Quotes about knowledge
page 32

“Chess is a form of intellectual productiveness, therein lies, its peculiar charm. Intellectual productiveness is one of the greatest joys -if not the greatest one- of human existence. It is not everyone who can write a play, or build a bridge, or even make a good joke. But in chess everyone can, everyone must, be intellectually productive and so can share in this select delight. I have always a slight feeling of pity for the man who has no knowledge of chess, just as I would pity for the man who has no knowledge of love. Chess, like love, like music, has the power to make men happy.”

Siegbert Tarrasch book The Game of Chess

The Game of Chess (As quoted by Fred Reinfeld in Tarrasch's Best Games of Chess)

Love, Men, Happiness, Music

“A theory of cultural change is impossible without knowledge of the changing sense ratios effected by various externalizations of our senses.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 49

Sense, Change

“Information retrieval is the name for the process or method whereby a prospective user of information is able to convert his need for information into an actual list of citations to documents in storage containing information useful to him. It is the finding or discovery process with respect to stored information. It is another, more general, name for the production of a demand bibliography. Information retrieval embraces the intellectual aspects of the description of information and its specification for search, and also whatever systems, technique, or machines that are employed to carry out the operation. Information retrieval is crucial to documentation and organization of knowledge.”

Calvin Mooers (1919–1994) American computer scientist

Calvin Mooers (1951) "Zatocoding applied to mechanical organization of knowledge." American Documentation, 2, p. 25; Cited in: Birger Hjørland (2006) " Information retrival (IR) http://www.iva.dk/bh/Core%20Concepts%20in%20LIS/articles%20a-z/information_retrieval.htm" on iva.dk.

“To my horror I began to cry…a great cloud of black guilt, knowledge of my atrocious selfishness, settled on me. One day she had said “when you love me (and she had not meant ‘make love to me’) it’s as if God forgave me for being the mess I am”; and I took it as chicanery, another emotional blackmail, to make me feel essential and give me a sense of responsibility towards her…My monstrous crime was Adam’s, the oldest and most vicious of all – male selfishness…Something far worse than lèse majesté. Lèse-humanité.”

John Fowles book Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

Love, God, Making love, Feeling

“Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer.”

Immanuel Kant book Critique of Pure Reason

Preface, A vii
Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 1787)

Fate, Question, Nature

“The foundation of economic development is the acquisition of more productive knowledge.”

Ha-Joon Chang book Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism

Source: Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism (2008), Ch. 6, Harsh rules and developing countries, p. 142

“Executable UML is designed to produce a comprehensive and comprehensible model of a solution without making decisions about the organization of the software implementation. It is a highly abstract thinking tool to aid in the formalization of knowledge, a way of thinking about and describing the concepts that make up an abstract solution to a client problem.”

Stephen J. Mellor (1952) British computer scientist

Source: Executable Uml: A Foundation for Model-Driven Architecture, 2002, p. 10.

Way, Problem, Thinking, Decision

“In fact, all the additional knowledge gained by an irrationally constituted society may but enlarge and enhance the powers of death and destruction.”

Paul A. Baran (1909–1964) American Marxist economist

Source: The Political Economy Of Growth (1957), Chapter Eight, The Steep Ascent, p. 299

Death

“Most of us stand poised at the edge of brilliance, haunted by the knowledge of our proximity, yet still demonstrably on the wrong side of the line, our dealings with reality undermined by a range of minor yet critical psychological flaws (a little too much optimism, an unprocessed rebelliousness, a fatal impatience or sentimentality). We are like an exquisite high-speed aircraft which for lack of a tiny part is left stranded beside the runway, rendered slower than a tractor or bicycle.”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

Source: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009), p. 127.

Optimism, Reality, Parting, Speed

“I found it peculiar that those who wanted to take military action could — with 100 per cent certainty — know that the weapons existed and turn out to have zero knowledge of where they were.”

Hans Blix (1928) Swedish politician

from an unnamed Swedish radio program, quoted in Mirror.co.uk, "Blix Blasts 'Illegal' US War on Iraq", August 7, 2003 http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/content_objectid=13263825_method=full_siteid=50143_headline=-BLIX-BLASTS--ILLEGAL--US-WAR-ON-IRAQ-name_page.html

“A society’s stock of knowledge is structured in terms of what is generally relevant and what is relevant only to specific roles… the social distribution of knowledge entails a dichotomization in terms of general and role-specific relevance… because of the division of labor, role-specific knowledge will grow at a faster rate than generally relevant and accessible knowledge… The increasing number and complexity of [the resulting] sub universes [of specialized knowledge] make them increasingly inaccessible to outsiders.”

Peter L. Berger book The Social Construction of Reality

Source: The Social Construction of Reality, 1966, p.77-87

Universe

“Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object; it means holding in our minds, within reach of this thought, but on a lower level and not in contact with it, the diverse knowledge we have acquired which we are forced to make use of.”

Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist

Waiting on God (1950), Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God

“Submission to Allah's Will is the best companion; wisdom is the noblest heritage; theoretical and practical knowledge are the best signs of distinction; deep thinking will present the clearest picture of every problem.”

Ali book Nahj al-Balagha

Nahj al-Balagha

Wisdom, Problem, Thinking

“What point of morals, of manners, of economy, of philosophy, of religion, of taste, of the conduct of life, has he not settled? What mystery has he not signified his knowledge of? What office, or function, or district of man's work, has he not remembered? What king has he not taught state, as Talma taught Napoleon? What maiden has not found him finer than her delicacy? What lover has he not outloved? What sage has he not outseen? What gentleman has he not instructed in the rudeness of his behavior?”

Ralph Waldo Emerson Music

Shakespeare; or, The Poet
1850s, Representative Men (1850)

Life, Religion, Behavior, Lovers

“Heredity is not the dark specter which some people have thought—merciless and unchangeable, the embodiment of Fate itself. This dark, pessimistic belief which tinges even the literature of to-day comes, no doubt, from the general lack of knowledge of the laws governing the interaction of these two ever-present forces of heredity and environment wherever there is life.
My own studies have led me to be assured that heredity is only the sum of all past environment, in other words environment is the architect of heredity; and I am assured of another fact: acquired characters are transmitted and—even further—that all characters which are transmitted have been acquired…”

Luther Burbank (1849–1926) American botanist, horticulturist and pioneer in agricultural science

p, 125
The Training of the Human Plant (1907)

Life, Fate, People, Law

“The circle of knowledge commences close round a man and thence stretches out concentrically.”

Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746–1827) Swiss pedagogue and educational reformer

Evening Hour of a Hermit (1780)

“People will observe you to see
How well you have observed.
The man who only observes himself however never gains
Knowledge of men. He is too anxious
To hide himself from himself. And nobody is
Cleverer than he himself is.”

Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) German poet, playwright, theatre director

"Speech to Danish working-class actors on the art of observation" [Rede an dänische Arbeiterschauspieler über die Kunst der Beobachtung] (1934), from The Messingkauf Poems, published in Versuche 14 (1955); trans. John Willett in Poems, 1913-1956, pp. 235-236
Poems, 1913-1956 (1976)

Men, People

“Freedom does not consist in any dreamt-of independence from natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends.”

Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) German social scientist, author, political theorist, and philosopher

Anti-Dühring http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/subject/quotes/index.htm (1878)

Law, Nature, Freedom

“It is pointed out convincingly by George Sarton in The Life of Science that the development of science, as contrasted with that of art, is cumulative and progressive. Every scientist is educated in the current knowledge of his age and, making use of all he has learned, attempts to add something of his own to the existing body of knowledge. For this reason it is essentially impossible to isolate his personal achievements from the total pattern of scientific development. It follows that one cannot write the scientific life story of an isolated scholar, but only the history of the branches of science in which he participated.”

Eduard Jan Dijksterhuis (1892–1965) Dutch historian

p 14
Simon Stevin: Science in the Netherlands around 1600, 1970

Life, Age, Education, Art

“Hitherto our principal difficulty has arose from a want of proper supplies of money, and from the inefficacy of that which we obtained; but now there appears a scene opening which will introduce new embarrassments. The Congress have recommended to the different States to take upon themselves the furnishing certain species of supplies for our department. The recommendation falls far short of the general detail of the business, the difficulty of ad justing which, between the different agents as well as the different authorities from which they derive their appointments, I am very apprehensive will introduce some jarring interests, many improper disputes, as well as dangerous delays. Few persons, who have not a competent knowledge of this employment, can form any tolerable idea of the arrangements necessary to give despatch and success in discharging the duties of the office, or see the necessity for certain relations and dependencies. The great exertions which are frequently necessary to be made, require the whole machine to be moved by one common interest, and directed to one general end. How far the present measures, recommended to the different States, are calculated to promote these desirable purposes, I cannot pretend to say; but there appears to me such a maze, from the mixed modes adopted by some States, and about to be adopted by others, that I cannot see the channels, through which the business may be conducted, free from disorder and confusion.”

Nathanael Greene (1742–1786) American general in the American Revolutionary War

Letter to George Washington (January 1780)

Money, Idea, Business, Appearance

“The subconscious mind acts as a storehouse of knowledge and past experiences. The materials stored in the subconscious mind form the conscious mind. Henceforth let us cease putting any minus materials into the subconscious. Let us always extend plus ki and live our life with a positive attitude.”

Koichi Tohei (1920–2011) Japanese aikidoka

9 : The subconscious
Ki Sayings (2003)

Life, Past

“Ardent desire for knowledge, in fact, is the one motive attracting and supporting investigators in their efforts; and just this knowledge, really grasped and yet always flying before them, becomes at once their sole torment and their sole happiness…. A man of science rises ever, in seeking truth; and if he never finds it in its wholeness, he discovers nevertheless very significant fragments; and these fragments of universal truth are precisely what constitutes science.”

Claude Bernard (1813–1878) French physiologist

Introduction à l'Étude de la Médecine Expérimentale (1865)

Happiness, Truth, Motivation, Support

“As information systems play a more active role in the management and operations of an enterprise, the demands on these systems have also increased. Departing from their traditional role as simple repositories of data, information systems must now provide more sophisticated support to manual and automated decision making; they must not only answer queries with what is explicitly represented in their Enterprise Model, but must be able to answer queries with what is implied by the model. The goal of the TOVE Enterprise Modelling project is to create the next generation Enterprise Model, a Common Sense Enterprise Model. By common sense we mean that an Enterprise Model has the ability to deduce answers to queries that require relatively shallow knowledge of the domain.”

Mark S. Fox (1952) Canadian computer scientist and Professor of Industrial Engineering

Source: Methodology for the Design and Evaluation of Ontologies (1995), p. 1: Introduction

Support, Decision, Sense

“In one of his many public statements, the leader of the Bosnian Serbs, Montenegrin Radovan Karadžić, said the Serbs in the past period, when everyone was on their side, had been subjected to "genocidal extermination" whereas now, over the last year, when so many are against them, they are suffering the least. Of all the innumerable absurdities and untruths that have been uttered, this statement truly takes the cake. For more than forty years Bosnia was inhabited by Bosnians, and we did not distinguish between Serbs, Muslim, and Croats, or at least such distinctions were not paramount in their mutual relations. Throughout that period, to the best of the Yugoslav and world public's knowledge, there were no detenction camps for Serbs in Bosnia, no brothels for Serbs women, no Serbian children had their throat cut. (…) But according to Karadzic, the Serbs were somehow unhappy then. And now, in war, with so many dead, (…) now, according to their leader, the time has come when they are suffering the least. (…) Ethnically pure states are an impossibility in today's world, and it is ridiculous to try to create and maintain such a state, even when there is just one nation.”

Mirjana Markovic (1942–2019) Serbian politician

In her newspaper column, on 20 January 1993, cited in Night and Day: A Diary, 1995, pp.17-18

Women, War, Children, World

“Only he is the true teacher [Satguru] who can show what are the religious and social obligations [dharma], show God to you, and give you the Knowledge of the holy name [sat nam]. And he who can give you the Knowledge of this dharma is completely wise. Satguru is the one who has the perfect wisdom. And other than the Satguru no one has the perfect wisdom. Oh! People of the world! Only a perfect avatar with the sixty-four virtues [kala] can reveal this Knowledge.”

Hans Ji Maharaj (1900–1966) Indian guru

Bombay, March 1966
Alternative translation: "Lord Rama was an incarnation of God who possessed 14 types of divine power. Lord Krishna was an incarnation of God who possessed 26 types of divine power. But I am fully perfect and the master of all the 64 divine powers."
This alternative translation, very different from the original Hindi, appeared in a book named Satgurudev (1970). It has been used by several scholars (Messer, Glock and Bellah; Reender Kranenborg) to position Hans Ji Maharaj as claiming to be more powerful than Krishna.
Source: Gupta, Mahendra. Hans Puran, (1969) New Delhi

Wisdom, God, People, World

“Some people say that we ought to audit the Fed. Here's what I do know. The Federal Reserve already has so many internal audits it's ridiculous. I don't know why people think we're gonna learn this great amount of information by auditing the Federal Reserve. I think a lot of people are calling for this audit of the Federal Reserve because they don't know enough about it. There's no hidden secrets going on in the Federal Reserve to my knowledge.”

Herman Cain (1945) American writer, businessman and activist

The Neal Boortz Show
2010-12-29
Radio, quoted in [Herman Cain: Federal Reserve Audit Unnecessary, 2011-10-10, YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q18jMzTWJ9A]

People, Secret, Thinking, Learning

“There are two kinds of thinkers, scholars and scientists. The first are the 'trail blazers' who propose new revolutionary ideas, point to new directions for scientific and intellectual developments, create new paradigms of science and scholarship, but leave the details to others. The second are those who follow the new trail, carry out careful experimentation and research within the established paradigm, and work out the precise formulations of theories in a particular domain of knowledge.”

Thaddus E. Weckowicz (1919–2000) Canadian psychologist

Source: Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901-1972) (1989), p. 2

Idea, Science

“Knowledge is indivisible. When people grow wise in one direction, they are sure to make it easier for themselves to grow wise in other directions as well. On the other hand, when they split up knowledge, concentrate on their own field, and scorn and ignore other fields, they grow less wise — even in their own field.”

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …

Source: The Roving Mind (1983), Ch. 25

People

“The question of where Europe ends and Asia begins has troubled many people over the years, but here's a rule of thumb: if someone can pose as an expert on the country in question without knowledge of the relevant language, it's part of Asia.”

Brian Reynolds Myers (1963) American professor of international studies

2000s, Mother of All Mothers (September 2004)

People, Question, Parting, Country

“Neither in deductive nor inductive reasoning can we add a tittle to our implicit knowledge, which is like that contained in an unread book or a sealed letter. …Reasoning explicates or brings to conscious possession what was before unconscious. It does not create, nor does it destroy, but it transmutes and throws the same matter into a new form.”

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

Source: The Principles of Science: A Treatise on Logic and Scientific Method (1874) Vol. 1, p. 136

Books

“We should learn from the mistakes and experiences of others, particularly from those less knowledgable than we are. If our experiences are not grounded in reality, our decisions can never be correct.”

Amitabh Bachchan (1942) Indian actor

Source: Soul Curry for You and Me: An Empowering Philosophy that Can Enrich Your Life, P. 27.

Reality, Decision, Learning

“A thousand newspapers vulgarise knowledge, debase aesthetical appreciation, democratise success and make impossible all that was once unusual and noble. The man of letters has become a panderer to the intellectual appetites of a mob or stands aloof in the narrowness of a coterie. There is plenty of brilliance everywhere, but one searches in vain for a firm foundation, the power or the solidity of knowledge. The select seek paradox in order to distinguish themselves from the herd; a perpetual reiteration of some startling novelty can alone please the crowd…. Of all literary forms the novel only has still some genius and even that is perishing of the modern curse of overproduction.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

March 26, 1910
India's Rebirth

Search, Success

“And the ethical system of these men of the New Republic, the ethical system which will dominate the world state, will be shaped primarily to favour the procreation of what is fine and efficient and beautiful in humanity—beautiful and strong bodies, clear and powerful minds, and a growing body of knowledge—and to check the procreation of base and servile types, of fear-driven and cowardly souls, of all that is mean and ugly and bestial in the souls, bodies, or habits of men. To do the latter is to do the former; the two things are inseparable. And the method that nature has followed hitherto in the shaping of the world, whereby weakness was prevented from propagating weakness, and cowardice and feebleness were saved from the accomplishment of their desires, the method that has only one alternative, the method that must in some cases still be called in to the help of man, is death. In the new vision death is no inexplicable horror, no pointless terminal terror to the miseries of life, it is the end of all the pain of life, the end of the bitterness of failure, the merciful obliteration of weak and silly and pointless things.”

H. G. Wells book Anticipations

Anticipations (1902)

Life, Death, Men, Pain

“The Catholic writer understands the necessary relationship between truth and beauty, which is not mere social convention or cultural accident but an essential form of human knowledge--intuitive, holistic, and experiential. Art is a form of knowing--distinct and legitimate--rooted in feeling and delight--that discovers, in the words of Jacques Maritain, "The splendor of the secrets of being radiating into intelligence.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

34
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), The Catholic Writer Today (2013)

Truth, Secret, Beauty, Art

“Guessing what the pitcher is going to throw is 80 percent of being a successful hitter. The other 20 percent is just execution. The mental aspects of hitting were especially important to me. I was strictly a guess hitter, which meant I had to have a thorough knowledge of every pitcher I came up against and develop a strategy for hitting him. My method was to identify the pitches a certain pitcher had and eliminate all but one or two and then wait for them. One advantage I had was quick wrists. Another advantage—and one that all good hitters have—was my eyesight. Sometimes I could read the pitcher's grip on the ball before he ever released it and be able to tell what pitch he was throwing. I never worried about the fastball. They couldn't throw it past me, none of them.”

Hank Aaron (1934) Retired American baseball player

From I Had a Hammer (1990) by Aaron, with Lonnie Wheeler; as reproduced in Hank Aaron https://books.google.com/books?id=tcPC-qgM8McC&pg=PA48&lpg=PA48&dq=%22Guessing+what+the+pitcher+is+going+to+throw+is+80+percent+of+being+a+successful+hitter.+The+other+20+percent+is+just+execution.%22&source=bl&ots=QZ81enT7WV&sig=NL9G0fGgcTJGfc6oVOYvuzBV2sI&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjQu9DFxcjVAhUEwYMKHdamDmsQ6AEIOzAE#v=onepage&q=%22Guessing%20what%20the%20pitcher%20is%20going%20to%20throw%20is%2080%20percent%20of%20being%20a%20successful%20hitter.%20The%20other%2020%20percent%20is%20just%20execution.%22&f=false (2007) by Jamie Poolos, p. 48

Waiting, Reading, Success, Past

“Surrender to what is ultimate. Surrender to what you really are! Besides being John, Gary, anything you are named. What are you is what you have to understand. And serve that purpose. Serve that motive. Because what you are is far more greater than what you think you are. And because you think what you are, that… What it is inside of you, what is far more greater than you think you are, supercedes. Because that is what you are always thinking. “Oh I am -- I’m just not good.” And, “I’m just, I’m just a bum,” or, “I’m just crazy,” or, “I’ve just had it.””

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

No. There’s something within inside of you that is really beautiful. And this is what the Knowledge reveals.
Portland, Oregon, 30 January 1977
1970s

Beauty, Motivation, Understanding, Thinking

“Information engineering has been defined with the reference to automated techniques as follows: An interlocking set of automated techniques in which enterprise models, data models and process models are built up in a comprehensive knowledge-base and are used to create and maintain data-processing systems.”

James Martin (author) (1933–2013) British information technology consultant and writer

Source: Information Engineering (1989), p. viii

“Our knowledge of human nature is for the most part empirical; and it would often be better, if, instead of endeavouring to say some new things ourselves, we were to confirm without more words the sayings of another.”

Arthur Helps (1813–1875) British writer

Source: Thoughts in the Cloister and the Crowd. 1901, p.19.

Nature, Parting

“True knowledge is that knowledge which makes man after self-realization or union with God assert that his real Self is in everything and everybody.”

Meher Baba (1894–1969) Indian mystic

Meher Baba Journal (June 1941), p. 480.
General sources

God

“Several times I asked myself, "Can it be that I have overlooked something, that there is something which I have failed to understand? Is it not possible that this state of despair is common to everyone?" And I searched for an answer to my questions in every area of knowledge acquired by man. For a long time I carried on my painstaking search; I did not search casually, out of mere curiosity, but painfully, persistently, day and night, like a dying man seeking salvation. I found nothing.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

Pt. I, ch. 5
Confession (1882)

Search, Understanding, Question, Time

“One demand for a concept of need arises because the concept of demand itself has serious weaknesses and limitations. It assumes away, for instance, a serious epistemological problem. The very idea of autonomous choice implies first that the chooser knows the real alternatives which are open to him, and second that he makes the choice according to value criteria or a utility function which he will not later regret. Both the image of the field of choice and the utility function have a learning problem which, by and large, economists have neglected. This problem is particularly acute in the case of medical care, where the demander is usually a layman faced with professional suppliers who know very much more than he does. The demand for medical care, indeed, is primarily a demand for knowledge or at least the results of knowledge…”

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

Kenneth Boulding (1967) "The Concept of Need for Health Services" as cited in: Gregory Parston (1980) Planners, Politics, and Health Services. p. 99
1960s

Idea, Problem, Learning

“First come I; my name is Jowett.
There's no knowledge but I know it.
I am master of this college:
What I don't know isn't knowledge.”

Henry Charles Beeching (1859–1919) English clergyman, author and poet

The Masque of Balliol http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/2735.html (1880)

“Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is knowing not to use it in a fruit salad.”

Brian O'Driscoll

O'Driscoll's widely quoted musing when asked to give his view on former Lions team mate and current England manager, Martin Johnson ahead of Ireland's Six Nations Championship match against England on 28 February 2009. Brendan Cole, " What Did BOD Mean? https://web.archive.org/web/20090228234200/http://www.rte.ie/ie/sportsixnations/entry/what_did_bod_mean", RTE Sport (February 27, 2009).

Wisdom, Funny

“There is oftentimes a great deal of knowledge where there is but little wisdom to improve that knowledge. It is not the most knowing Christian but the most wise Christian that sees, avoids, and escapes Satan's snares. Knowledge without wisdom is like mettle in a blind horse, which is often an occasion of the rider's fall.”

Thomas Brooks (1608–1680) English Puritan

Quote reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895). p. 365.
Quotes from secondary sources

Wisdom, Horse

“It can hardly be a matter for surprise that our race has not succeeded in solving any large part of its most difficult problems in the first millionth part of its existence. Perhaps life would be a duller affair if it had. For to many it is not knowledge but the quest for knowledge that gives the greater interest to thought - to travel hopefully is better than to arrive.”

James Jeans (1877–1946) British mathematician and astronomer

Physics and Philosophy (1942)

Life, Travel, Problem, Parting

“The evil effect of science upon men is principally this, that by far the greatest number of those who wish to display a knowledge of it accomplish no improvement at all of the understanding, but only a perversity of it, not to mention that it serves most of them as a tool of vanity.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

Part III : Selection on Education from Kant's other Writings, Ch. I Pedagogical Fragments, # 52
The Educational Theory of Immanuel Kant (1904)

Men, Understanding, Science, Evil

“The spirit of the Knowledge Society is the spirit of Pluralism—a readiness to accept the Other, indeed to learn from him, to see difference as an opportunity rather than a threat.”

Aga Khan IV (1936) 49th and current Imam of Nizari Ismailism

Address by His Highness the Aga Khan to the 2006 Convocation of the Aga Khan University, Karachi, Pakistan (2 December 2006)]

Learning

“Even a single missed crucial consideration could vitiate our most valiant efforts or render them as actively harmful as those of a soldier who is fighting on the wrong side. The search for crucial considerations (which must explore normative as well as descriptive issues) will often require crisscrossing the boundaries between different academic disciplines and other fields of knowledge. As there is no established methodology for how to go about this kind of research, difficult original thinking is necessary.”

Nick Bostrom book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

Source: Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014), Ch. 15

Search, Thinking, Effort, Fight

“Other sciences are suited to the various conditions of life: some, more necessary to some; other, to others. But this [science of self-knowledge] equally concerns every one.”

John Mason (1706–1763) English Independent minister and author

A Treatise on Self-Knowledge (1745)

Life, Science

“Your biggest fear is the transition from football to business. You feel inferior at the beginning. You don't have the knowledge to compete. But once you start focusing and understanding, then you start relating to things.”

Emmitt Smith (1969) American football player and sports broadcaster

Richard Alm, The Dallas Morning News (October 30, 2002) "Mover and Shaker - As a budding businessman, Emmitt Smith hopes to remain a ...", The Dallas Morning News, p. 6B.

Fear, Feeling, Understanding, Business

“The newspapers still talk about glory but the average man, thank God, has got rid of that illusion. It is a damned bore, with a stall mate as the most probable outcome, but one has to see it through, and see it through with the knowledge that whichever side wins, civilisation in Europe will be pipped for the next 30 years. Don't indulge in Romance here, Malcolm, or suppose that an era of jolly little nationalities is dawning. We shall be much too much occupied with pestilence and poverty to reconstruct.”

E.M. Forster (1879–1970) English novelist

Letter 136, to Malcolm Darling, 6 November 1914
Selected Letters (1983-1985)

God

“Apollonius then asked him [Iarchas] whether they knew themselves also, thinking that he, like the Greeks, would regard self-knowledge as a difficult matter. But the other, contrary to Apollonius' expectations, corrected him and said: "We know everything, just because we begin by knowing ourselves; for no one of us would be admitted to this philosophy unless he first knew himself." And Apollonius remembered what he had heard Phraotes say, and how he who would become a philosopher must examine himself before he undertakes the task; and he therefore acquiesced in this answer, for he was convinced of its truth in his own case also.”

Philostratus book Life of Apollonius of Tyana

Book 3, § 18.
Life of Apollonius of Tyana

Truth, Thinking

“The goal of mankind is knowledge.... Now this knowledge is inherent in man. No knowledge comes from outside: it is all inside. What we say a man "knows," should, in strict psychological language, be what he "discovers" or "unveils"; what man "learns" is really what he discovers by taking the cover off his own soul, which is a mine of infinite knowledge.”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

Pearls of Wisdom

Soul, Learning

“Your Senate Committee on Finance conducted two budget hearings on this matter, Mr. President, to gain a more thorough knowledge on the various projects involved in this measure. All national government agencies and government-owned or controlled corporations that shall implement the said projects served as resource persons for the consecutive hearings.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2014, Speech: Sponsorship Speech for the Supplemental Appropriations for FY 2014

Personality

“The test of the worth of a school is not the amount of knowledge it imparts, but the self-activity it calls forth.”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 227

School

“The only sure mode of acquiring sound ideas of our relation to the Creator is to begin with the study of ourselves, and to view God as a Father and Friend, dealing with us in precisely the same way as we would deal with others over whom we exercise authority. Conscience, that infallible Mentor "that sticketh closer than a brother," tells us that we are responsible beings; and in the domestic, as well as the social circle, we speedily feel the discipline and learn the lesson of rewards and punishments. The law written in man's heart points to the past as pregnant with events which may affect the future; and in the earnestness of his aspirations, and the activity of his search, he is gradually led to the mysterious history of his race. He learns that on tables of stone have been engraven the same law to which his heart responded; -that when all were dead, one died for all; and in the contemplation of the great sacrifice, he obtains a solution of the interesting problem of his individual destiny. The Sacred record which is now his guide, speaks to him of fore-knowledge and predestination, while, in perfect consistency, it records the ministration of descending spirits, and the holier communings of God with man. The Divine decrees no longer perplex him. They transcend, indeed, his Reason - but that Reason, the faithful interpreter of Conscience, does not falter in proclaiming the Freedom of his Will, and the Responsibility of his Actions.”

David Brewster (1781–1868) British astronomer and mathematician

Review of Vestiges (1845)

God, Faith, Law, Way

“You have been allowing challenges to destroy you instead of you to destroy challenges. When challenges come – my God has the final say, not my ability or knowledge.”

T. B. Joshua (1963) Nigerian Christian leader

On handling challenges - "TB Joshua Lambasts Money-Hungry Pastors, Politicians" http://vibeghana.com/2015/01/20/t-b-joshua-lambasts-money-hungry-pastors-politicians/ Vibe Ghana (January 20 2015)

God

“This volume is an analysis of the American party system, an account of the structure, processes and significance of the political party, designed to show as clearly as possible within compact limits what the function of the political party is in the community. My purpose is to make this, as far as possible, an objective study of the organization and behavior of our political parties. It is hoped that this volume may serve as an introduction to students and others who wish to find a concise account of the party system; and also that it may serve to stimulate more intensive study of the important features and processes of the party. From time to time in the course of this discussion significant fields of inquiry have been indicated where it is believed that research would bear rich fruit. In the light of broader statistical information than we now have and with the aid of a thorough-going social and political psychology than we now have, it will be possible in the future to make much more exhaustive and conclusive studies of political parties than we are able to do at present. The objective, detailed study of political behavior will unquestionably enlarge our knowledge of the system of social and political control under which we now operate. But such inquiries will call for funds and personnel not now available to me.”

Charles Edward Merriam (1874–1953) American political scientist

Source: The American Party System, 1922, p. v; Preface lead paragraph

Hope, Behavior, Communication, Study

“Sun-worship and pure forms of nature worship were, in their day, noble religions, highly allegorical but full of profound truth and knowledge.”

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

Source: Esoteric Christianity, Or The Lesser Mysteries http://books.google.co.in/books?id=6Uk0AHHn-cgC&pg=PT8, p. 8

Truth, Religion, Nature, Sun

“There has been an inversion in the hierarchy of the two principles of antiquity, “Take care of yourself” and “Know yourself.” In Greco-Roman culture, knowledge of oneself appeared as the consequence of the care of the self. In the modern world, knowledge of oneself constitutes the fundamental principle.”

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) French philosopher

“Technologies of the Self,” Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth (1994), p. 228

World, Appearance

“In attempting to expose the views of another, one is forced to make one's own view appear infallible and absolute, which is a procedure altogether to be avoided if one is making a specifically non-evaluative investigation. The second possible approach is nevertheless to combine such a non-evaluative analysis with a definite epistemology. Viewed from the angle of this second approach there are two separate and distinct solutions to the problem of what constitutes reliable knowledge — the one solution may be termed relationism, and the other relativism.”

Karl Mannheim (1893–1947) Hungarian sociologist

Ideology and Utopia (1929)

Problem, Appearance

“…he was indebted to his right honourable friend [Edmund Burke] for the greatest share of the political knowledge he possessed,—his political education had been formed under him,—his instructions had invariably governed his principles.”

Charles James Fox (1749–1806) British Whig statesman

Speech in the House of Commons (2 March 1790).
1790s

Education

“The highest part of the human soul, which is called the intelligence and which is not the act of any body and does not need for its proper operation a corporeal instrument—this intelligence, if it were not obscured and weighed down by the mass of the body, would itself have complete knowledge from the irradiation received from the superior light without the help of sense, just as it will have when the soul is drawn forth from the body, and as perhaps those people have who are free from the love and the imaginings of corporeal things.”

Robert Grosseteste (1175–1253) English bishop and philosopher

Commentarius in Posteriorum Analyticorum Libros (c. 1217-1220)

Love, People, Soul, Imagination

“I cannot find in Chatterton's works any thing so extraordinary as the age at which they were written. They have a facility, vigour, and knowledge, which were prodigious in a boy of sixteen, but which would not have been so in a boy of twenty. He did not show extraordinary powers of genius, but extraordinary precocity. Nor do I believe he would have written better, had he lived. He knew this himself, or he would have lived. Great geniuses, like great kings, have too much to think of to kill themselves.”

Thomas Chatterton (1752–1770) English poet, forger

William Hazlitt Lectures on the English Poets (Philadelphia: Thomas Dobson, 1818) p. 243.
Criticism

Age, Boy, Thinking

“Segregating science and spirituality has been the greatest crime against humanity in the past century. These two main branches of knowledge that should have gone hand in hand were divided and practitioners were either labeled as modern scientists or representatives of religious faiths. “Only scientific discoveries apply to logic and intelligence. They are the only truth. Religious faith is blind and misguided.” This was the ideology that was popularized. All the recent natural disasters and the alarming changes in the global climate are challenging the further survival of this beautiful earth we live in. Now, many people cannot help thinking that all this may be the result of weighing science and spirituality on opposite sides of a scale and deeming that one is much greater than the other.”

Mata Amritanandamayi (1953) Hindu spiritual leader and guru

From Amritanandamayi's Address at the United Nations Academic Impact Conference on Technology for Sustainable Development (2015)

People, Truth, Faith, Beauty

“To become sober is: to come to oneself in self-knowledge and before God as nothing before him, yet infinitely, unconditionally engaged. P. 104”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

1850s, Judge For Yourselves! 1851 (1876)

God

“The evolutionary vision is agnostic in regard to systems in the universe of greater complexity than those of which human beings have clear knowledge. It recognizes aesthetic, moral, and religious ideas and experiences as a species, in this case of mental structures or of images, which clearly interacts with other species in the world's great' ecosystem.”

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

Source: 1970s, Ecodynamics: A New Theory Of Societal Evolution, 1978, p. 20

World, Idea, Universe

“With the advance of knowledge, therefore, prayer and sacrifice assume the leading place in religious ritual; and magic; which once ranked with them as a legitimate equal, is gradually relegated to the background and sinks to the level of a black art.”

James Frazer book The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 7, Incarnate Human Gods.

Art

“The three theological virtues of faith, hope and charity, aided by the highest and most sublime gifts of the Holy Spirit, such as understanding, wisdom, knowledge, and counsel, unite the creature, the human spirit, with his God, the souls with the Word of God. It is this sacred union that you must seek, hold and possess; in it lie the spiritual life, health and strength, and from it originate all the other virtues.”

Francisco Palau (1811–1872) Beatified Spanish Discalced Carmelite friar and priest

Letter to Juana Gratia (1857)

Life, Wisdom, God, Health

“By one hour's intimate access to the throne of grace, where the Lord causes his glory to pass before the soul that seeks him, you may acquire more true spiritual knowledge and comfort, than by a day or a week's converse with the best of men, or the most studious perusal of many folios.”

John Newton (1725–1807) Anglican clergyman and hymn-writer

Letter (February 1772) http://www.graceonlinelibrary.org/articles/full.asp?id=33|35|383

Men, Soul

“As far as France is concerned, we are ready to envisage everything that can be done under UNSCR 1441. […] But I repeat that every possibility offered by the present resolution must be explored, that there are a lot of them and they still leave us with a lot of leeway when it comes to ways of achieving the objective of eliminating any weapons of mass destruction which may exist in Iraq. I'd like nevertheless to note that, as things stand at the moment, I have, to my knowledge, no indisputable proof in this sphere.”

Jacques Chirac (1932–2019) 22nd President of France

Source: http://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/actu/bulletin.gb.asp?liste=20030211.gb.html Statement made during a joint press conference, Paris, February 10 2003 <br class="br">Diplomacy with Iraq 2000s

Way

“The applications of knowledge, especially mathematics, reveal the unity of all knowledge. In a new situation almost anything and everything you ever learned might be applicable, and the artificial divisions seem to vanish.”

Richard Hamming (1915–1998) American mathematician and information theorist

Methods of Mathematics Applied to Calculus, Probability, and Statistics (1985)

Mathematics, Learning

“How much self-knowledge is limited to presenting other people with a more precise and exact description of our weaknesses.”

Max Frisch (1911–1991) Swiss playwright and novelist

I'm not Stiller (1955)

People

“Ours is an industrial civilization, in which no society can prosper unless it possesses an elite of highly trained scientists and a considerable army of engineers and technicians. The possession and wide dissemination of a great deal of correct, specialized knowledge has become a prime condition of national survival. In the United States, during the last twenty or thirty years, this fact seems to have been forgotten. Professional educationists have taken John Dewey's theories of ‘learning through doing’ and of ‘education as life adjustment,’ and have applied them in such a way that, in many American schools, there is now doing without learning, along with courses in adjustment to everything except the basic twentieth-century fact that we live in a world where ignorance of science and its methods is the surest, shortest road to national disaster. During the past half century every other nation has made great efforts to impart more knowledge to more young people. In the United States professional educationists have chosen the opposite course.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

"Knowledge and Understanding", in Vedanta and the West (May-June 1956); later in Collected Essays (1958)

Life, People, World, Education

“And what did ye look they should compass?
Warcraft learned in a breath,
Knowledge unto occasion at the first far view of Death?
So? And ye train your horses and the dogs ye feed and prize?
How are the beasts more worthy than the souls, your sacrifice?
But ye said, “Their valour shall show them”; but ye said, “The end is close.”
And ye sent them comfits and pictures to help them harry your foes:
And ye vaunted your fathomless power, and ye flaunted your iron pride,
Ere—ye fawned on the Younger Nations for the men who could shoot and ride!
Then ye returned to your trinkets; then ye contented your souls
With the flannelled fools at the wicket or the muddied oafs at the goals.”

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) English short-story writer, poet, and novelist

The Islanders http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/K/KiplingRudyard/verse/p1/islanders.html, l. 22-31 (1902). <br class="br">Other works

Death, Men, Dogs, Fools

“Just as a primitive sextant functions on the illusion that the sun and stars rotate around the planet we are standing on, our senses give us the illusion of stability in the universe, and we accept it, because without that acceptance, nothing can be done.
Virginia Vidaura, pacing the seminar room, lost in lecture mode.
But the fact that a sextant will let you navigate accurately across an ocean does not mean that the suns and stars do rotate are us. For all that we have done, as a civilization, as individuals, the universe is not stable, nor is any single thing within it. Stars consume themselves, the universe itself rushes apart, and we ourselves are composed of matter in constant flux. Colonies of cells in temporary alliance, replicating and decaying, and housed within, an incandescent cloud of electrical impulse and precariously stacked carbon code memory. This is reality, this is self-knowledge, and the perception of it will, of course, make you dizzy.”

Richard K. Morgan book Altered Carbon

Source: Altered Carbon (2002), Chapter 28 (pp. 354-355)

Star, Reality, Sense, Universe

“Science is unreasonably effective, it's generated knowledge beyond all expectation. It's also delivered perspective. Yes, we are an insignificant speck in an infinite universe, but we're also rare. And because we're rare, we're valuable. So what are we to do to secure our future? Well, we must learn to value the acquisition of knowledge for its own sake, and not just because it grows our economy or allows us to build better bombs. We must also learn to value the human race and take responsibility for our own survival. Why? Because there's nobody else out there to value us or to look after us. And finally, most important of all, we must educate the next generation in the great discoveries of science and we must teach them to use the light of reason to banish the darkness of superstition, because if we do that, then at least there's a chance that this universe will remain a human one.”

Brian Cox (physicist) (1968) English physicist and former musician

Human Universe, episode 5

Education, Light, Learning, Universe

“On observing his Mahālakṣmī, the beauty of whose face was like that of a spectacular lotus, the brilliance of brilliance, the Lakṣmī (prosperity) of Lakṣmī (prosperity), the brilliance of the knowledge of Brahman, the intellect of intellect, the modesty of modesty, the earth (bearer) of the earth, and the daughter of the earth, Rāma said to Lakṣmaṇa, characterized by good qualities. ॥ 16.84 ॥”

Rāmabhadrācārya (1950) Hindu religious leader

vīkṣya tāṃ vīkṣaṇīyāmbujāsyaśriyaṃ
svaśriyaṃ śrīśriyaṃ brahmavidyāśriyam ।
dhīdhiyaṃ hrīhriyaṃ bhūbhuvaṃ bhūbhuvaṃ
rāghavaḥ prāha sallakṣaṇaṃ lakṣmaṇam ॥
Śrībhārgavarāghavīyam

Beauty, Daughters

“In an economy where the only certainty is uncertainty, the one sure source of lasting competitive advantage is knowledge.”

Ikujiro Nonaka (1935) Japanese business theorist

Ikujiro Nonaka (1991), "The Knowledge-Creating Company", Harvard Business Review 69 (6 Nov-Dec): 96–104

“No society has ever yet been able to handle the temptations of technology to mastery, to waste, to exuberance, to exploration and exploitation. We have to learn to cherish this earth and cherish it as something that's fragile, that's only one, it's all we have. We have to use our scientific knowledge to correct the dangers that have come from science and technology.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Radio excerpt presented by Voice of America (17 January 2010) http://learningenglish.voanews.com/content/margaret-mead-1901-1978-one-of-the-most-famous-anthropologists-in-the-world-124869344/112571.html <br class="br">2000s

Learning, Science

“The history of the human race is a continual struggle from darkness towards light. It is, therefore, to no purpose to discuss the use of knowledge; man wants to know, and when he ceases to do so, he is no longer man.”

Fridtjof Nansen (1861–1930) Norwegian polar explorer and Nobel Peace Prize laureate

[Nansen, Fridtjof, A New Route to the North Pole, https://books.google.com/books?id=KPoLAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA693, 11, August 1891, The Forum, 693–709]

History, Light

“Freedom and determinism are only the obverse and the reverse of the two-faced fact of rational self-activity. Freedom is the thought-action of the self, defining its specific identity, and determinism means nothing but the definite character which the rational nature of the action involves. Thus freedom, far from disjoining and isolating each self from other selves, especially the Supreme Self, or God, in fact defines the inner life of each, in its determining whole, in harmony with theirs, and so, instead of concealing, opens it to their knowledge — to God, with absolute completeness eternally, in virtue of his perfect vision into all possible emergencies, all possible alternatives; to the others, with an increasing fulness, more or less retarded, but advancing toward completeness as the Rational Ideal guiding each advances in its work of bringing the phenomenal or natural life into accord with it. For our freedom, in its most significant aspect, means just our secure possession, each in virtue of his self-defining act, of this common Ideal, whose intimate nature it is to unite us, not to divide us; to unite us while it preserves us each in his own identity, harmonising each with all by harmonising all with God, but quenching none in any extinguishing Unit. Freedom, in short, means first our self-direction by this eternal Ideal and toward it, and then our power, from this eternal choice, to bring our temporal life into conformity with it, step by step, more and more.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Harmony of Determinism and Freedom, p.375-6

Life, God, Nature, Freedom

“In physical science and in industrial technique… we have emancipated ourselves… from the savage dependence upon catastrophes for progress… In science and in industry we are radicals—radicals relying on a tested method. But in matters of social organization we retain a large part of the conservatism characteristic of the savage mind…
The 'social reformer' we have always with us, it is true. Or rather most of us are 'social reformers' of some kind… Yet the story of the past in matters of social organization is not a story that we should like to have continued for a thousand and one years. Reform by agitation or class struggle is a jerky way of moving forward, uncomfortable and wasteful of energy. Are we not intelligent enough to devise a steadier and a more certain method of progress? Most certainly, we could not keep social organization what it is even if we wanted to. We are not emerging from the hazards of war into a safe world. On the contrary, the world is a very dangerous place for a society framed as ours is, and I for one am glad of it.
Taking us all together as one people in a group of mighty peoples, our first and foremost concern is to develop some way of carrying on the infinitely complicated processes of modern industry and interchange day by day, despite all tedium and fatigue, and yet to keep ourselves interested in our work and contented with the division of the product…
What is lacking to achieve that end… is not so much good will as it is knowledge—above all, knowledge of human behavior. Our best hope for the future lies in the extension to social organization of the methods that we already employ in our most progressive fields of effort. In science and in industry… we do not wait for catastrophes to force new ways upon us… We rely, and with success, upon quantitative analysis to point the way; and we advance because we are constantly improving and applying such analysis. While I think that the development of social science offers more hope for solving our social problems than any other line of endeavor, I do not claim that these sciences in their present state are very serviceable.
They are immature, speculative, filled with controversies. Nor have we any certain assurance that they will ever grow into robust manhood, no matter what care we lavish upon them…. Those of us who are concerned with the social sciences… are engaged in an uncertain enterprise; perhaps we shall win no great treasures for mankind. But certainly it is our task to work out this lead with all the intelligence and the energy we possess until its richness or sterility be demonstrated.”

Wesley Clair Mitchell (1874–1948) American statistician

Source: "Statistics and Government," 1919, pp. 45, 47, 48-51; as cited in: Arthur F. Burns. " New Facts on Business Cycles http://www.nber.org/chapters/c0386," in: Arthur F. Burns (ed). The Frontiers of Economic Knowledge. Princeton University Press. 1954. p. 61 - 106; p. 63

War, People, World, Hope

“Our knowledge of physics only takes us back so far. Before this instant of cosmic time, all the laws of physics or chemistry are as evanescent as rings of smoke.”

Joseph Silk (1942) British-American astronomer

The Infinite Cosmos, Page 3

Law, Time

“In art, never try to find out anything, or try to learn anything until the not knowing it has come to be a nuisance to you for some time. Then you will remember it, but not otherwise. Let knowledge importune you before you will hear it. Our schools and universities go on the precisely opposite system.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Agonising
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part VII - On the Making of Music, Pictures, and Books

School, Art, Learning, Universe

“I like to know things. I'm hungry for knowledge.”

Lee Child book 61 Hours

61 Hours, (2010).

“A source of strength in the early days was that groups in various parts of the world were prepared to construct experimental computers without necessarily intending them to be the prototype for serial production. As a result, there became available a body of knowledge about what would work and what would not work.”

Maurice Wilkes (1913–2010) British computer scientist

Sect. 1: Pioneering Days
"Computers Then and Now" (1968)

World, Parting

“What was man before the invention of words and the knowledge of language? An animal..”

Julien Offray de La Mettrie book Man a Machine

p, 125
Man a Machine (1747)

Animals

“But it is evident, that these bursts of universal distress are more dreaded than felt; thousands and ten thousands flourish in youth, and wither in age, without the knowledge of any other than domestic evils, and share the same pleasures and vexations, whether their kings are mild or cruel, whether the armies of their country pursue their enemies or retreat before them.”

Samuel Johnson book The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia

Source: The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759), Chapter 28

Pleasure, Youth, Age, Universe

“Hath God obliged himself not to exceed the bounds of our knowledge?”

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

Book II, Ch. 12
Attributed

God

“I begin [a painting] from an impulse, an intense and irrational desire that takes you over, prompting you to start moving. And from experience, with some knowledge of what moves oneself, I think it's not altogether arbitrary what one begins with.... certainly implicit partially is the feeling, not that 'I am going to paint something I know' by 'through the act of painting I'm going to find out exactly how I feel.”

Robert Motherwell (1915–1991) American artist

as cited in Abstract Expressionism, Creators and Critics, ed. Clifford Ross, Abrahams Publishers, New York 1990, p. 111
1960s, Interview with David Sylvester', (1960)

Feeling, Thinking, Painting

“It is difficult to become familiar with animals without becoming fond of them, provided one doesn't wish to domineer them. I have never heard that love for animals has changed to hate, but many cases where the opposite happened. Many hunters, obliged to observe the animals while stalking them, in time grow increasingly reluctant to kill them, and finally wish to become wardens in the national parks, to help protect them. Very few vivisectors seem to be hampered by this natural evolution that leads to the love and respect of the animals through a deeper knowledge of them.”

Hans Ruesch (1913–2007) Swiss racing driver

Source: Slaughter of the Innocent (1978), p. 52

Love, Hate, Nature, Change

“A father is rarely a good teacher; either he thinks he knows things and finds his knowledge to be very slight, or he knows but explains badly, or he is too severe and impatient because teaching bores him, or he is dangerously indulgent because he loves his children too much. It is from professional teachers who have made a success of the art that we must learn its rules. There can be no teaching without discipline. A pupil must first learn to work. Training of the will must precede that of the mind, and this is why home teaching is never very successful. Excuses are too easily accepted: the child has a headache; he has slept badly; there is a party somewhere. A school makes no compromise and that is its virtue. I am inclined to prefer the boarding-school system. It has some serious drawbacks; it sometimes produces immorality and it is always rather severe, but it makes men. The system forces boys to find their own places in a group; in a family they find these places ready-made and it is too easy for them. If absolutely necessary, and if the parents are judicious, day schools are satisfactory up to the age of fifteen or sixteen. For boys between the ages of seventeen and twenty, freedom in a large city is fatal.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Working

Love, Men, Children, Age

“Was that, too, destined to thrive awhile and decay and vanish, and be replaced by another, Nortekku wondered? Probably. The earth changes, he thought. Mountains rise, are ground to dust, give way to plains and valleys. Shorelines are drowned; new islands are thrust upward out of the sea. Civilizations are born, die, are forgotten. The planet alone abides, and all that dwells upon it is transient.
Contemplating these things, he felt much the richer for all his freshly acquired knowledge. He felt that for the first time he comprehended, at least some small way, the great chain of existence, stretching across time from misty past to unborn future.”

Robert Silverberg (1935) American speculative fiction writer and editor

Source: Short fiction, A Piece of the Great World (2005), p. 80

Way, Mountain, Change, Time

“The mystery of the poor is this: That they are Jesus, and what you do for them you do for Him. It is the only way we have of knowing and believing in our love. The mystery of poverty is that by sharing in it, making ourselves poor in giving to others, we increase our knowledge of and belief in love.”

Dorothy Day (1897–1980) Social activist

Catholic Worker (April 1964)

Love, Way

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

Edward O. Wilson book On Human Nature

On Human Nature (1978), Ch.4 Emergence

Life, Nature

“It was in this attitude of faith as pure fealty to the moral ideal, that Kant left the human spirit at the close of his great labours. It was the only solution left him, after his thesis of the absolute limitation of knowledge to objects of sense. But surely that thesis has a strange sound, coming from the same lips that utter with equal emphasis the lesson of our really having cognitions that are independent of all experience. This is neither the place nor the time to expose the oversight and confusion by which Kant fell into this self-contradiction; I must content myself with saying that the contradiction exists, and that I think the oversight is exactly designable, and entirely avoidable. There is a truth concealed in Kant's thesis of the immutable conjunction of thought and sense, but there is a greater falsehood conveyed by it.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The City of God and the True God as its Head (In Royce’s “The Conception of God: a Philosophical Discussion Concerning the Nature of the Divine Idea as a Demonstrable Reality”), p.124-5

Truth, Faith, Thinking, Sense