Quotes about knowledge
page 18

“What we deplore is not that the gate of western knowledge was thrown open to Indians, but that such knowledge was imported to India at the sacrifice of our own cultural heritage. What was needed was a proper synthesis between the two systems and not neglect, far less destruction, of the Indian base.”

Syama Prasad Mookerjee (1901–1953) Indian politician

Speech delivered at Gurkula Visvavidyalaya Convocation on 25th April 1943.

“Usually it is easier to obtain estimates for budget proportions and Engel elasticities than for elasticities with respect to price. By making certain want independence assumptions, the elasticities with respect to price can be deduced from the knowledge of budget proportions and Engel elasticities. In this connection the concept of the flexibility of the marginal utility of money is essential. A system of formulae decribing these relations is given.”

Ragnar Frisch (1895–1973) Norwegian economist

Ragnar Frisch. " A complete scheme for computing all direct and cross demand elasticities in a model with many sectors http://econ.ucdenver.edu/beckman/Research/readings/frisch-demand-econometrica.pdf." Econometrica 27.2 (1959): 177-196. 1940-60s

Money

“vagueness is a 'romantic' value.... an emphasis on geometry is an emphasis on the 'known', on order and knowledge.”

Ad Reinhardt (1913–1967) American painter

Quote of Ad Reinhardt in: Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1983, p. 107
after 1967 - posthumous

“Morally relevant emotions are essential for living in social groups and they provide the basis on which we may construct conceptual frameworks that help guide our actions, but human beings should more accurately be thought of as being endowed with morally relevant capacities rather than innate moral knowledge.”

Nayef Al-Rodhan (1959) philosopher, neuroscientist, geostrategist, and author

Source: Sustainable History and the Dignity of Man (2009), p.128

Help

“That there are degrees in the knowledge of rational beings, and also in their capacities to acquire it, cannot be disputed, as it is so very obvious among mankind.”

Ethan Allen (1738–1789) American general

Source: Reason: The Only Oracle Of Man (1784), Ch. IV Section I - Speculation on the Doctrine of the Depravity of Human Reason

“Thenceforth they thought that, rationally concluded, doubt could become an instrument of knowledge.”

Marc Bloch (1886–1944) French historian, medievalist, and historiographer

“To this period [age seven] I trace my worst faults. Indecision, for I found that by hesitating for a long time over two toys in a shop I would be given both and so was tempted to make two alternatives always seem equally attractive; Ingratitude, for I grew so used to having what I wanted that I assumed it as a right; Laziness, for sloth is the especial vice of tyrants; the Impatience with boredom that is generated by devotion; the Cruelty which comes from a knowledge of power and the Giving way to moods, for I learnt that sulking, crying, moping and malingering were bluffs that paid.”

Cyril Connolly book Enemies of Promise

Source: Enemies of Promise (1938), Part 3: A Georgian Boyhood, Ch. 18: The Branching Ogham (p. 149)

Age, Way, Mood, Time

“Communication becomes the defining characteristic of homo sapiens; we are the species that speaks. We utter the words that create our world, and have learned to take our words and translate them into the ethereal play of zeros and ones, lay them out, at the speed of light, first on a wire, then a radio wave, and lately, on a beam of light, so that the voice, once constrained by mouth and ear, now straddles the entire planet in thirty millionths of a second, messages pinging back and forth, not unlike the meeting points of a synaptic gap, using photons as neurotransmitters, and each network router the equivalent of a synapic junction, deciding whether to activate or extinguish each message that crosses the continents, connected now in a seamless, endless web of knowledge, more than two billion pages, more than any one of us could ever read or know, the collected and collective intelligence of a species that seems to have made information the central mystery of culture, the project of civilization, and the goal of being.”

Mark Pesce (1962) American writer

From the narration to Becoming Transhuman http://www.webearth.org/bt.pdf

World, Intelligence, Communication, Light

“Thou hast asked concerning the fundamentals of religion and its ordinances: Know thou that first and foremost in religion is the knowledge of God. This attaineth its consummation in the recognition of His divine unity, which in turn reacheth its fulfilment in acclaiming that His hallowed and exalted Sanctuary, the Seat of His transcendent majesty, is sanctified from all attributes. And know thou that in this world of being the knowledge of God can never be attained save through the knowledge of Him Who is the Dayspring of divine Reality.”

Báb (1819–1850) Iranian prophet; founder of the religion Bábism; venerated in the Bahá'í Faith

Dalá’Il-I-Sab‘ih

God, World, Religion, Reality

“A philosophy has no private store of knowledge or methods for attaining truth, so it has no private access to good. As it accepts knowledge and principles from those competent in science and inquiry, it accepts the goods that are diffused in human experience. It has no Mosaic or Pauline authority of revelation entrusted to it. But it has the authority of intelligence, of criticism of these common and natural goods.”

John Dewey (1859–1952) American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer

Experience and Nature (1925)

Truth, Intelligence, Nature, Science

“The science of political economy is essentially practical, and applicable to the common business of human life. There are few branches of human knowledge where false views may do more harm, or just views more good.”

Thomas Robert Malthus Principles of Political Economy

Book I, Introduction, p. 9
Principles of Political Economy (Second Edition 1836)

Life, Business, Science, Falseness

“Projections involve many more aspects of the whole self, and are a mark that the personality is progressing in important ways. The inner senses are allowed their greatest freedom in projection states, and the whole self retains experience that it would not otherwise. When this knowledge becomes part of the usual waking consciousness, that is when you realize what you have done, then you have taken a gigantic step forward. An almost automatic determination must be set up however if projections with conscious awareness are to be anything but rare oddities.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Session 274, Page 280
The Early Sessions: Sessions 1-42, 1997, The Early Sessions: Book 6

Way, Sense, Freedom, Parting

“We have a large reservoir of engineers (and scientists) with a vast background of engineering know how. They need to learn statistical methods that can tap into the knowledge. Statistics used as a catalyst to engineering creation will, I believe, always result in the fastest and most economical progress…”

George E. P. Box (1919–2013) British statistician

Statement of 1992, quoted in Introduction to Statistical Experimental Design — What is it? Why and Where is it Useful? (2002) Johan Trygg & Svante Wold

Learning

“By now many intellectuals regard theoretical or 'objective' knowledge as the only knowledge worth considering. Popper himself encourages the belief by his slander of relativism. Now this conceit would have substance if scientists and philosophers looking for universal and objective morality had succeeded in finding the former and persuaded, rather than forced, dissenting cultures to adopt the latter. This is not the case.”

Paul Karl Feyerabend book Farewell to Reason

pg 168.
Farewell to Reason (1987)

Universe

“BECAUSE no People can be truly happy, though under the greatest Enjoyment of Civil Liberties, if abridged of the Freedom of their Consciences, as to their Religious Profession and Worship: And Almighty God being the only Lord of Conscience, Father of Lights and Spirits; and the Author as well as Object of all divine Knowledge, Faith and Worship, who only doth enlighten the Minds, and persuade and convince the Understandings of People, I do hereby grant and declare, That no Person or Persons, inhabiting in this Province or Territories, who shall confess and acknowledge One almighty God, the Creator, Upholder and Ruler of the World; and profess him or themselves obliged to live quietly under the Civil Government, shall be in any Case molested or prejudiced, in his or their Person or Estate, because of his or their conscientious Persuasion or Practice, nor be compelled to frequent or maintain any religious Worship, Place or Ministry, contrary to his or their Mind, or to do or suffer any other Act or Thing, contrary to their religious Persuasion.”

William Penn (1644–1718) English real estate entrepreneur, philosopher, early Quaker and founder of the Province of Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania Charter of Privileges (28 October 1701)

God, Happiness, People, World

“The persons who are interested in the life of ancient polymaths, devote their life to learn and innovate in sciences, arts, and the transfer of their knowledge to the Iranians and the other nations.”

Taraneh Javanbakht (1974) Iranian scientist, faculty, poet, translator, playwright and writer

Source: Gooyanews website, 2010 http://news.gooya.com/politics/archives/2010/03/102134.php

Life, Art, Learning, Science

“Scientists and archaeologists have no clue how the ancients were able to excavate, let alone move such huge stones on such rough and uneven terrain. They cannot be moved by any combination of modern equipment today. Whole books have been written on speculation as to how they moved these massive stones. Many writers conclude that aliens must have visited earth and done this with technology about which we know nothing! Ahhhh?…there is a much simpler solution…Ancient man, especially pre-flood, and for a few hundred years post-flood, lived lots longer and accumulated lots more knowledge than we have today! No “Aliens” required!”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Source: What On Earth Is About To Happen… For Heaven’s Sake? (2013), p. 57

Books

“She [Queen Elizabeth II] is a person of sharp memory and has great knowledge about India. I met her first in 1933 during my maiden visit to England. It was long before her coronation. She was then Princess Elizabeth. Her father, then Duke of York, was also there when I saw her.”

Uthradom Thirunal Marthanda Varma (1922–2013) Maharaja of Travancore

After meeting Queen Elizabeth, in When 'Maharaja of Travancore' met Queen Elizabeth II (8 July 2012) http://www.ndtv.com/article/south/when-maharaja-of-travancore-met-queen-elizabeth-ii-240858

Memory, Personality, Princess

“What was crucial to the partnership, it should be noted, is that Flavor Flav was a clown — in the tradition of the best black comics — yet he was a clown with consciousness, empowered with knowledge of self, an entirely different persona from the "Stepin Fetchit" and "Sambo" stereotypes of subservient and uncouth black Americans. Flavor Flav was and is a fool, but a fool on a mission. On the cover of Nation of Millions, he wears a gigantic clock as a medallion — a preposterous getup — yet it is designed to illustrate, through a comic medium, that time is indeed running out.”

Flavor Flav (1959) American rapper

Rickey Vincent, Funk: The Music, the People, and the Rhythm of the One (1996), p. 309.
About

Fools, Time, Partnership

“All the phenomena of the universe are presumably in some way continuous, and it is unscientific to call in the aid of mysterious agencies when, with every fresh advance in knowledge, it is shown that ether vibrations have powers and attributes abundantly equal to any demand — even to the transmission of thought.”

William Crookes (1832–1919) British chemist and physicist

Address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1898)

Way, Universe

“The dirty wax of egotism accumulated in the heart prevents us from clearly hearing the Lord’s voice within. A guru, with the stick of knowledge, cleans our hearts. Its really ugly to see what may come out, but by following patiently, we keep cleaning.”

Radhanath Swami (1950) Gaudiya Vaishnava guru

?
The Journey Home: Autobiography of an American Swami (Tulsi Books, 2010)

Heart

“The question "cui bono" to what practical end and advantage do your researches tend? is one which the speculative philosopher who loves knowledge for its own sake, and enjoys, as a rational being should enjoy, the mere contemplation of harmonious and mutually dependent truths, can seldom hear without a sense of humiliation. He feels that there is a lofty and disinterested pleasure in his speculations which ought to exempt them from such questioning; communicating as they do to his own mind the purest happiness (after the exercise of the benevolent and moral feelings) of which human nature is susceptible, and tending to the injury of no one, he might surely allege this as a sufficient and direct reply to those who, having themselves little capacity, and less relish for intellectual pursuits, are constantly repeating upon him this enquiry.”

John Herschel (1792–1871) English mathematician, astronomer, chemist and photographer

A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (1831)

Love, Happiness, Pleasure, Truth

“George Foulkes: Will the Prime Minister tell us what word he would legitimately use to describe those Cabinet Ministers who, while professing loyalty to him, are setting up telephone lines in campaign offices for the second round of the election?
John Major: I have no knowledge of that. I can say that the speed at which these matters can be done is a tribute to privatisation.”

John Major (1943) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Prime Minister's Questions http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199495/cmhansrd/1995-06-29/Orals-2.html, 29 June, 1995. It was rumoured that Cabinet member Michael Portillo had installed telephone lines in the event of his standing in the Conservative leadership election. 1990s, 1995

Speed, Loyalty

“I have… begun to collect materials for a work… relating to every department of medical knowledge: …it will be comparatively more concise than these lectures, in proportion to what has been said and written respecting physic, but, I hope, much more complete, with regard to all that is known with certainty, and can be applied with utility.”

Thomas Young (scientist) (1773–1829) English polymath

Preface (March 30, 1807)
A Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy and the Mechanical Arts (1807)

Hope

“Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science. It has been so even amongst us. Many who hear me, perhaps, can recollect well, that this truth was not generally admitted, even within their day. The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago. Those at the north, who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity. One of the most striking characteristics of insanity, in many instances, is forming correct conclusions from fancied or erroneous premises; so with the anti-slavery fanatics. Their conclusions are right if their premises were. They assume that the negro is equal, and hence conclude that he is entitled to equal privileges and rights with the white man. If their premises were correct, their conclusions would be logical and just but their premise being wrong, their whole argument fails. I recollect once of having heard a gentleman from one of the northern States, of great power and ability, announce in the House of Representatives, with imposing effect, that we of the South would be compelled, ultimately, to yield upon this subject of slavery, that it was as impossible to war successfully against a principle in politics, as it was in physics or mechanics. That the principle would ultimately prevail. That we, in maintaining slavery as it exists with us, were warring against a principle, a principle founded in nature, the principle of the equality of men. The reply I made to him was, that upon his own grounds, we should, ultimately, succeed, and that he and his associates, in this crusade against our institutions, would ultimately fail. The truth announced, that it was as impossible to war successfully against a principle in politics as it was in physics and mechanics, I admitted; but told him that it was he, and those acting with him, who were warring against a principle. They were attempting to make things equal which the Creator had made unequal.”

Alexander H. Stephens (1812–1883) Vice President of the Confederate States (in office from 1861 to 1865)

The Cornerstone Speech (1861)

Men, War, Truth, World

“Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason why it was put up.”

G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) English mystery novelist and Christian apologist

According to The American Chesterton Society http://www.chesterton.org/qmeister2/19.htm, this quotation is actually a paraphrase by John F. Kennedy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy of a passage from The Thing (1929) in which Chesterton made reference to a fence or gate erected across a road: "The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it." Misattributed

“The analogy with bibliographic classifications and thesauri is obvious… despite the differences, it is to be regretted that 'ontological engineers' make little or no reference to work in information science. As a consequence, they do not appear to draw at all on the rich experience of constructing knowledge schedules … or… developing concept lexicons.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Source: Information history – an introduction (2009), p. 284; As cited in: Lyn Robinson and David Bawden (2011).

Appearance, Science, Drawing

“Yet, we are well assured that learning did not form any prominent feature in the education of a young nobleman during the Saxon government: it is notorious, that Alfred the Great was twelve years of age before he learned to read; and that he owed his knowledge of letters to accident, rather than to the intention of his tutors. A book adorned with paintings in the hands of his mother, attracted his notice, and he expressed his desire to have it: she promised to comply with his request on condition that he learned to read it, which it seems he did; and this trifling incident laid the groundwork of his future scholarship.”

Joseph Strutt (1749–1802) British engraver, artist, antiquary and writer

xx
The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), Education

Books, Age, Education, Learning

“The object of this book is to suggest certain lines of thought as to the deep truths underlying Christianity, truths generally overlooked, and only too often denied. The generous wish to share with all what is precious, to spread broadcast priceless truths, to shut out none from the illumination of true knowledge, has resulted in a zeal without discretion that has vulgarised Christianity, and has presented its teachings in a form that often repels the heart and alienates the intellect. The command to “preach the gospel to very creature” – though admittedly by doubtful authenticity – has been interpreted as forbidding the teaching of Gnosis to a few, and has apparently erased the less popular saying of the same Great Teacher “Give not that is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine.””

Annie Besant (1847–1933) British socialist, theosophist, women's rights activist, writer and orator

In Esoteric Christianity: Or, The Lesser Mysteries http://books.google.co.in/books?id=XLUipprqQkAC&pg=PT2, p. 2

Truth, Dogs, Swine, Teachers

“I’m very skeptical in approaching Bach as a clean slate. To understand Bach, one has to be at home in the whole literature of art and interpretation; one must have great experience in performing the complete literature, from Bach until the early avantgarde. I’m absolutely convinced that only by this deep knowledge one can feel the all-embracing range of effects that are compressed in Bach and his music - and how later generations have been inspired. Only by this experience you can give the Bach interpretation a new balance and tension. In the case of the Goldberg Variations we are confronted with these all-emotional effects, and I’m also skeptical whether this all-embracing range can be touched by much too young players, on harpsichord as well as on piano. Knowing the true worth of this condensed and nearly welded-in polyphonic structure and singular musical architecture, one ultimately knows that it is impossible to play with the variations, meaning to change voices, or make doublings. Then the music itself would be robbed of its true worth and sense, which can only be revealed by bringing out the embedded simplicity, which however is transformed to an electrified, heated atmosphere. One has to respect the internal strength.”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings on Bach

Art, Music, Feeling, Home

“A world of such individual minds is by the final implications of this proof the world of primary causes, and every member of it, secure above the vicissitudes of Time and Space and Force, is possessed of a supertemporal or eternal reality, and is therefore not liable to any lethal influence from any other source. Itself a primary cause, it can neither destroy another primary cause nor be destroyed by any. The objector who would open the eternal permanence of the soul to doubt, then, must assail the proofs of a priori knowledge; for so long as these remain free from suspicion, there can be no real question as to what they finally imply. The concomitance of our two streams of experience, the timed stream and the spaced stream, raised from a merely historical into a necessary concomitance by the argument that refers it to the active unity of each soul as its ground, becomes the steadfast sign and visible pledge of the imperishable self-resource of the individual spirit.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), Human Immortality: its Positive Argument, p.307-8

World, Soul, Question, Reality

“Knowing is what counts. To know one's country and govern it with that knowledge is the only way to free it from tyranny.”

José Martí (1853–1895) Poet, writer, Cuban nationalist leader

Our America (1881)

Way, Country

“When the Father would give men the light of the knowledge of His glory, how does He proceed? To what does He turn men's gaze? Not to His mighty works; not to creative or providential wonders; not to geological or astronomical facts; not to the data on which Paley and Bell and other admirable writers build up their argument from design; not to the still greater wonder of mind, but to " the face of Jesus Christ," that face that was more marred than any man's; that endured the ruffian blows; down which the blood drops trickled; that looked down on a mocking crowd from an ignominious cross.”

John Hall (1829–1898) Presbyterian pastor from Northern Ireland in New York, died 1898

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 70.

Men, Light, Christ

“If history moves forward, knowledge of it travels backwards, so that in writing of our own recent past we are continually meeting ourselves coming the other way.”

Terry Eagleton (1943) British writer, academic and educator

Afterword, p. 190
1980s, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983)

Way, Travel, History, Past

“The primary, the cardinal attribute of leadership is professional knowledge and professional competence. And you will agree with me… that you cannot be born with professional knowledge and professional competence. Not even if you are the son of the Prime Minister, an industrialist, or a Field Marshal. Professional knowledge has to be acquired the hard way. It is continuous study and you never acquire it in today’s fast-moving technological world that you are living in. You have to keep up with your profession whatever you are in.”

Sam Manekshaw (1914–2008) First Field marshal of the Indian Army

His lecture on leadership as part of the Field Marshal KM Kariappa Memorial Lectures.

Source: [Field Marshal KM Kariappa Memorial Lectures, 1995-2000, http://books.google.com/books?id=Eux31FCNj8MC&pg=PA21, 2001, Lancer Publishers, 978-81-7062-119-5, 21–]

World, Way, Study

“Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin.”

Emil M. Cioran book History and Utopia

History and Utopia (1960)

“As revelation is the great strengthener of reason, the march of mind which leaves the Bible in the rear, is an advance, like that of our first parents in Paradise, towards knowledge, but, at the same time, towards death.”

Henry Melvill (1798–1871) British academic

Quote reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 364.
Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

Death, Parent, Time

“The significance of that 'absolute commandment', know thyself — whether we look at it in itself or under the historical circumstances of its first utterance — is not to promote mere self-knowledge in respect of the particular capacities, character, propensities, and foibles of the single self. The knowledge it commands means that of man's genuine reality — of what is essentially and ultimately true and real — of spirit as the true and essential being.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel book Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences

Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1816)

Reality

“One can bring no greater reproach against a man than to say that he does not set sufficient value upon pleasure, and there is no greater sign of a fool than the thinking that he can tell at once and easily what it is that pleases him. To know this is not easy, and how to extend our knowledge of it is the highest and the most neglected of all arts and branches of education.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

On Knowing what Gives us Pleasure, i
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XIII - Unprofessional Sermons

Pleasure, Education, Fools, Art

“To the memory of Sir Thomas Denison, Knt., this monument was erected by his afflicted widow. He was an affectionate husband, a generous relation, a sincere friend, a good citizen, an honest man. Skilled in all the learning of the common law, he raised himself to great eminence in his profession; and showed by his practice, that a thorough knowledge of the legal art and form is not litigious, or an instrument of chicane, but the plainest, easiest, and shortest way to the end of strife. For the sake of the public he was pressed, and at the last prevailed upon, to accept the office of a judge in the Court of King's Bench. He discharged the important trust of that high office with unsuspected integrity, and uncommon ability. The clearness of his understanding, and the natural probity of his heart, led him immediately to truth, equity, and justice; the precision and extent of his legal knowledge enabled him always to find the right way of doing what was right. A zealous friend to the constitution of his country, he steadily adhered to the fundamental principle upon which it is built, and by which alone it can be maintained, a religious application of the inflexible rule of law to all questions concerning the power of the crown, and privileges of the subject. He resigned his office February 14, 1765, because from the decay of his health and the loss of his sight, he found himself unable any longer to execute it. He died September 8, 1765, without issue, in the sixty-seventh year of his age. He wished to be buried in his native country, and in this church. He lies here near the Lord Chief Justice Gascoigne, who by a resolute and judicious exertion of authority, supported law and government in a manner which has perpetuated his name, and made him an example famous to posterity.”

Thomas Denison (1699–1765) British judge (1699–1765)

Memorial inscription, reported in Edward Foss, The Judges of England, With Sketches of Their Lives (1864), Volume 8, p. 266-268.
About

Health, Truth, Age, Justice

“Till women are more rationally educated, the progress in human virtue and improvement in knowledge must receive continual checks.”

Mary Wollstonecraft book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Source: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Ch. 3

Women, Education

“Science is knowledge which we understand so well that we can teach it to a computer; and if we don't fully understand something, it is an art to deal with it.”

Donald Ervin Knuth (1938) American computer scientist

Source: Computer Programming as an Art (1974), p. 668

Art, Understanding, Science

“A fundamental requirement of a Foreign Service Officer is that he or she report on a given situation as observed or understood. It is only in this way that any government can draw conclusions knowledgeably and make its considered decisions, even if at variance with the reports received.”

Jacques Roy (diplomat) Canadian diplomat

Way, Decision, Drawing

“Of the sixteen chapters which compose it, there are fifteen wholly employed in detecting the fallacy and ridicule to be found in the objects of human passions and inclinations, and in demolishing such obstacles as at first weaken, and afterwards extinguish, any knowledge of God in mankind;
Therefore, these chapters are merely preparatory to the sixteenth and last, wherein atheism is attacked, and perhaps routed, wherein the proofs of a God, such at least as weak man is capable of receiving, are produced; wherein the providence of God is defended against the insults and complaints of free-thinkers.”

Jean de La Bruyère book Les Caractères

On the purpose of writing Les Carácteres, Preface to La Bruyere's "Characters," p. v
Les Caractères (1688)

God, Passion

“Carry out a random act of kindness with no expectation of reward, safe in the knowledge that one day someone might do the same for you.”

Diana, Princess of Wales (1961–1997) First wife of Charles, Prince of Wales

The Huffington Post - Diana: The Legacy (31 Aug 2012) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-allison/diana-the-legacy_b_1844945.html

“There are few, however, who devote thought and study to perfection of Divine service—to love, fear, communion and all of the other aspects of saintliness. It is not that they consider this knowledge unessential; if questioned each one will maintain that it is of paramount importance and that one who is not clearly versed in it cannot be deemed truly wise. Their failure to devote more attention to it stems rather from its being so manifest and so obvious to them that they see no need for spending much time upon it. Consequently, this study and the reading of works of this kind have been left to those of a not too sensitive, almost dull intelligence. These you will see immersed in the study of saintliness, not stirring from it. It has reached the stage that when one sees another engaging in saintly conduct, he cannot help but suspect him of dullwittedness.”

Moshe Chaim Luzzatto book Mesillat Yesharim

Mesillat Yesharim (1738), Introduction

Love, Fear, Intelligence, Failure

“Credo Mutwa, the most knowledgeable man i have ever had the honor of knowing.”

David Icke (1952) English writer and public speaker

Source: The Biggest Secret, 1998

“Truth is the foundation of all knowledge, and the cement of all societies.”

John Dryden (1631–1700) English poet and playwright of the XVIIth century

The Character of Polybius (1692)

Truth

“Geometry is that of mathematical science which is devoted to consideration of form and size, and may be said to be the best and surest guide to study of all sciences in which ideas of dimension or space are involved. Almost all the knowledge required by navigators, architects, surveyors, engineers, and opticians, in their respective occupations, is deduced from geometry and branches of mathematics. All works of art constructed according to the rules which geometry involves; and we find the same laws observed in the works of nature. The study of mathematics, generally, is also of great importance in cultivating habits of exact reasoning; and in this respect it forms a useful auxiliary to logic.”

Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) (1802–1871) Scottish publisher and writer

Robert Chambers, Chambers's Information for the People (1875) Vol. 2 https://books.google.com/books?id=vNpTAAAAYAAJ

Law, Art, Mathematics, Idea

“On Omega, the law was kept secret. Older residents used their knowledge of the law to enforce their rule over the newcomers. This system was condoned and reinforced by the doctrine of the inequality of all men, which lay at the heart of the Omegan legal system. Through planned inequality and enforced ignorance, power and status remained in the hands of the older residents.”

Robert Sheckley book The Status Civilization

Source: The Status Civilization (1960), Chapter 5 (p. 26)

Men, Secret, Law, Heart

“If Virtue & Knowledge are diffus'd among the People, they will never be enslav'd. This will be their great Security.”

Samuel Adams (1722–1803) American statesman, Massachusetts governor, and political philosopher

Letter to James Warren (12 February 1779)

People

“What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) German scientist, satirist

G 7
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook G (1779-1783)

Nature

“No one thinks he will escape death, so there is no disappointment and, as long as we know neither the when nor the how, the mere fact that we shall one day have to go does not much affect us; we do not care, even though we know vaguely that we have not long to live. The serious trouble begins when death becomes definite in time and shape. It is in precise fore-knowledge, rather than in sin, that the sting of death is to be found; and such fore-knowledge is generally withheld; though, strangely enough, many would have it if they could.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Fore-knowledge of Death
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XXIII - Death

Death, Disappointment, Thinking, Time

“Once we recognize that all historical knowledge is relational knowledge, and can only be formulated with reference to the position of the observer, we are faced, once more, with the task of discriminating between what is true and what is false in such knowledge.”

Karl Mannheim (1893–1947) Hungarian sociologist

Ideology and Utopia (1929)

Falseness

“Many associate the word scientific with physics. But it means much more than that. Scientific management means a constant search for the facts, the true actualities, and their intelligent, unprejudiced analysis. Thus, and in no other way, policies and their administration are determined. I keep saying to the General Motors organization that we are prepared to spend any proper amount of money to get the facts. Only by increased knowledge can we progress, perhaps I had better say survive. That is really research, but few realize research can and should be just as effectively used in all functional branches of industry as in physics”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

Source: Adventures of a White-Collar Man. 1941, p. 140

Money, Way, Search, Intelligence

“The Enlightenment worldview held by Du Bois is ultimately inadequate, and, in many ways, antiquated, for our time. The tragic plight and absurd predicament of Africans here and abroad requires a more profound interpretation of the human condition — one that goes beyond the false dichotomies of expert knowledge vs. mass ignorance, individual autonomy vs. dogmatic authority, and self-mastery vs. intolerant tradition.”

Cornel West book The Future of the Race

The Future of the Race (1997) by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Cornel West, p. 64

Way, Boy, Time, Falseness

“The danger arises when a culture takes its own story as the absolute truth, and seeks to impose this truth on others as the yardstick of all knowledge and belief.”

F. David Peat (1938–2017) British physicist

From Certainty to Uncertainty (2002)

Truth

“[Responding to criticism from Dr. Hesse] Voodoo, Dr Hesse's piece de risistance', is case in point. Nobody knows it, everybody uses it as a paradigm of backwardness and confusion. And yet Voodoo has a firm though still not sufficiently understood material basis, and a study of its manifestations can be used to enrich, and perhaps even revise, our knowledge of physiology.”

Paul Karl Feyerabend book Against Method

Pg. 50.
Against Method (1975)

Study

“Much of what we often consider knowledge is actually a point of view held without sufficient grounds: in a word, dogma.”

Nayef Al-Rodhan (1959) philosopher, neuroscientist, geostrategist, and author

Knowledge and Global Order https://www.academia.edu/4418949/Knowledge_and_Global_Order_-_BBVA_OpenMind_August_2013/ - BBVA OpenMind, August 2013

“The death-of-the-author thematics, as commonly adapted, are another inanity: when society does its very best to homogenize us, what is wrong with a strong, knowledgeable, and responsible ego crying in the darkening wilderness?”

Nathaniel Tarn (1928) American poet, essayist, anthropologist, and translator

Nathaniel Tarn (1999) "Octavio Paz, Anthropology, and the Future of Poetry" published in: The Embattled Lyric: Essays and Conversations in Poetics and Anthropology (2007). p. 118.

Death, Strong, Cry

“God grant, that not only the Love of Liberty, but a thorough Knowledge of the Rights of Man, may pervade all the Nations of the Earth, so that a Philosopher may set his Foot anywhere on its Surface, and say, 'This is my Country.”

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) American author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, …

Letter to David Hartley (December 4, 1789); reported in Albert H. Smyth, ed., The Writings of Benjamin Franklin (1907), Volume 10, p. 72; often quoted as, "Where liberty dwells, there is my country".
Decade unclear

Love, God, Country

“At one time in my life I used to look out of my bedroom window and see in the distance that stupendous mountain pile, Kinchengunga, one of the highest peaks in the Himalayas. It looked so close, almost as if a day's walking would bring me to its foot but I knew that it would take at least twelve weeks hard trekking to get an able bodied climber there, and then there would be the terrific climb to its summit — a feat seldom accomplished. So it is with knowledge. That which is worth having is seldom of easy attainment and in itself only constitutes a foundation for more knowledge.”

Alice A. Bailey (1880–1949) esoteric, theosophist, writer

Source: The Unfinished Autobiography (1951), Chapter II, Part 1

Life, Mountain, Time

“Many pressing problems facing science and society are inherently geospatial – location matters. The availability of essential geospatial data has increased dramatically over the past decade. Both scientific progress and application of geospatial information to societal needs remains hampered, however, due to the lack of methods for transforming these data into information and for combining information from diverse sources to construct knowledge. Progress requires fundamental breakthroughs in both geovisualization and its integration with other methods for geospatial knowledge construction. The research agenda delineated in this issue is a step toward achieving these breakthroughs. Identifying the challenges is the easy part. Meeting them is unlikely without a commitment to a coordinated approach, by both individuals and organizations in multiple countries.”

Alan MacEachren (1952) American geographer

Source: Research challenges in geovisualization (2001), p. 12. summary

Problem, Science, Past, Parting

“I think the enemy is here before us, too. But I think we know the forms and faces of the enemy, and in the knowledge that we know him, and shall meet him, and eventually must conquer him is also our living hope. I think the enemy is here before us with a thousand faces, but I think we know that all his faces wear one mask. I think the enemy is single selfishness and compulsive greed. I think the enemy is blind, but has the brutal power of his blind grab. I do not think the enemy was born yesterday, or that he grew to manhood forty years ago, or that he suffered sickness and collapse in 1929, or that we began without the enemy, and that our vision faltered, that we lost the way, and suddenly were in his camp. I think the enemy is old as Time, and evil as Hell, and that he has been here with us from the beginning. I think he stole our earth from us, destroyed our wealth, and ravaged and despoiled our land. I think he took our people and enslaved them, that he polluted the fountains of our life, took unto himself the rarest treasures of our own possession, took our bread and left us with a crust, and, not content, for the nature of the enemy is insatiate--tried finally to take from us the crust.”

Thomas Wolfe book You Can't Go Home Again

Book VII, Ch. 48: Credo
You Can't Go Home Again (1940)

Life, People, Hope, Way

“You don't gather knowledge when you are getting to know yourself; you lose it. Many of your firmest ideas go out the window. You may feel naked, vulnerable, threatened, argumentative, angry.”

Barry Long (1926–2003) Australian spiritual teacher and writer

Knowing Yourself: The True in the False (1996)

Feeling, Idea

“But the Quincunx of Heaven runs low, and 'tis time to close the five ports of knowledge. We are unwilling to spin out our awaking thoughts into the phantasmes of sleep, which often continueth præcogitations; making Cables of Cobwebbes and Wildernesses of handsome Groves. Beside Hippocrates hath spoke so little and the Oneirocriticall Masters, have left such frigid Interpretations from plants, that there is little encouragement to dream of Paradise it self. Nor will the sweetest delight of Gardens afford much comfort in sleep; wherein the dulnesse of that sense shakes hands with delectable odours; and though in the Bed of Cleopatra, can hardly with any delight raise up the ghost of a Rose.”

Thomas Browne book The Garden of Cyrus

Source: The Garden of Cyrus (1658), Ch. 5

Dreams, Sense, Sleep, Time

“We got a leader in Iran who has announced that he wants to destroy Israel. So I've told people that if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

Press conference http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2007/10/20071017.html (17 October 2007). 2000s, 2007

War, People, World

“Schools everywhere have always confined themselves to making students learn techniques and write essays, while proscribing treading for pleasure. It seems to be established in perpetuity, in every part of the world, that enjoyment has no part to play in the curriculum, and that knowledge can only be the fruit of suffering.”

Daniel Pennac (1944) French author

The Rights of the Reader (2008 translation by Sarah Adams)

Pleasure, World, School, Suffering

“He stayed in no one place very long, but he usually managed to absorb something of the atmosphere of each town, village or rubber estate he visited, and he always made quick contact with the local residents. These residents were invariably Europeans - planters, colonial officials, businessmen, or just men living in exile to escape from trouble or sadness at home - and there is little evidence that Maugham gained, or wished to gain, any direct knowledge of the lives and customs of the native peoples of the East. This must be disappointing to present-day Malay and Indian and Chinese and Eurasian readers of his stories, but we have to remember that (apart from the fact that Maugham had no time to learn Malay or Chinese or Tamil) the Western attitude to the Far East was very different in Maugham's time from what it is today.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Introduction to Maugham's Malaysian Stories (1969)
People, Joseph Conrad, W. Somerset Maugham

Men, People, Sadness, Disappointment

“Even European philosophers have taken notice that most of what we take for knowledge is nothing but bias and prejudice.”

Jack Abbott book In the Belly of the Beast

In the Belly of the Beast (1981)

“To show that there are natural processes that produce religious belief does nothing, so far, to discredit it; perhaps God designed us in such a way that it is by virtue of those processes that we come to have knowledge of him.”

Alvin Plantinga book Warranted Christian Belief

[2000, Warranted Christian Belief, 9780195131925, 145, http://www.ccel.org/ccel/plantinga/warrant3.v.iii.i.iv.html]

God, Way, Nature

“I insist that my positive knowledge, however small, is not to be set aside for the gentleman's ignorance, however great.”

Leonard Bacon (1802–1881) American Congregational preacher and writer.

Reported in Friends' Intelligencer and Journal (1898) Volume 55, p. 210. No earlier source for this quotation is given, or has otherwise been identified. Several variants are found elsewhere, e.g., ""I cannot allow my opponent's Ignorance, however vast, to offset my knowledge, however small," reported in The Kingston Daily Freeman, Volume 33, Number 167, 3 May 1904, p. 4; and "my knowledge, however small, must outweigh your ignorance, however large," reported in Semi-Centennial (1939), p. 5, by Leonard Bacon, the great-grandson of the preacher. This quote has recently been mis-attributed to William James.

“It is not uncommon for intelligent adults to turn into passive observers of their own incompetence in anything but the most elementary mathematics. Individuals may see the direct consequences of this intellectual paralysis in terms of limiting job possibilities. But the indirect, secondary consequences are even more serious. One of the main lessons learned by most people in math class is a sense of having rigid limitations. They learn a balkanized image of human knowledge which they come to see as a patchwork of territories separated by impassable iron curtains.”

Seymour Papert book Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas

Source: Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas (1980), Chapter 2, Mathophobia: The Fear of Learning

People, Intelligence, Mathematics, Sense

“The function of knowledge in the decision-making process is to determine which consequences follow upon which of the alternative strategies.”

Herbert A. Simon (1916–2001) American political scientist, economist, sociologist, and psychologist

Source: 1940s-1950s, Public administration, 1950, p. 75

Decision

“One of the deep mysteries to me is our logo, the symbol of lust and knowledge, bitten into, all crossed with the colors of the rainbow in the wrong order. You couldn't dream a more appropriate logo: lust, knowledge, hope and anarchy.”

Jean-Louis Gassée (1944) French businessman

Apple Confidential: The Real Story of Apple Computer, 1999
As President of Apple Products, speaking on the Apple logo

Dreams, Hope, Color

“What are wanted for the Indian as for the Englishman, the Frenchman, the German, and the Russian, are not Constitutions and Revolutions, nor all sorts of Conferences and Congresses, nor the many ingenious devices for submarine navigation and aerial navigation, nor powerful explosives, nor all sorts of conveniences to add to the enjoyment of the rich, ruling classes; nor new schools and universities with innumerable faculties of science, nor an augmentation of papers and books, nor gramophones and cinematographs, nor those childish and for the most part corrupt stupidities termed art — but one thing only is needful: the knowledge of the simple and clear truth which finds place in every soul that is not stupefied by religious and scientific superstitions — the truth that for our life one law is valid — the law of love, which brings the highest happiness to every individual as well as to all mankind. Free your minds from those overgrown, mountainous imbecilities which hinder your recognition of it, and at once the truth will emerge from amid the pseudo-religious nonsense that has been smothering it: the indubitable, eternal truth inherent in man, which is one and the same in all the great religions of the world. It will in due time emerge and make its way to general recognition, and the nonsense that has obscured it will disappear of itself, and with it will go the evil from which humanity now suffers.”

Leo Tolstoy A Letter to a Hindu

A Letter to a Hindu (1908)

Love, Life, Happiness, Truth

“ To be able to read and write, therefore, is to learn to profit by and take part in the greatest of human achievements -- that which makes all other achievements possible --namely, the pooling of our experiences in great cooperative stores of knowledge, available […] to all. From the warning cry of primitive man to the latest newsflash or scientific monograph, language is social. Cultural and intellectual cooperation is the great principle of human life. ”

S. I. Hayakawa book Language in Thought and Action

Source: Language in Thought and Action (1949), The Pooling of Knowledge, p. 14

Life, Learning, Reading, Parting

“Kergan Banbeck threw up his hands, turned once more to the sacerdote. “How can I halt his nonsense? How can I make him see reason?
The sacerdote reflected. “He speaks not nonsense, but rather a language you fail to understand. You can make him understand your language by erasing all knowledge and training from his mind, and replacing it with patterns of your own.””

Jack Vance book The Dragon Masters

Section 2
The Dragon Masters (1962)

Understanding, Training

““Spelling is relevant knowledge." by Smita Nair Jain at The first Global Alumni Leadership Summit organized by the Indian Institute of Management - Bangalore Alumni Association 2015””

Smita Nair Jain (1969) Indian Author, screenwriter and playback singer

“A mind does not receive truth as a chest receives jewels that are put into it, but as the stomach takes up food into the system. It is no longer food, but flesh, and is assimilated. The appetite and the power of digestion measure our right to knowledge. He has it who can use it. As soon as our accumulation overruns our invention or power to use, the evils of intellectual gluttony begin,— congestion of the brain, apoplexy and strangulation.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

The Natural History of Intellect (1893)

Truth, Food, Evil

“Machines as simple as thermostats can be said to have beliefs, and having beliefs seems to be a characteristic of most machines capable of problem solving performance. However, the machines mankind has so far found it useful to construct rarely have beliefs about beliefs, although such beliefs will be needed by computer programs that reason about what knowledge they lack and where to get it. Mental qualities peculiar to human-like motivational structures, such as love and hate, will not be required for intelligent behavior, but we could probably program computers to exhibit them if we wanted to, because our common sense notions about them translate readily into certain program and data structures. Still other mental qualities, e. g. humor and appreciation of beauty, seem much harder to model.”

John McCarthy (1927–2011) American computer scientist and cognitive scientist

" Ascribing Mental Qualities to Machines http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/ascribing.html" (1979) Sect. 1: Introduction. Reprinted in Formalizing Common Sense: Papers By John McCarthy, 1990, ISBN 0893915351 1970s

Love, Hate, Beauty, Behavior

“Regional Banks that are constrained to lend within a particular area are a necessary part of the institutional ecology in that they resist the centralising power of capital, allow a more stable access to credit for regional and smaller businesses and encourage relationships and reciprocity to constrain the demand for higher rates of return that have decimated the mutual bank sector in Britain. They also offer an alternative to usurious lending, one of the great growth areas in our economy. Any serious reflection on ‘employment policies’ must confront the centralisation of capital and the state and seek to constrain both through the endowment of decentralised regional and sectoral institutions that constrain centralisation and preserve and renew traditions of virtue within the economy through resisting the commodification of human beings, nature and knowledge demanded by the maximum return on investment. It allows initiative and enterprise to be oriented towards the future.”

Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman (1961) British philosopher

The Politics of Employment, 23 May 2013 http://togetherforthecommongood.co.uk/viewpoints/opinion-pieces/articles/maurice-glasman.html

Business, Nature, Future, Parting

“An underlying characteristic of a person in that it may be a motive, trait, skill, aspect of one’s self-image or social role, or a body of knowledge which he or she uses… a person’s competencies reflect his or her capability. They are describing what he or she can do, not necessarily what he or she does, nor does all the time regardless of the situation and setting.”

Richard Boyatzis (1946) American business theorist

Source: Competent manager (1982), p. 23.

Motivation, Time, Personality

“Associating with the wise and the knowledgeable people adds to the prestige of a person.”

Ali (601–661) cousin and son-in-law of the Islamic prophet Muhammad

Majlisi, Bihārul Anwār, vol. 78, p. 6
Regarding Knowledge & Wisdom, General

People, Personality

“Wherever there is greater joy, there is the direction of everyone’s activity, because the innermost of everyone is really the lighted lamp of Total Knowledge, total organising power of knowledge, it’s all bliss, it’s not necessary for the people to suffer.”

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (1917–2008) Inventor of Transcendental Meditation, musician

Quoted from: Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's Main Message - from Victory Day, October 21, 2007 Maharishi Channel http://www.bienfaits-meditation.com/en/maharishi/videos/maharishi_main_message_2007

People, Light, Suffering, Joy

“What is wonderful about a university like LSE is that you not only receive teaching of very high quality, you also learn where to find the knowledge you are seeking. And you make unexpected discoveries; it was a Marxist professor who introduced me to the work of Cardinal Newman, a great master of English prose as well as theology.”

Pierre Trudeau (1919–2000) 15th Prime Minister of Canada

Part 1, 1919 - 1968 The Road to 24 Sussex Drive, p. 46
Memoirs (1993)

Learning, Universe

“If intellection and knowledge were mere passion from without, or the bare reception of extraneous and adventitious forms, then no reason could be given at all why a mirror or looking-glass should not understand; whereas it cannot so much as sensibly perceive those images which it receives and reflects to us.”

Ralph Cudworth (1617–1688) English philosopher

Source: Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality (1731), Ch. 1, sct. 3

Understanding, Passion

“To understand at all what life means, one must begin with Christian belief. And I think knowledge may be sorrow with a man unless he loves.”

William Mountford (1816–1885) English Unitarian preacher and author

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 364.

Love, Life, Understanding, Thinking

“An accomplished woman almost always knows more than we men, though her knowledge is of a different sort. I am sure you could teach me a thousand things--as an exquisite bird could teach a bear if there were any common language between them. Happily, there is a common language between women and men, and so the bears can get taught.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Middlemarch (1871)

Women, Men, Bird

“These days a passion to accumulate knowledge of any and every kind consumed him; but only as a means to an end. He must know all things, for only so might he have, when situations arose in the future, a full pack of cards to play from.”

Mervyn Peake book Titus Groan

Source: Titus Groan (1946), Chapter 32 “The Fir-Cones” (p. 174)

Passion, Future

“Giving it away helps defuse complex intellectual property issues of ownership and control that can distract the universities from their missions to disseminate knowledge." - commmenting on MIT's Open Courseware program”

Hal Abelson (1947) computer scientist

Source: MIT's maverick view of intellectual property worth considering http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/metro/stories/MYSA18.01C.hendricks0318.768fcaac.html

Universe, Help

“Nothing whatever is to be gained by driving the timorous and weak by lies or compulsion into pain which they will resent and responsibility which they will evade. Everything is to be gained by training a woman in knowledge, courage, and physical strength, and leaving it then to her own instinct and her mind to tell her that to create new human beings is worth the discomfort and the suffering she must necessarily undergo. Those in whom the courage to create survives when choice is free and all the facts are known are those best fitted to bring children into the world, and breed in them eagerness and intrepidity. The others will only pass on fear and distaste for life from which individuals and the community suffer far too much already.”

Dora Russell book Hypatia

Hypatia (1925), Ch. 4

Life, Pain, Children, World

“Knowledge and science are the coffers and caches to the treasures of Perfection; and the only access to them is to ask and question.”

Ali al-Rida (770–818) eighth of the Twelve Imams

‘Uyūn al-Akbar, vol.2, p. 28.
Regarding Knowledge & Wisdom, General

Question, Science, Perfection

“Fraud includes the pretense of knowledge when knowledge there is none.”

Benjamin N. Cardozo (1870–1938) United States federal judge

Ultramares Corp. v. Touche, 255 N.Y. 170, 179, 174 N.E. 441, 444 (N.Y. 1931)
Judicial opinions

Fraud

“The cultures we can look at had already grasped the essential unity of nature. No board of gods can survive that knowledge.”

Jack McDevitt (1935) American novelist, Short story writer

Source: Academy Series - Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins, The Engines of God (1994), Chapter 8 (p. 107)

God, Nature

“These thirty years, and more, that I've spent among exotic, barbaric, indomitable gods and goddesses, nourished on myths, obsessed by symbols, nursed and bewitched by so many images which have come down to me from those submerged worlds, today seem to me to be the stages of a long initiation. Each one of these divine figures, each of these myths or symbols, is connected to a danger that was confronted and overcome. How many times I was almost lost, gone astray in this labyrinth where I risked being killed… These were not only bits of knowledge acquired slowly and leisurely in books, but so many encounters, confrontations, and temptations. I realize perfectly well now all the dangers I skirted during this long quest, and, in the first place, the risk of forgetting that I had a goal… that I wanted to reach a "center."”

Mircea Eliade (1907–1986) Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer and philosopher

Journal entry (10 November 1959) published in No Souvenirs (1977) , 74-5. Journal II, 1957-1969 (1989).

God, Books, World, Time

“Teachers, not students, are the ones who are failing. As Albert Einstein said that “all religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree,” the detachment of philosophy – the forefather of all knowledge and academic disciplines – from mathematics, sciences, and technology is the fundamental reason for failure in modern-day K-12 and higher education.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Google It: Total Information Awareness, 2016

Education, Religion, Art, Mathematics

“It has been said that to appreciate what virtue and morals mean, men must live virtuous and moral lives. It is equally true, that a knowledge of the objects of science is not to be attained by any scheme of definitions, however carefully contrived. He who would know what geometry is, must venture boldly into its depths and learn to think and feel as a geometer.”

James Joseph Sylvester (1814–1897) English mathematician

J. J. Sylvester. "A Probationary Lecture on Geometry", Collected Mathematical Papers, Vol. 2 (1908), p. 9 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=miun.aas8085.0002.001;view=1up;seq=25

Men, Feeling, Thinking, Learning

“Fourth, Lieutenant Commander Edward Ellsberg, Construction Corps, the salvage officer, was in direct personal charge of the actual salvage work and diving operations; his technical knowledge and resourcefulness were adequate for all of the innumerable setbacks and difficulties; he developed an improved underwater cutting torch, worked out the technique of handling the pontoons, learned to dive during the months the actual operations were suspended and actually went down on the wreck some three times during the spring operations; he was the embodiment of perseverance and determination.”

Ernest King (1878–1956) United States Navy admiral, Chief of Naval Operations

p. 184. Detailing the salvaging of U.S.S. S-51.

Spring, Learning, Time, Personality

“The standard Christian conscience does not permit the believer to look upon the self and find beauty, goodness, natural kindness, strength. Self-knowledge is tainted with self-hatred. The rules of the game of the Christian conscience are such that, when I look within, I must take the blame for all evil, all hardness of the heart that I find, but give God all the credit for any evidence of love. … It is not surprising that the practice of meditation … has remained under a cloud in the West, and that we have, consequently, created a culture of extroverts.”

Sam Keen (1931) author, professor, and philosopher

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 162

Love, God, Beauty, Game

Quotes about knowledge page 18

Quotes about knowledge
page 18