Quotes about knowledge
page 11

“It felt good to be surrounded by books, by all this solid knowledge, by these objects that could be ripped page by page but couldn't be torn if the pages all held together.”

David Levithan book Wide Awake

Source: Wide Awake

Books

“Knowledge is a weapon. I intend to be formidably armed.”

Terry Goodkind (1948) American novelist

“When his brain died, all of the memories
held in his gray matter, along with all of the knowledge he had acquired, would simply evaporate
in a flood of chemical reactions.”

Dan Brown book The Lost Symbol

Source: The Lost Symbol

Memory

“Most men and women, by birth or nature, lack the means to advance in wealth and power, but all have the ability to advance in knowledge.”

Pythagoras (-585–-495 BC) ancient Greek mathematician and philosopher

As quoted in The Golden Ratio (2002) by Mario Livio

Women, Men, Birth, Nature

“Knowledge is a thing that one cannot have enough of. It is the fruit of wisdom, to be eaten carefully and digested fully, unlike that lunch you are bolting down, little friend.”

Brian Jacques Redwall

Source: Redwall

Wisdom

“The true knowledge is notthe things, but in finding the connectionsthe things.”

Daniel H. Wilson book Robopocalypse

Source: Robopocalypse

“The best teacher is not the one who knows most but the one who is most capable of reducing knowledge to that simple compound of the obvious and wonderful.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

Teachers

“But though all our knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows, that all arises out of experience.”

Immanuel Kant book Critique of Pure Reason

Introduction I. Of the Difference Between Pure and Empirical Knowledge
Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 1787)
Variant: That all our knowledge begins with experience there can be no doubt.
Context: That all our knowledge begins with experience there can be no doubt. For how is it possible that the faculty of cognition should be awakened into exercise otherwise than by means of objects which affect our senses, and partly of them selves produce representations, partly rouse our powers of understanding into activity, to compare, to connect, or to separate these, and so to convert the raw material of our sensuous impressions into a knowledge of objects, which is called experience? In respect of time, therefore, no knowledge of ours is antecedent to experience, but begins with it. But though all our knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows, that all arises out of experience. For, on the contrary, it is quite possible that our empirical knowledge is a compound of that which we receive through impressions, and that which the faculty of cognition supplies from itself (sensuous impressions giving merely the occasion)... It is, therefore, a question which requires close investigation, and is not to be answered at first sight,—whether there exists a knowledge altogether independent of experience, and even of all sensuous impressions? Knowledge of this kind is called à priori, in contradistinction to empirical knowledge which has its sources à posteriori, that is, in experience.

“I will never shame you. I will hate the man you choose because he is not me, and love him if he makes you smile. No woman deserves the sure knowledge of widow's black as her brideprice, you least of all.”

Robert Jordan book The Eye of the World

al'Lan Mandragoran to Nynaeve al'Meara
(15 January 1990)
Source: The Eye of the World

Love, Hate, Smile

“The recipe for perpetual ignorance is: Be satisfied with your opinions and content with your knowledge.”

Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915) American writer, publisher, artist, and philosopher fue el escritor del jarron azul

“Droll thing life is -- that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself -- that comes too late -- a crop of inextinguishable regrets.”

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness

Life, Hope

“Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

“Just the knowledge that a good book is waiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier.”

Kathleen Norris (1880–1966) American writer

Books, Waiting

“Life can give everything to whoever tries to understand and is willing to receive new knowledge.”

Pramoedya Ananta Toer book Bumi Manusia

Source: Bumi Manusia

Life, Understanding

“Compassion is the sometimes fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else's skin. It's the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too.”

Frederick Buechner (1926) Poet, novelist, short story writer, theologian

Peace, Feeling, Joy

“Sometimes it takes more courage not to let yourself see. Sometimes knowledge is damaging - not enlightenment but enleadenment.”

Marisha Pessl Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Source: Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Courage

“There is no knowledge so hard to acquire as the knowledge of how to live this life well and naturally.”

Michel De Montaigne (1533–1592) (1533-1592) French-Occitan author, humanistic philosopher, statesman

Life, Nature

“She wants to know if I love her, that's all anyone wants from anyone else, not love itself but the knowledge that love is there, like new batteries in the flashlight in the emergency kit in the hall closet.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), p. 130

Love

“We all know that Beauty grows to love the Beast. She grows to love him, despite what her family might think ⎼ for his charm and education, his knowledge of art and his sensitive heart.”

E. Lockhart book We Were Liars

Source: We Were Liars

Love, Education, Family, Beauty

“Even as a youngster, though, I could not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presented danger, the solution was ignorance.”

Isaac Asimov book The Caves of Steel

Source: The Caves of Steel

“Expect to feel pleasure. Knowledge is sexy. Expect to feel pain. Knowledge is torture.”

Jeff Noon book Vurt

Source: Vurt

Pain, Pleasure, Feeling

“The stony-minded orthodox were right in fearing the first movement of new knowledge and free thought. It has gone on, and will go on, irresistibly, until some day we shall have no respect for an alleged "truth" which cannot stand the full blaze of knowledge, the full force of active thought.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) American feminist, writer, commercial artist, lecturer and social reformer

The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, (1935).

Truth, Fear

“One more instance I will give of his interest and his knowledge. We were passing under a fir tree when we heard a small song in the tree above us. We stopped and I said that was the song of a golden-crested wren. He listened very attentively while the bird repeated its little song, as its habit is. Then he said, "I think that is exactly the same song as that of a bird that we have in America"; and that was the only English song that he recognized as being the same as any bird song in America. Some time afterwards I met a bird expert in the Natural History Museum in London and told him this incident, and he confirmed what Colonel Roosevelt had said, that the song of this bird would be about the only song that the two countries had in common. I think that a very remarkable instance of minute and accurate knowledge on the part of Colonel Roosevelt. It was the business of the bird expert in London to know about birds. Colonel Roosevelt's knowledge was a mere incident acquired, not as part of the work of his life, but entirely outside it.”

Edward Grey, 1st Viscount Grey of Fallodon (1862–1933) British Liberal statesman

Recreation (1919)

Life, History, Business, Nature

“Empiricism and positivism share the common view that scientific knowledge should in some way be derived from the facts arrived at by observation.”

Alan Chalmers book What Is This Thing Called Science?

Source: What Is This Thing Called Science? (Third Edition; 1999), Chapter 1, Science as knowledge derived form the facts of experience, p. 3.

Way

“Mathematics because of its nature and structure is peculiarly fitted for high school instruction [Gymnasiallehrfach]. Especially the higher mathematics, even if presented only in its elements, combines within itself all those qualities which are demanded of a secondary subject. It engages, it fructifies, it quickens, compels attention, is as circumspect as inventive, induces courage and self-confidence as well as modesty and submission to truth. It yields the essence and kernel of all things, is brief in form and overflows with its wealth of content. It discloses the depth and breadth of the law and spiritual element behind the surface of phenomena; it impels from point to point and carries within itself the incentive toward progress; it stimulates the artistic perception, good taste in judgment and execution, as well as the scientific comprehension of things. Mathematics, therefore, above all other subjects, makes the student lust after knowledge, fills him, as it were, with a longing to fathom the cause of things and to employ his own powers independently; it collects his mental forces and concentrates them on a single point and thus awakens the spirit of individual inquiry, self-confidence and the joy of doing; it fascinates because of the view-points which it offers and creates certainty and assurance, owing to the universal validity of its methods. Thus, both what he receives and what he himself contributes toward the proper conception and solution of a problem, combine to mature the student and to make him skillful, to lead him away from the surface of things and to exercise him in the perception of their essence. A student thus prepared thirsts after knowledge and is ready for the university and its sciences. Thus it appears, that higher mathematics is the best guide to philosophy and to the philosophic conception of the world (considered as a self-contained whole) and of one’s own being.”

Christian Heinrich von Dillmann (1829–1899) German educationist

Source: Die Mathematik die Fackelträgerin einer neuen Zeit (Stuttgart, 1889), p. 40.

Truth, World, School, Law

“We must not think, "Well, we have all the truth, we understand the main pillars of our faith, and we may rest on this knowledge." The truth is an advancing truth, and we must walk in the increasing light.”

Ellen G. White (1827–1915) American author and founder/leader of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church

The Review and Herald (27 March 1890); also in Counsels for Writers and Editors http://books.google.de/books?id=UEM4uBD04asC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Counsels+to+writers+and+editors&cd=1#v=onepage&q&f=false (1946), p. 33; also in Evangelism http://books.google.de/books?id=gsy20ga71LEC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Ellen+Gould+Harmon+White+Evangelism&cd=1#v=onepage&q&f=false (1946), p. 296; also in 1888 - The Ellen G. White 1888 Materials (1987), Ch. 64, p. 547.

Truth, Faith, Understanding, Thinking

“One who desired knowledge of man apart from the fruits of knowledge would seek it in the history of religious enthusiasm, of martyrdom, or of love; he would not seek it in the market-place. When we elect to watch the play of human motives that are ordinary — that are sometimes mean and dismal and ignoble — our impulse is not the philosopher's impulse, knowledge for the sake of knowledge, but rather the physiologist's, knowledge for the healing that knowledge may help to bring.”

Arthur Cecil Pigou (1877–1959) British economist

Source: The Economics of Welfare (1920), Ch. 1 : Welfare and Economic Welfare, § 1

Love, History, Motivation, Help

“Under the world view possessed by medieval scholars, the path of learning was a path of self-deprecation. … An opposite conception comes in with Bacon’s “knowledge is power.” If the aim of knowledge is domination, it is hardly to be supposed that the possessors of knowledge will be indifferent to their importance. On the contrary, they begin to swell; the seek triumphs in the material world (knowledge being meanwhile necessarily degraded to skills) which inflate their egotism and self-consideration. Such is a brief history of how knowledge passes from a means of spiritual redemption to a basis for intellectual pride.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 72.

World, History, Learning, Indifference

“With adolescence, Pryn had certainly taken on the sometimes troubling knowledge that almost anything with an outside and an inside supporting movement from one to the other could be sexually suggestive.”

Samuel R. Delany book Neveryóna

Source: Neveryóna (1983), Chapter 8, “Of Models, Moonlight, Mystery, and Authority” (p. 199)

Support

“Only a book written by the God who knows the end from the beginning could predict the future with one hundred percent accuracy. The God of the Bible (unlike all other “gods”) is not limited by time, space, or matter. He created all of those on Day One and is “above” and “outside of” and “not limited by” His creation in any way. We are the ones who are limited by time, space, and matter, not God. The fact that He knows the future does not mean that He controls the future and we are robots acting out a pre-programmed set of instructions. He has complete knowledge, yet we have complete control at all times. He could step in and control everything, but then we would be robots and not humans. It is called Free Will. That’s a gift God gave to mankind.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Source: What On Earth Is About To Happen… For Heaven’s Sake? (2013), pp. 6-7

God, Books, Way, Time

“A gift is the transfer of a good without an explicit specification of a quid pro quo. The good can be a tangible thing or money, but it also can be intangible, as in the form of time, attention, information or knowledge. A present is a gift and so may be the attention that one person ‘gives’ another, or the time that a person donates to an art institute as a volunteer. Usually a gift entails reciprocity: the giver expects something in return for the gift given. Friends expect friendly gestures in return for their friendly gestures; donors expect some form of appreciation or another; and those who give presents at Christmas expect to receive presents in return. The key to understanding the phenomenon of the gift is the nature of the reciprocity involved”

Arjo Klamer (1953) Dutch columnist, economist and politician

Arjo Klamer, " 30 Gift economy http://www.klamer.nl/docs/1dec_2002.pdf." A handbook of cultural economics (2003): 243.

Money, Art, Understanding, Nature

“In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer's words, to turn pain into knowledge.”

Alain de Botton book The Consolations of Philosophy

Source: The Consolations of Philosophy (2000), Chapter V, Consolation For A Broken Heart, p. 199.

Pain, Art, Way, Help

“The Leader of the Future 2 is divided into five parts. In Part One, our book begins where it should, with Peter Drucker’s vision of leadership… Part Two, "Leading in a Diverse World," begins with the recognized world authority on building a learning organization. "Systems Citizenship" presents MIT’s Peter Senge at his best, as he challenges us to understand systems, implement systems intelligence, and build partnerships that are a mandate for the new millennium… Part Three, "Leading in a Time of Crisis and Complexity," begins with Ron Heifetz of Harvard’s Kennedy School. Ron describes new approaches to solving leadership dilemmas as he challenges leaders in "Anchoring Leadership in the Work of Adaptive Progress"… Part Four, "Leading Organizations of the Future," shows how changing context has an impact leadership needs, demanding changes in leadership styles. Charles Handy is one of the great social philosophers of our time… Part Five, "The Quality and Character of the Leader of the Future," begins with one of the most influential thought leaders in history, Stephen Covey. In "Leading in the Knowledge Worker Age."”

Marshall Goldsmith (1949) American author of leadership and management literature

Source: The leader of the future 2, 2006, p. xiv-xvii; preview

Books, Age, World, School

“But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page
Rich with the spoils of time did ne'er unroll;
Chill Penury repressed their noble rage,
And froze the genial current of the soul.”

Thomas Gray (1716–1771) English poet, historian

St. 13 <br class="br"> Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard http://www.thomasgray.org/cgi-bin/display.cgi?text=elcc (written 1750, publ. 1751)

Soul, Rage, Time

“Knowledge exists in minds, not in books. Before what has been found can be used by practitioners, someone must organize it, integrate it, extract the message”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Attributed to Kenneth Boulding (1976) in John T. Partington, Terry Orlick, John H. Salmela (1982) Sport in perspective. p. 94
1970s

Books

“Our units of temporal measurement, from seconds on up to months, are so complicated, asymmetrical and disjunctive so as to make coherent mental reckoning in time all but impossible. Indeed, had some tyrannical god contrived to enslave our minds to time, to make it all but impossible for us to escape subjection to sodden routines and unpleasant surprises, he could hardly have done better than handing down our present system. It is like a set of trapezoidal building blocks, with no vertical or horizontal surfaces, like a language in which the simplest thought demands ornate constructions, useless particles and lengthy circumlocutions. Unlike the more successful patterns of language and science, which enable us to face experience boldly or at least level-headedly, our system of temporal calculation silently and persistently encourages our terror of time.
…
It is as though architects had to measure length in feet, width in meters and height in ells; as though basic instruction manuals demanded a knowledge of five different languages. It is no wonder then that we often look into our own immediate past or future, last Tuesday or a week from Sunday, with feelings of helpless confusion.”

Robert Grudin (1938) American writer

Time and the Art of Living (1982)

God, Feeling, Science, Time

“Gratitude is a sign of maturity. It is an indication of sincere humility. It is a hallmark of civility. And most of all it is a divine principle. … Indeed, gratitude is the beginning of civility, of decency and goodness, of a recognition that we cannot afford to be arrogant. We should walk with the knowledge that we will need help every step of the way.”

Gordon B. Hinckley book Standing for Something

Standing for Something: Ten Neglected Virtues That Will Heal Our Hearts and Homes.

Way, Help, Sincerity, Gratitude

“All of that to gain a piece of paper, that minimally guarantees a job of stability, a job where one follows a daily routine and gets a monthly salary, and a job, in my opinion, of sheer boredom and unhappiness. And they with the piece of paper, claiming that they have faired better in their lives, compared to fellow hawkers and construction workers. But I retort, at least they didn’t spend up to 10 years in a place they didn’t like, filling their brains with knowledge they never wanted. Some people say it’s a life they want, not for me. Some people they say it is worth going to school for over 10 years for such a life, no it isn’t.”

Amos Yee (1998) blogger

Tumblr postings

Life, People, School

“The true method of knowledge is experiment.”

William Blake book All Religions are One

All Religions are One (1788)
1780s

“Science develops best when its concepts and conclusions are integrated into the broader human culture and its concerns for ultimate meaning and value. Scientists cannot, therefore, hold themselves entirely aloof from the sorts of issues dealt with by philosophers and theologians. By devoting to these issues something of the energy and care they give to their research in science, they can help others realize more fully the human potentialities of their discoveries. They can also come to appreciate for themselves that these discoveries cannot be a genuine substitute for knowledge of the truly ultimate. Science can purify religion from error and superstition; religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes. Each can draw the other into a wider world, a world in which both can flourish.”

Pope John Paul II (1920–2005) 264th Pope of the Catholic Church, saint

Letter to the Rev. George V. Coyne, S.J., Director of the Vatican Observatory, 1 June 1988
Source: [Russell, Robert J., Stoeger, William R., Pope John Paul II, Coyne, George V., 1990, John Paul II on science and religion: reflections on the new view from Rome, Vatican Observatory Publications]

World, Religion, Error, Science

“Machiavelli is not concerned with how men do live merely in order to describe it; his intention is rather, on the basis of knowledge of how men do live, to teach princes how they ought to rule and even how they ought to live.”

Leo Strauss (1899–1973) Classical philosophy specialist and father of neoconservativism

"Niccolo Machiavelli" (1987)

Men

“By induction we gain no certain knowledge; but by observation, and the inverse use of deductive reasoning, we estimate the probability that an event which has occurred was preceded by conditions of specified character, or that such conditions will be followed by the event. …I have no objection to use the words cause and causation, provided they are never allowed to lead us to imagine that our knowledge of nature can attain to certainty. …We can never recur too often to the truth that our knowledge of the laws and future events of the external world are only probable.”

William Stanley Jevons (1835–1882) English economist and logician

Source: The Principles of Science: A Treatise on Logic and Scientific Method (1874) Vol. 1, pp. 257, 260 & 271

Truth, World, Law, Imagination

“The more information a guy has, the more likely he is to say, "Hey, King Charlie, you really blew that call." That's why democracy happened. The control of information is something the elite always does, particularly in a despotic form of government. Information, knowledge, is power. If you can control information, you can control people.”

Tom Clancy (1947–2013) American author

1990s, Schafer interview (1995)

People, Guy, Democracy

“I started off believing all men were equal. I now know that's the most unlikely thing ever to have been, because millions of years have passed over evolution, people have scattered across the face of this earth, been isolated from each other, developed independently, had different intermixtures between races, peoples, climates, soils… I didn't start off with that knowledge. But by observation, reading, watching, arguing, asking, that is the conclusion I've come to.”

Lee Kuan Yew (1923–2015) First Prime Minister of Singapore

Lee Kuan Yew, The Man & His Ideas, 1997
1990s

Men, People, Reading

“Why did my parents send me to the schools
That I with knowledge might enrich my mind?
Since the desire to know first made men fools,
And did corrupt the root of all mankind.”

John Davies (poet) (1569–1626) English poet, lawyer, and politician, born 1569

Stanza 1.
Nosce Teipsum (1599)

Men, School, Fools, Parent

“That discipline which corrects the baseness of worldly passion, fortifies the heart with virtuous principles, enlightens the mind with useful knowledge, and furnishes it with enjoyment from within itself, is of more consequence to real felicity, than all the provision we can make of the goods of fortune.”

Hugh Blair (1718–1800) British philosopher

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 109.

Passion, Heart

“Horsed upon hippogriffs, the hags of night
Shall come to visit me; and once an age
Some desperate wight, or wizard, gaunt and grey,
Shall seek this spot by help of hidden lore,
To ask of things forgotten or to come.
But who, beholding me, shall dare defy
The wrath of Jove? Since vain is wisdom's boast,
And impotent the knowledge that o'erleaps
The dusky bourne of time. Twere better far
That gods should quaff their nectar merrily,
And men sing out the day like grasshoppers,
So may they haply lull the watchful thunder.”

Hartley Coleridge (1796–1849) British poet, biographer, essayist, and teacher

Prometheus
Poems (1851), Prometheus

Wisdom, Men, God, Age

“The spectator of a sculpture, modern or ancient, is not called to examine his own or the sculptor's knowledge of anatomy but to participations, so to say, a participation where the motions which have strangulated the carver, while working, must operate the same mysterious attraction and inexpressible miracle of forms and lines, its dramaticism, its graphic tragedy, or its smiling gaiety and happiness: its words carved out of forms and sown with lines into phrases of philosophy, religion.”

Ossip Zadkine (1890–1967) French sculptor

n.p.
1960 - 1968, Plastic Language, Ossip Zadkine

Happiness, Religion, Smile

“Only an unashamed dogmatist would dare to assert that the issue has finally been resolved now, in favor of the view that, outside logic or mathematics, the method of modern science is the only method to employ in seeking knowledge. The dogmatist who made this assertion would have to be more than ashamed. He would have to blind himself to the fact that his own assertion was not established by the experimental method, nor made as an indisputable conclusion of mathematical reasoning or of purely logical analysis.”

Robert Maynard Hutchins (1899–1977) philosopher and university president

Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education (1954)

Mathematics, Science

“Religion may be a quest for the truth, but it has no way of finding the truth, or verifying what it claims to find. Our knowledge of what God is like has not advanced one iota over the ideas of the 1500s.
And insofar as theological interpretation has changed, it’s done so not as a result of faith’s quest for truth, but of pressure from science and secular morality. Really, can any theologian, philosopher, or scientist tell me anything about God now that we didn’t know 500 years ago? Then ask a scientist what we know now about science that we didn’t know in 1500.”

Jerry Coyne (1949) American biologist

" Do both science and faith produce truth? http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/08/11/do-both-science-and-faith-produce-truth/" August 11, 2012

God, Truth, Faith, Religion

“I used to think that television could be potentially the most powerful medium for the dissemination of knowledge that the world has ever known, it could be a very rich and rewarding thing if handled properly and that the problem was in the execution. I've now come, after ten years in the business, five years of which was as a television critic, to taking the very extreme view point. I think television itself is bad.
The idea of television, the act of watching television kills the imagination. It's not like radio, with radio you had to listen, had to make things, you had to build things in your mind. Movies do that. Television is something else again. Television lays it all out there in a very prescribed way and the bare minimum of imagination on the part of the viewer is needed and I really fear for all of us.”

Harlan Ellison (1934–2018) American writer

Interview in 1979, quoted in The Online Copywriter's Handbook (2002) by Robert W. Bly, p. 19

World, Fear, Way, Imagination

“Discussion is an exchange of knowledge; argument an exchange of ignorance.”

Robert Quillen (1887–1948) American journalist

As quoted in The School Day Begins : A Guide to Opening Exercises, Grades Kindergarten - 12 (1967) by Agnes Krarup

“The democratization of knowledge by the print medium brought the Enlightenment. Now, broadband interconnection is supporting decentralized processes that reinvigorate democracy.”

Al Gore (1948) 45th Vice President of the United States

Quotes, The Assault on Reason (2007)

Democracy, Support

“The organism or group enacts equivocal raw talk, the talk is viewed retrospectively, sense is made of it, and then this sense is stored as knowledge in the retention process. The aim of each process has been to reduce equivocality and to get some idea of what has occurred.”

Karl E. Weick (1936) Organisational psychologist

Source: 1980s-1990s, Sensemaking in Organizations, 1995, p. 133-134

Idea, Sense

“No objection can be made to these voluntary associations upon the ground that they would lack that knowledge of justice, as a science, which would be necessary to enable them to maintain justice, and themselves avoid doing injustice. Honesty, justice, natural law, is usually a very plain and simple matter, easily understood by common minds. Those who desire to know what it is, in any particular case, seldom have to go far to find it.”

Lysander Spooner (1808–1887) Anarchist, Entrepreneur, Abolitionist

Section IV, p. 8
Natural Law; or The Science of Justice (1882), Chapter I. The Science of Justice.

Justice, Law, Nature, Science

Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) American historian

Source: The Evolution of Civilizations (1961) (Second Edition 1979), Chapter 1, Scientific Method and the Social Sciences, p. 40

Idea, Science

“Knowledge or wealth to few are given,
But mark how just the ways of Heaven:
True joy to all is free.
Nor wealth nor knowledge grant the boon:
'Tis thine, O conscience, thine alone,
It all belongs to thee.”

William Julius Mickle (1734–1788) British writer

Knowledge: an Ode (c. 1761)

Way, Joy, Wealth

“To be perfectly ignorant in all the Terms of them is only tolerable in those, who think their Tongues of as little Use to them, as generally their Understandings are. Those whom Necessity has obliged to get their Bread by Manual Industry, where some Degree of Art is required to go along with it, and who have had some Insight into these Studies, have very often found Advantages from them sufficient to reward the Pains they were at in acquiring them. And whatever may have been imputed (how justly I'm not now to determine) to some other Studies, under the Notion of Insignificancy and Loss of Time; yet these, I believe, never caused Repentance in any, except it was for their Remissness in the Prosecution of them. And though Plato's Censure, that those who did not understand the 117 Prop. of the 10th Element, ought not to be ranked among Rational Creatures, wax unreasonable and unjust: Yet to give a Man the Character of Universal Learning that is destitute of a competent Knowledge in the Mathematics, is no less so.”

Jacques Ozanam (1640–1718) French mathematician

Preface
A Mathematical Dictionary: Or; A Compendious Explication of All Mathematical Terms, 1702

Pain, Art, Mathematics, Understanding

“A work upon the plan originally contemplated by the Author seems still to be required, to initiate the young and uninstructed in the study of those MEDALS 0F CREATION—those electrotypes of nature—the mineralized remains of the plants and animals which successively flourished in the earlier ages of our planet, in periods incalculably remote, and long antecedent to all human history and tradition. With this conviction the present volumes are offered… as a guide for the Student and the Amateur Collector of fossil remains; for the intelligent Observer who may desire to possess a general knowledge of the subject, without intending to pursue Geology as a science; and for the Tourist who may wish, in the course of his travels, to employ profitably a leisure hour in quest of those interesting memorials of the ancient physical revolutions of our globe, which he will find everywhere presented to his observation.”

Gideon Mantell (1790–1852) British scientist and obstetrician

Preface to the First Edition
The Medals of Creation or First Lessons in Geology (1854)

Age, Travel, History, Intelligence

“As all true virtue, wherever found, is a ray of the life of the All-Holy; so all solid knowledge, all really accurate thought, descends from the Eternal Reason, and ought, when we apprehend it, to guide us upwards to Him.”

Henry Liddon (1829–1890) British theologian

Quote reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895). p. 366.
Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

Life

“These Gentlemen must be told, that they take too much upon themselves when they pretend to appoint how far and no farther Men shall go in their Searches, and to set bounds to other Mens Industry; as if they knew the Marks that God has placed to Knowledge…”

Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695) Dutch mathematician and natural philosopher

Book 1, p. 8
Cosmotheoros (1695; publ. 1698)

Men, God, Search

“We reduce the complexity of the variety of the world in experiments whose results are validated by their repeatability, and we may build knowledge by the refutation of hypotheses.”

Peter Checkland (1930) British management scientist

Source: Systems Thinking, Systems Practice, 1981, p. 51 cited in: Rosário Macário (2011) Managing Urban Mobility Systems. p. 52

World

“Desolate and dreary as the little town was in the world of today, it was infinitely more liveable than the same town of nearly two centuries before. There had been much progress in how to do things. It was regrettable that there was less progress in knowledge of things worth doing.”

Murray Leinster (1896–1975) Novelist, short story writer

Source: Time Tunnel (1964), Chapter 5 (p. 59).

World

“Some other Course therefore must be taken to promote the Search of Knowledge. Some other kind of Art for Inquiry than what hath been hitherto made use of, must be discovered; the Intellect is not to he suffer'd to act without its Helps, but is continually to be assisted by some Method or Engine, which shall be as a Guide to regulate its Actions, so as that it shall not be able to act amiss: Of this Engine, no Man except the incomparable Verulam hath had any Thoughts, and he indeed hath promoted it to a very good pitch; but there is yet somewhat more to be added, which he seem'd to want time to compleat. By this, as by that Art of Algebra in Geometry, 'twill be very easy to proceed in any Natural Inquiry, regularly and certainly: And indeed it may not improperly be call'd a Philosophical Algebra, or an Art of directing the Mind in the search after Philosophical Truths, for as 'tis very hard for the most acute Wit to find out any difficult Problem in Geometry. without the help of Algebra to direct and regulate the Acts of the Reason in the Process from the question to the quœsitum, and altogether as easy for the meanest Capacity acting by that Method to compleat and perfect it, so will it be in the inquiry after Natural Knowledge.”

Robert Hooke (1635–1703) English natural philosopher, architect and polymath

"The Present State of Natural Philosophy, and wherein it is deficient," The Posthumous Works of Robert Hooke https://books.google.com/books?id=6xVTAAAAcAAJ (1705) ed., Richard Waller, pp. 6-7.

Truth, Art, Search, Question

“If I build a castle of love [i. e., mystical knowledge]
for the suffering people, they kill me!
If I don’t build I die!”

Jahonotin Uvaysiy (1781–1845) Uzbekistani poet

(Uvaysiy 1980:58) Quoted in Female Celebrations in Uzbekistan and Afghanistan: The Power of Cosmology in Musical Rites http://raziasultanova.co.uk/YTM%2008-Sultanova-FINAL.pdf by Razia Sultanova, in The 2008 Yearbook For Traditional Music, Volume 40, page 14

Love, People, Suffering

“For those who labor, I propose to improve unemployment insurance, to expand minimum wage benefits, and by the repeal of section 14(b) of the Taft-Hartley Act to make the labor laws in all our states equal to the laws of the 31 states which do not have tonight right-to-work measures. And I also intend to ask the Congress to consider measures which, without improperly invading state and local authority, will enable us effectively to deal with strikes which threaten irreparable damage to the national interest. The third path is the path of liberation. It is to use our success for the fulfillment of our lives. A great nation is one which breeds a great people. A great people flower not from wealth and power, but from a society which spurs them to the fullness of their genius. That alone is a Great Society. Yet, slowly, painfully, on the edge of victory, has come the knowledge that shared prosperity is not enough. In the midst of abundance modern man walks oppressed by forces which menace and confine the quality of his life, and which individual abundance alone will not overcome. We can subdue and we can master these forces—bring increased meaning to our lives—if all of us, government and citizens, are bold enough to change old ways, daring enough to assault new dangers, and if the dream is dear enough to call forth the limitless capacities of this great people.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, State of the Union Address (1966)

Life, People, Law, Dreams

“I have heard many times that atheists know more about religion than religious people. Atheism is an effect of that knowledge, not a lack of knowledge. I gave a Bible to my daughter. That's how you make atheists.”

David Silverman (1957) American animator and director

David Silverman, quoted in * 2010-09-28
Basic Religion Test Stumps Many Americans
Laurie Goodstein
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/28/us/28religion.html

People, Religion, Time, Daughters

“Without devotion, knowledge is tasteless. Without knowledge, devotion is mere empty idol worship.”

Chinmayananda Saraswati (1916–1993) Indian spiritual teacher

Quotations from Gurudev’s teachings, Chinmya Mission Chicago

“During the act of knowledge itself, the objective and subjective are so instantly united, that we cannot determine to which of the two the priority belongs.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge book Biographia Literaria

Source: Biographia Literaria (1817), Ch. XII

“Sweet food of sweetly uttered knowledge.”

Philip Sidney (1554–1586) English diplomat

Page 39.
An Apology of Poetry, or The Defence of Poesy (1595)

Food

“A monk should surely love his books with humility, wishing their good and not the glory of his own curiosity; but what the temptation of adultery is for laymen and the yearning for riches is for secular ecclesiastics, the seduction of knowledge is for monks.”

Umberto Eco book The Name of the Rose

The Name of the Rose (1980)

Love, Books

“As long as scientists are free to pursue the truth wherever it may lead, there will be a flow of new scientific knowledge to those who can apply it to practical problems.”

Vannevar Bush (1890–1974) American electrical engineer and science administrator

As quoted by George H. W. Bush in remarks while presenting National Medals of Science and Technology http://bushlibrary.tamu.edu/research/papers/1990/90111300.html (13 November 1990). This might be a paraphrase of statements from his introduction to "Science The Endless Frontier" (1945), rather than a direct quote. (see below)

Truth, Problem