they did not aspire to knowledge of life as we aspire to understand it, because their lives were full. But their knowledge was higher and deeper than ours; for our science seeks to explain what life is, aspires to understand it in order to teach others how to love, while they without science knew how to live; and that I understood, but I could not understand their knowledge.
Preface.
A History of Science Vol.1 Ancient Science Through the Golden Age of Greece (1952)