Quotes about knowledge (4545 quotes, page 45)

“The summit of evil, the crime most natural to the devil, pride, was born of knowledge. But if this is so, how can it be possible that all the passions result from ignorance? Does knowledge purify the psyche? Paul says: Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up”

Gregory Palamas (1296–1359) Monk and archbishop

1 Corinthians 8:1
Source: Holy Hesychia: The Stillness that Knows God, p. 33

Nature , Passion , Love , Making love

“Knowledge is not like sin. There is no mystical escape from it.”

Leigh Brackett book The Long Tomorrow

Source: The Long Tomorrow (1955), Chapter 30

“You can’t destroy knowledge. You can stamp it under and burn it up and forbid it to be, but somewhere it will survive.”

Leigh Brackett book The Long Tomorrow

Source: The Long Tomorrow (1955), Chapter 21

“Few men, whatever their creed, would now seek their geology in the books of their religion, or, on the other hand, would fancy that the laboratory or the microscope could help them to penetrate the mysteries which hang over the nature and the destiny of the soul of man. ... We live in a small, bright oasis of knowledge, surrounded on all sides by a vast, unexplored region of impenetrable mystery.”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830–1903) British politician

Speech to the British Association (6 August 1894), quoted in The Times (9 August 1894), p. 6
1890s

Soul , Religion , Help , Nature

“I have only one goal and one desire, namely to give myself a practical instruction, to get to know the world and its inhabitants. There will come times when this knowledge will be of use to me.”

Leopold II of Belgium (1835–1909) King of the Belgians

https://klara.be/leopold-ii-aflevering-1-0 Prince Leopold II on his second wedding trip in a letter to his father Leopold I of Belgium in 1854.

World , Time

“I leave knowing that one of the things that makes us human is our curiosity, and one of the things that is the record of our curiosity is our knowledge.”

Katherine Maher (1983) chief executive officer and executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation

Wikimedia CEO on facts, hoaxes and the promise of Wikipedians by Luke Ottenhof, Canada's National Observer https://www.nationalobserver.com/2021/03/19/news/wikimedia-ceo-facts-wiki-hoaxes-and-promise-wikipedians, (19 March 2021)
2021

Making love

“Even in physics, there is no infallible procedure for generating reliable knowledge. The calm order and perfection of well-established theories, accredited by innumerable items of evidence from a thousand different hands, eyes and brains, is not characteristic of the front-line of research, where controversy, conjecture, contradiction and confusion are rife. The physics of undergraduate text-books is 90% true; the contents of the primary research journals of physics is 90% false. The scientific system is as much involved in distilling the former out of the latter as it is in creating and transferring more and more bits of data and items of 'information'.”

John Ziman (1925–2005) New Zealand physicist

John Ziman in "Reliable Knowledge: an Exploration of the Grounds for Belief in Science" (1978)

Perfection , Falseness , Books

“Its always my conviction that young filmmakers do not actively need old filmmakers help, because the society in which they are living in, their surroundings and their knowledge is completely different. I mean there’s a whole set of different rules which they know better than we do, but if we use our experience to tell them what to do I think it hinders more than it helps. Not unless the old director who’s out to help is also a very good teacher that is saying to the student what he needs to know instead of just telling the student his experience. And being a teacher, I think I’ve been one myself and I know that I’m not good enough, because to be a great teacher is more difficult than to be a great filmmaker.”

Ann Hui (1947) Hong Kong film director

77. Mostra del Cinema - Ann Hui masterclass 28 Oct 2020, at 3 Min 12 Sec https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NNfVayr694
Masterclass with Ann Hui at the 77th Venice International Film Festival

Thinking , Help , Teachers

“There was no knowledge on my part about his specific actions, but… There was just energy. And that type of sinister, shadow energy cannot be concealed
..
When your primary male figure couldn't care less to show up, that can become a theme in your life where you’re trying to fill this gap with these different men”

Lisa Bonet (1967) American actress

9 March 2018 https://www.net-a-porter.com/en-gb/porter/article-33a55e73f6c7ac7b/cover-stories/cover-stories/lisa-bonet?cm_mmc=Twitter-_-Magazine-_-20180309&utm_source=t.co&utm_medium=referral&siteID=TnL5HPStwNw-I7e_rfvO9ni1Csr6IiWfpw&Skimlinks.com=Skimlinks.com interview regarding Bill Cosby

Life , Parting , Men

“The chief blessings of human nature are the three following:—TRUTH—VIRTUE—and LIBERTY.—These are, therefore, the blessings in the possession of which the interest of our country lies, and to the attainment of which our love of it ought to direct our endeavours. By the diffusion of KNOWLEDGE it must be distinguished from a country of Barbarians: by the practice of religious VIRTUE, it must be distinguished from a country of gamblers, Atheists, and libertines: and by the possession of LIBERTY, it must be distinguished from a country of slaves.”

Richard Price (1721–1791) Welsh nonconformist preacher and radical

Source: A Discourse on the Love of Our Country (1789), p. 11

Truth , Country , Love , Making love

“The support of the communities implies concrete assistance to young couples because it can offer them knowledge and an important wealth of experience, while encouraging them, above all, to open themselves to the presence of God in their lives, a presence that will help them to support their love in a long, faithful, and fruitful marriage. When the parish communities take this responsibility seriously the ministry of marriage preparation has the potential to be a life-giving joy for communities and families. Their love is contagious and does everyone good.”

Peter Doyle (bishop) (1944) Catholic bishop

Marriage Preparation in the light of “Amoris Laetitia”: The experience of the Office for Life, Family, and Marriage of the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales http://www.laityfamilylife.va/content/laityfamilylife/en/news/2018/la-preparazione-al-matrimonio-alla-luce-di-amoris-laetitia--lesp.html (23 August 2018)

Family , God , Faith , Marriage

“Knowledge breaks down the barriers of prejudice and opens doors for embrace.”

Valter Bitencourt Júnior (1994) Brazilian poet and writer

“Wisdom is a kind of knowledge. It is knowledge of the nature, career, and consequences of human values.”

Sidney Hook (1902–1989) American philosopher

Nature , Wisdom

“Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers. It may not be difficult to store up in the mind a vast quantity of facts within a comparatively short time, but the ability to form judgments requires the severe discipline of hard work and the tempering heat of experience and maturity.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

Time , Wisdom

“Science investigates; religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge which is power; religion gives man wisdom which is control.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

Religion , Wisdom , Science

“If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow.”

Rachel Carson (1907–1964) American marine biologist and conservationist

Sense , Wisdom

“Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”

George Eliot (1819–1880) English novelist, journalist and translator

Life , Wisdom

“Wisdom is the power to put our time and our knowledge to the proper use.”

Tom Watson (1874–1956) American businessman

Time , Wisdom , Wise

“Here is one quality that one must possess to win, and that is definiteness of purpose, the knowledge of what one wants, and a burning desire to possess it.”

Napoleon Hill (1883–1970) American author

“A little knowledge that acts is worth infinitely more than much knowledge that is idle.”

Khalil Gibran (1883–1931) Lebanese artist, poet, and writer

“Sorrow is knowledge, those that know the most must mourn the deepest, the tree of knowledge is not the tree of life.”

George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement

Tree , Life , Hurtful

“Knowledge has three degrees: opinion, science, illumination. The means or instrument of the first is sense; of the second, dialectic; of the third, intuition.”

Plotinus (203–270) Neoplatonist philosopher

Sense , Science

“Pain and foolishness lead to great bliss and complete knowledge, for Eternal Wisdom created nothing under the sun in vain.”

Khalil Gibran (1883–1931) Lebanese artist, poet, and writer

Pain , Sun , Wisdom

“The doorstep to the temple of wisdom is a knowledge of our own ignorance.”

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

Wisdom

“In friendship as well as love, ignorance very often contributes more to our happiness than knowledge.”

François de La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680) French author of maxims and memoirs

Friendship , Happiness , Love

“Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.”

Will Durant (1885–1981) American historian, philosopher and writer

Science , Wisdom

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For while knowledge defines all we currently know and understand, imagination points to all we might yet discover and create.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Imagination , Understanding

“I suggest that scientific knowledge, though logically more articulate and far more complex, is of this sort. The books and teachers from whom it is acquired present concrete examples together with a multitude of theoretical generalizations. Both are essential carriers of knowledge, and it is therefore Pickwickian to seek a methodological criterion that supposes the scientist can specify in advance whether each imaginable instance fits or would falsify his theory.”

Thomas Kuhn (1922–1996) American historian, physicist and philosopher

"Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research?", Criticism and the growth of knowledge edited by Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (1970)

Imagination , Teachers , Books

“Science is empirical: knowing the answer is nothing. Testing your knowledge means everything.”

Lawrence M. Krauss (1954) American physicist

"A Universe From Nothing" by Lawrence Krauss, AAI 2009 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ImvlS8PLIo#t=23m40s (23:40-23:48)

Science

“Religion translates metaphysical or universal truths into dogmatic language; now though dogma is not accessible to all men in its intrinsic truth, which can only be directly attained by the Intellect, it is nonetheless accessible through faith, which is, for the great majority, the only possible mode of participation in the Divine Truths. As for intellectual knowledge, which proceeds neither from belief nor from a process of reasoning, it goes beyond dogma in the sense that, without ever contradicting the latter, it penetrates its internal dimension, that is, the infinite Truth that dominates all forms.”

Frithjof Schuon book The Transcendent Unity of Religions

[1993, The Transcendent Unity of Religions, Quest Books, xxxi, 978-0-8356-0587-8]
Miscellaneous, Religion

Sense , Men , Universe , Truth

“Revelation is the fulgurant irruption of a knowledge that comes, not from an individual or collective subconscious, but on the contrary from a supra-consciousness, which though latent in all beings nonetheless immensely surpasses its individual and psychological crystallizations.”

Frithjof Schuon (1907–1998) Swiss philosopher

[2006, Light on the Ancient Worlds, World Wisdom, 117, 978-0-941532-72-3]
Miscellaneous, Revelation

“That servant who is claimant of Divine knowledge but seeks peace in other than God, is entrapped in severe affliction. But when comely he seeks forgiveness of the Almighty, his affliction is eliminated.”

Ibrahim Khawas Iranian scientist

Source: The Sayings and Teachings of the Great Mystics of Islam (2004), p. 59

Forgiveness , God , Peace , Affliction

“Faith is not knowledge of an object but communion with it.”

Nicolás Gómez Dávila (1913–1994) Colombian writer and philosopher

Escolios a un Texto Implicito (1977), Volume Two

Faith

“The most real and reliable quality of knowledge, is experience.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: (it) La più reale ed affidabile qualità di conoscenza, è l'esperienza.
Source: prevale.net

“One of the greatest errors in the reconstruction of another era lies in our tendency to think of them as being like ourselves in feeling and attitudes. Actually, without considerable study on the part of a present-day man — if he were confronted by a fifteenth-century man — there would be no possible communication. I think it is possible through knowledge and discipline for a modern man to understand, and, to a certain extent, live into a fifteenth-century mind, but the reverse would be completely impossible.”

John Steinbeck book The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights

Appendix, letter to Elizabeth Otis and Chase Horton (14 March 1958)
The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976)

Communication , Understanding , Thinking , Study

“A knowledge of Bach is the beginning of musical wisdom.”

Walter Raymond Spalding (1865–1962) American music pedagogue and author

Page 47 https://books.google.com/books?id=pQARAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA47.
Music: An Art and a Language (1920), Polyphonic Music; Sebastian Bach (Ch. III)

Wisdom , Music

“I have extensive management experience in crisis situations, accumulated experience, and knowledge in the security and defense system. I have experience in overcoming the economic crisis. The current dangers and the accumulated experience and knowledge practically coincide”

Robert Kocharyan (1954) second President of Armenia

Excerpts from 2021 keynote speech on formation of 'Armenia' alliance

“My English name is Bowinn Ma, but in Chinese, it’s Ma Bo Wen. Ma literally translates as “horse,” which is the family name, and Bo Wen literally translates to “plentiful script.” But what it means can be roughly translated as “ocean of knowledge” or “broad scholar.””

Bowinn Ma (1985) Canadian politician

It means someone who has a broad understanding of many things and someone who has the wisdom to use this knowledge in a good way. It represents what my parents and grandparents had hoped I would become as an adult. In English, my name is just a name, a series of sounds used to identify me. But in my traditional language, those two simple syllables are a culmination of all of the hopes and dreams that my family have had of me since my birth — aspirations that could never truly be translated properly across cultures in as succinct a way.
British Columbia Legislative Hansard, March 12, 2018: INDIGENOUS LANGUAGES
Meaning of Name

Family , Horse

“It is only by poets that the life of any epoch can be synthesized. Encyclopaedias and guides to knowledge cannot do it, for the good reason that they affect only the intellectual surface of a man’s life. The lower layers, the core of his being, they leave untouched.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

Source: Texts and Pretexts (1932), p. 4

Life

“Over the ages, if we had had a more open attitude to knowledge, to change of consciousness, to change of perception of the possibilities of life and the nature of the reality in which we live, people like Galileo or Copernicus would have had altogether easier lives.”

Benjamin Creme (1922–2016) artist, author, esotericist

The Great Approach (2001)

People , Nature , Reality , Age

“Education opens the way to a new life and a new world. Be brave and confident. Open all doors through knowledge, open with your willpower and the impulse of your hearts, diligence, helping each other, trusting each other, learning from each other.”

Armen Sarkissian (1953) 4th President of Armenia, Member of the Global Leadership Foundation, one of the directors of Eurasia House, phy…

"Congratulations on the Knowledge and Schooling Day" https://www.president.am/en/statements-and-messages/item/2021/09/01/President-Armen-Sarkissians-congratulatory-message-on-the-occasion-of-Knowledge-and-Schooling-Day-/ (1 September 2021)

Confidence , Help , Heart , Learning

“God had given men reason, by which they could find out things for themselves, but He had given animals knowledge which did not depend on reason, and which was much more prompt and perfect in its way, and by which they had often saved the lives of men.”

Anna Sewell book Black Beauty

Source: Black Beauty (1877), Ch. XII, p. 61

God , Dependency , Perfection , Animals