Quotes about knowledge
page 5

“The hunger for peace is too great, the hour in history too late, for any government to mock men's hopes with mere words and promises and gestures. […] There is, before all peoples, a precarious chance to turn the black tide of events. If we failed to strive to seize this chance, the judgment of future ages will be harsh and just. If we strive but fail and the world remains armed against itself, it at least would need be divided no longer in its clear knowledge of who has condemned humankind to this fate.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) American general and politician, 34th president of the United States (in office from 1953 to 1961)

1950s, The Chance for Peace (1953)

Men, Hunger, Fate, People

“For I say this is death and the sole death,—
When a man's loss comes to him from his gain,
Darkness from light, from knowledge ignorance,
And lack of love from love made manifest.”

Robert Browning (1812–1889) English poet and playwright of the Victorian Era

A Death in the Desert (1864)

Love, Death, Light, Loss

“Karthik Raja is immensely talented. It’s unfortunate he hasn’t got the right break. Be it technology, manuscript or knowledge of genres, he is thorough. I’m sure he will make it ASAP.”

Yuvan Shankar Raja (1979) Indian musician

Yuvan Unplugged (2009)

“Our scientists will keep collaborating with yours in fields like nanotechnology and clean energy and health care that make our lives better and fuel economic growth on both sides of the Atlantic –- because progress is essential to peace. And because knowledge and understanding is essential to peace, we will keep investing in programs that enrich both of us ….”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

Remarks by President Obama and Mrs. Obama in Town Hall with Youth of Northern Ireland, Belfast Waterfront, Belfast, Northern Ireland (17 June 2013)
2013

Health, Peace, Understanding

“For example, a man who had seen a great many white swans might argue, by our principle, that on the data it was probable that all swans were white, and this might be a perfectly sound argument. The argument is not disproved by the fact that some swans are black, because a thing may very well happen in spite of the fact that some data render it improbable. In the case of the swans, a man might know that colour is a very variable characteristic in many species of animals, and that, therefore, an induction as to colour is peculiarly liable to error. But this knowledge would be a fresh datum, by no means proving that the probability relatively to our previous data had been wrongly estimated. The fact, therefore, that things often fail to fulfill our expectations is no evidence that our expectations will not probably be fulfilled in a given case or a given class of cases. Thus our inductive principle is at any rate not capable of being disproved by an appeal to experience. The inductive principle, however, is equally incapable of being proved by an appeal to experience.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

"On Induction"
1910s, The Problems of Philosophy (1912)

Error, Animals

“Neither acquiescence in skepticism nor acquiescence in dogma is what education should produce. What it should produce is a belief that knowledge is attainable in a measure, though with difficulty; that much of what passes for knowledge at any given time is likely to be more or less mistaken, but that the mistakes can be rectified by care and industry. In acting upon our beliefs, we should be very cautious where a small error would mean disaster; nevertheless it is upon our beliefs that we must act. This state of mind is rather difficult: it requires a high degree of intellectual culture without emotional atrophy. But though difficult, it is not impossible; it is in fact the scientific temper. Knowledge, like other good things, is difficult, but not impossible; the dogmatist forgets the difficulty, the skeptic denies the possibility. Both are mistaken, and their errors, when widespread, produce social disaster.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

On Education, Especially in Early Childhood (1926), Ch. 2: The Aims of Education, p. 36.No one gossips about other people's secret virtues.
1920s

Education, Error, Time, Forgetting

“A thinking that approaches it objects openly, rigorously … is also free toward its objects in the sense that it refuses to have rules prescribed to it by organized knowledge. It … rends the veil with which society conceals them, and perceives them anew.”

Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) German sociologist, philosopher and musicologist known for his critical theory of society

Denken, das offen, konsequent und auf dem Stand vorwärtsgetriebener Erkenntnis den Objekten sich zuwendet, ist diesen gegenüber frei auch derart, daß es sich nicht vom organisierten Wissen Regeln vorschreiben läßt. Es kehrt den Inbegriff der in ihm akkumulierten Erfahrung den Gegenständen zu, zerreißt das gesel1schaftliche Gespinst, das sie verbirgt, und gewahrt sie neu.
Source: Wozu noch Philosophie? [Why still philosophy?] (1963), p. 13

Thinking, Sense

“We must realize the extent to which it is necessary that our knowledge of language be based on history. Only history can impart to words that degree of precision which we need in order to understand them well.”

Michel Bréal (1832–1915) French philologist

Source: Essai de semantique, 1897, p. 112 ; as cited in: Schaff (1962:16).

History, Understanding

““Knowing something as knowledge” and “realizing” are different. You have to realize.”

Jung Myung Seok (1945) South Korean Leader of New Religious Movement, Poet, Author, Founder of Wolmyeongdong Center

Extracted from Proverbs Blog https://providencepath.wordpress.com/2016/06/08/jung-myung-seok-knowing-is-different-from-realizing/

“While it is true that science cannot decide questions of value, that is because they cannot be intellectually decided at all, and lie outside the realm of truth and falsehood. Whatever knowledge is attainable, must be attained by scientific methods; and what science cannot discover, mankind cannot know.”

Bertrand Russell book Religion and Science

Religion and Science (1935), Ch. IX: Science of Ethics.
1930s
Variant: "What science cannot tell us, mankind cannot know." (Attributed to Russell in Ted Peters' Cosmos As Creation: Theology and Science in Consonance [1989], p. 14, with a note that it was "told [to] a BBC audience [earlier this century]").

Truth, Lie, Question, Science

“If the knowledge which we acquired before birth was lost to us at birth, and afterwords by the use of the senses we recovered that which we previously knew, will not that which we call learning be a process of recovering our knowledge, and may not this be rightly termed recollection by us? …Then, Simmias, our souls must have existed before they were in the form of man—without bodies, and must have had intelligence.”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

Plato, Phaedo

Soul, Intelligence, Birth, Sense

“To wisdom belongs the intellectual apprehension of things eternal; to knowledge, the rational apprehension of things temporal.”

Aurelius Augustinus (354–430) early Christian theologian and philosopher

As quoted in The Anchor Book of Latin Quotations: with English translations‎ (1990) by Norbert Guterman, p. 375
Disputed

Wisdom

“Imagine that each of these layers of existence are like patterns. They're patterns within patterns within patterns within patterns, and there's a way of making all that harmonious. That's what music models. That's why music is so meaningful. You take a beautiful orchestral composition, and they're doing different things are different levels. But they all flow together harmoniously, and you're right in the middle of that as a listener. And it fills you almost with a sense of religious awe, even if you're a punk rock nihilist. The reason for that is because the music is modeling the manner of Being that's harmonious. It's the proper way to exist. Religious writings, in the deepest sense, are guidelines to that mode of Being. They're not true like scientific knowledge is true. They're hyper true, or meta-true. It's like this: if you take the most true things about your life, and then you take the most true things about ten other people's lives, and then we amalgamate them into a single figure. That would be like a literary hero. And then we take a thousands literary heroes and we extract out from them what makes the most heroic person - that's a religious deity. That's what Christ is. He's a meta-hero. And that sits at the bottom of Western Civilization. Christ's archetypal mode of Being is True Speech. That's the fundamental idea of Western Civilization, and it's right.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Concepts

Life, People, Beauty, Music

“What is wisdom? If you are a mystic you become totally empty and you are given whatever you need. For example, there is a plane where all the knowledge is, and you can go there. You can get whatever you need.”

Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee (1953) Sufi mystic

interviewed in One: The Movie Full interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gby6y4i4ljU

Wisdom

“Each of these private teachers who work for pay … inculcates nothing else than these opinions of the multitude which they opine when they are assembled and calls this knowledge wisdom.”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

Plato, Republic, 493a
Plato, Republic

Wisdom, Teachers

“He who studies without passion will never become anything more than a pedant. We must approach knowledge from the inside; inspired by passion.”

Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) Austrian writer

Confusion of Feelings or Confusion: The Private Papers of Privy Councillor R. Von D (1927)

Study, Passion

“Mark what 'tis his mind aims at in the question, and not what words he expresses it in: and when you have informed and satisfied him in that, you shall see how his thoughts will enlarge themselves, and how by fit answers he may be led on farther than perhaps you could have imagine. For knowledge is grateful to the understanding, as light to the eyes.”

John Locke book Some Thoughts Concerning Education

Sec. 118
Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693)

Imagination, Understanding, Question, Light

“Rationalist politics, I have said, are the politics of the felt need, the felt need not qualified by a genuine, concrete knowledge of the permanent interests and direction of movement of a society, but interpreted by 'reason' and satisfied according to the technique of an ideology: they are the politics of the book.”

Michael Oakeshott (1901–1990) British philosopher

Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (1962)

Books

“Of all the officers of the Government, those of the Department of Justice should be kept most free from any suspicion of improper action on partisan or factional grounds, so that there shall be gradually a growth, even though a slow growth, in the knowledge that the Federal courts and the representatives of the Federal Department of Justice insist on meting out even-handed justice to all.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

Letter to Attorney General William H. Moody (August 9, 1904); reported in Homer S. Cummings, Federal Justice (1937), p. 500
1900s

Justice

“All human activity takes place within a culture and interacts with culture. For an adequate formation of a culture, the involvement of the whole man is required, whereby he exercises his creativity, intelligence, and knowledge of the world and of people. Furthermore, he displays his capacity for self-control, personal sacrifice, solidarity and readiness to promote the common good.”

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

Encyclical Centesimus Annus, 1 May 1991 Source: Libreria Editrice Vaticana http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_01051991_centesimus-annus_en.html

People, World, Exercises, Intelligence

“There's a tiredness of abstract intelligence, and it's the most horrible of tirednesses. It doesn't weight on you like the tiredness of the body, nor does it worry you like the tiredness of knowledge and emotion. It's a weightiness of the conscience of the world, an inability of the soul to breathe.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Ibid., p. 69
The Book of Disquiet
Original: Há um cansaço da inteligência abstracta, e é o mais horroroso dos cansaços. Não pesa como o cansaço do corpo, nem inquieta como o cansaço do conhecimento e da emoção. É um peso da consciência do mundo, um não poder respirar da alma.

World, Soul, Intelligence

“I do not think it possible to get anywhere if we start from scepticism. We must start from a broad acceptance of whatever seems to be knowledge and is not rejected for some specific reason.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Source: 1950s, My Philosophical Development (1959), p. 200

Thinking

“Equality gives rise to challenging questions which are not altogether easy to answer… a = a and a = b are obviously statements of differing cognitive value; a = a holds a priori and, according to Kant, is to be labeled analytic, while statements of the form a = b often contain very valuable extensions of our knowledge and cannot always be established a priori. The discovery that the rising sun is not new every morning, but always the same, was one of the most fertile astronomical discoveries. Even to-day the identification of a small planet or a comet is not always a matter of course. Now if we were to regard equality as a relation between that which the names 'a' and 'b' designate, it would seem that a = b could not differ from a = a (i. e. provided a = b is true). A relation would thereby be expressed of a thing to itself, and indeed one in which each thing stands to itself but to no other thing.”

Gottlob Frege Sense and reference

As cited in: M. Fitting, Richard L. Mendelsoh (1999), First-Order Modal Logic, p. 142. They called this Frege's Puzzle.
Über Sinn und Bedeutung, 1892

Question, Sun

“Just ask yourselves, historians, when was monogamy introduced on to the face of the earth? When those buccaneers, who settled on the peninsula where Rome now stands, could not steal women enough to have two or three apiece, they passed a law that a man should have but one woman. And this started monogamy and the downfall of the plurality system. In the days of Jesus, Rome, having dominion over Jerusalem, they carried out the doctrine more or less. This was the rise, start and foundation of the doctrine of monogamy; and never till then was there a law passed, that we have any knowledge of, that a man should have but one wife.”

Brigham Young (1801–1877) Latter Day Saint movement leader

Journal of Discourses 12:262 (Aug. 9, 1868)
1860s

Women, Law

“To whatever extent a person's knowledge increases, his attention will be turned more towards his soul.”

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

Husayn al-Nuri al-Tabarsi, Mustadrak al-Wasā'il, vol. 11, p. 323
Regarding Knowledge & Wisdom, Religious

Soul, Personality

“It is not to be supposed that young men and women who are busy acquiring valuable specialized knowledge can spare a great deal of time for the study of philosophy, but even in the time that can easily be spared without injury to the learning of technical skills, philosophy can give certain things that will greatly increase the student’s value as a human being and as a citizen. It can give a habit of exact and careful thought, not only in mathematics and science, but in questions of large practical import. It can give an impersonal breadth and scope to the conception of the ends of life. It can give to the individual a just measure of himself in relation to society, of man in the present to man in the past and in the future, and of the whole history of man in relation to the astronomical cosmos. By enlarging the objects of his thoughts it supplies an antidote to the anxieties and anguish of the present, and makes possible the nearest approach to serenity that is available to a sensitive mind in our tortured and uncertain world.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

1940s, Philosophy for Laymen (1946)

Life, Women, Men, World

“As you will never be sure which are the right problems to work on, most of the time that you spend in the laboratory or at your desk will be wasted. If you want to be creative, then you will have to get used to spending most of your time not being creative, to being becalmed on the ocean of scientific knowledge.”

Steven Weinberg Scientist: Four golden lessons

Scientist: Four golden lessons (2003)

Problem, Time

“Modern production sets rapidly rising demands not only on machines, on technology, but also and primarily on the workers, on those who create these machines and control this technology. For ever larger segments of workers specialised knowledge and a high degree of professional training, man’s general cultural standard, are becoming an obligatory condition of successful work.”

Leonid Brezhnev (1906–1982) General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Cited in Soviet Youth and Socialism http://leninist.biz/en/1974/SYAS228/3.1-Youth.and.Culture

Success, Training

“The scholar whose knowledge is made use of and benefited from, is worthier and more virtuous than seventy thousand worshippers and adorers.”

Muhammad al-Baqir (677–733) fifth of the Twelve Shia Imams

Ibn Shu’ba al-Harrani, Tuhaf al-'Uqul, p. 294

“Let there be no fainting of heart and no depression, and also let there be no unforeseeing fury, no blindly-striking madness. We are at the beginning of a time of terrible trial. The passage is not to be easy, the crown is not to be cheaply earned. India is going down into the valley of the shadow of death, into a great horror of darkness and suffering. Let us realise that what we are now suffering, is a small part of what we shall have to suffer, and work in that knowledge, with resolution, without hysteria…. The first need at the present moment is courage, a courage which knows not how to flinch or shrink.”

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

Bande Mataram, 1907
India's Rebirth

Death, Courage, Suffering, Time

“I always believed that at some time fate would take from me the terrible effort and duty of educating myself. I believed that, when the time came, I would discover a philosopher to educate me, a true philosopher whom one could follow without any misgiving because one would have more faith in him than one had in oneself. Then I asked myself: what would be the principles by which he would educate you?—and I reflected on what he might say about the two educational maxims which are being hatched in our time. One of them demands that the educator should quickly recognize the real strength of his pupil and then direct all his efforts and energy and heat at them so as to help that one virtue to attain true maturity and fruitfulness. The other maxim, on the contrary, requires that the educator should draw forth and nourish all the forces which exist in his pupil and bring them to a harmonious relationship with one another. … But where do we discover a harmonious whole at all, a simultaneous sounding of many voice in one nature, if not in such men as Cellini, men in whom everything, knowledge, desire, love, hate, strives towards a central point, a root force, and where a harmonious system is constructed through the compelling domination of this living centre? And so perhaps these two maxims are not opposites at all? Perhaps the one simply says that man should have a center and the other than he should also have a periphery? That educating philosopher of whom I dreamed would, I came to think, not only discover the central force, he would also know how to prevent its acting destructively on the other forces: his educational task would, it seemed to me, be to mould the whole man into a living solar and planetary system and to understand its higher laws of motion.”

Friedrich Nietzsche Untimely Meditations

“Schopenhauer as educator,” § 3.2, R. Hollingdale, trans. (1983), pp. 130-131
Untimely Meditations (1876)

Love, Men, Hate, Fate

“If graduates do not get relevant experience in their field of study after graduation, they will forget what they learned and, in a few years, their knowledge may be completely lost”

Nigel Cumberland (1967) British author and leadership coach

Quoted in Hong Kong's Career Times newspaper (February 6th 2004) http://www.ctgoodjobs.hk/english/article/show_article.asp?category_id=1070&article_id=12825&title=is-hong-kong-investing-enough-in-its-future&listby=date&listby_id=&page=4 Miscellaneous Quotes in the Press (2002-Present)

Study, Learning, Forgetting

“You, your families, your friends and your countries are to be exterminated by the common decision of a few brutal but powerful men. To please these men, all the private affections, all the public hopes, all that has been achieved in art, and knowledge and thought and all that might be achieved hereafter is to be wiped out forever.
Our ruined lifeless planet will continue for countless ages to circle aimlessly round the sun unredeemed by the joys and loves, the occasional wisdom and the power to create beauty which have given value to human life.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Leaflet issued while Russell was in Brixton Prison, 1961
1960s

Love, Life, Wisdom, Men

“A man must read widely, a little of everything or whatever he can, but given the shortness of life and the verbosity of the world, not too much should be demanded of him. Let him begin with those titles no one should omit, commonly referred to as books for learning, as if not all books were for learning, and this list will vary according to the fount of knowledge one drinks from and the authority that monitors its flow.”

José Saramago book The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis

Source: The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1993), p. 117

Life, Books, World, Drink

“The first economic revolution was not a revolution because it shifted man's major economic activity from hunting and gathering to settled agriculture. It was a revolution because the transition created an incentive change for mankind of fundamental proportions. The incentive change stems from the different property rights under the two systems. When common property rights over resources exist, there is little incentive for the acquisition of superior technology and learning. In contrast, exclusive property rights which reward the owners provide a direct incentive to improve efficiency and productivity, or, in more fundamental terms, to acquire more knowledge and new techniques. It is this change in incentive that explains the rapid progress made by mankind in the last 10,000 years in contrast to his slow development during the long era as a primitive hunter/gatherer.”

Douglass C. North (1920–2015) American Economist

Source: The rise of the western world, 1973, p. 240-1, as cited in: Thrainn Eggertsson (1990), Economic behavior and institutions. p. 255-6

Learning, Change

“He is a stranger to me, but he is a most remarkable man — and I am the other one. Between us, we cover all knowledge; he knows all that can be known, and I know the rest.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Statement (1906) in Mark Twain in Eruption: Hitherto Unpublished Pages About Men and Events (1940) edited by Bernard DeVoto

“In Jeet Kune Do, it’s not how much you have learned, but how much you have absorbed from what you have learned. It is not how much fixed knowledge you can accumulate, but what you can apply livingly that counts. ‘Being’ is more valued than "doing."”

Bruce Lee (1940–1973) Hong Kong-American actor, martial artist, philosopher and filmmaker

Source: The Warrior Within : The Philosophies of Bruce Lee (1996), p. 117

Learning

“Really, Ischomachus, I am disposed to ask: "Does teaching consist in putting questions?" Indeed, the secret of your system has just this instant dawned upon me. I seem to see the principle in which you put your questions. You lead me through the field of my own knowledge, and then by pointing out analogies to what I know, persuade me that I really know some things which hitherto, as I believed, I had no knowledge of.”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

Oeconomicus (The Economist) XIX.15 (as translated by H. G. Dakyns)
Xenophon

Secret, Question

“[Unlike the] utilitarian… I judge pleasure and pain to be of small importance compared to knowledge, the appreciation and contemplation of beauty, and a certain intrinsic excellence of mind which, apart from its practical effects, appears to me to deserve the name of virtue. [For] many years it seemed to me perfectly self-evident that pleasure is the only good and pain the only evil. Now, however, the opposite seems to me self-evident.
What first turned me away from utilitarianism was the persuasion that I myself ought to pursue philosophy, although I had (and have still) no doubt that by doing economics and the theory of politics I could add more to human happiness. It appeared to me that the dignity of which human existence is capable is not attainable by devotion to the mechanism of life, and that unless the contemplation of eternal things is preserved, mankind will become no better than well-fed pigs. But I do not believe that such contemplation on the whole tends to happiness. It gives moments of delight, but these are outweighed by years of effort and depression.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Letter to Gilbert Murray, April 3, 1902
1900s

Life, Pain, Pleasure, Beauty

“The more extensive an author's knowledge of what has been done, the greater will be his power of knowing what to do.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Isaac D'Israeli, Curiosities of Literature.
Misattributed, Isaac D'Israeli

“Pedantry is properly the over-rating of any kind of knowledge we pretend to.”

Jonathan Swift book A Treatise on Good Manners and Good Breeding

A Treatise on Good Manners and Good Breeding

“Unmediated concepts … veil the relations between objects. … They are, therefore, objects of knowledge, but the object which is known through them is not the capitalist system of production itself, but the ideology of its ruling class.”

György Lukács book History and Class Consciousness

Source: History and Class Consciousness (1968), pp. 13-14

“Religion is not 'doctrinal knowledge,' but wisdom born of personal experience.”

Martin Luther (1483–1546) seminal figure in Protestant Reformation

Holborn, Hajo; A HISTORY OF MODERN GERMANY: The Reformation; 1959/1982 Princeton university Press

Wisdom, Religion, Personality

“It is knowledge that influences and equalises the social condition of man; that gives to all, however different their political position, passions which are in common, and enjoyments which are universal.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

"The Value of Literature to Men of Business," speech at the Manchester Athenaeum (23 October 1844), cited in Selected Speeches of the Late Right Honourable the Earl of Beaconsfield, Vol. 2 (1882), p. 625.
1840s

Universe, Passion

“As you are aware, I have never been able to soothe myself with the sugary delusions of religion; for these things stand convicted of the utmost absurdity in light of modern scientific knowledge. With Nietzsche, I have been forced to confess that mankind as a whole has no goal or purpose whatsoever, but is a mere superfluous speck in the unfathomable vortices of infinity and eternity. Accordingly, I have hardly been able to experience anything which one could call real happiness; or to take as vital an interest in human affairs as can one who still retains the hallucination of a "great purpose" in the general plan of terrestrial life. … However, I have never permitted these circumstances to react upon my daily life; for it is obvious that although I have "nothing to live for", I certainly have just as much as any other of the insignificant bacteria called human beings. I have thus been content to observe the phenomena about me with something like objective interest, and to feel a certain tranquillity which comes from perfect acceptance of my place as an inconsequential atom. In ceasing to care about most things, I have likewise ceased to suffer in many ways. There is a real restfulness in the scientific conviction that nothing matters very much; that the only legitimate aim of humanity is to minimise acute suffering for the majority, and to derive whatever satisfaction is derivable from the exercise of the mind in the pursuit of truth.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to Reinhardt Kleiner (14 September 1919), in Selected Letters I, 1911-1924 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, pp. 86-87
Non-Fiction, Letters

Life, Truth, Religion, Way

“Perhaps the topic [of this book] will appear fairly difficult to you because it is not yet familiar knowledge and the understanding of beginners is easily confused by mistakes; but with your inspiration and my teaching it will be easy for you to master, because clear intelligence supported by good lessons is a fast route to knowledge.”

Diophantus Arithmetica

Following the dedication to Dionysus as quoted by Paul Drijvers, Secondary Algebra Education (2011)
Arithmetica (c. 250 AD)

Books, Intelligence, Understanding, Support

“For knowledge to become wisdom, and for the soul to grow, the soul must be rooted in God: and it is through prayer that there comes to us that which is the strength of our strength, and the virtue of our virtue, the Holy Spirit.”

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

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 616.

Wisdom, God, Soul

“I also bought a copy of The New York Times, the previous day's issue of which I had seen the previous day in Puerto Rico. I was interested in newspapers and knew this paper to be one of the foremost in the world. But to read a newspaper for the first time is like coming into a film that has been on for an hour. Newspapers are like serials. To understand them you have to take knowledge to them; the knowledge that serves best is the knowledge provided by the newspaper itself. It made me feel a stranger, that paper.”

V.S. Naipaul book The Enigma of Arrival

"The Journey", p. 115
The Enigma of Arrival (1987)

World, Feeling, Understanding, Time

“For myself I would say that more than the interest and uses of the study of Welsh as an adminicle of English philology, more than the practical linguist's desire to acquire a knowledge of Welsh for the enlargement of his experience, more even than the interest and worth of the literature, older and newer, that is preserved in it, these two things seem important: Welsh is of this soil, this island, the senior language of the men of Britain; and Welsh is beautiful.”

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892–1973) British philologist and author, creator of classic fantasy works

English and Welsh (1955)

Men, Beauty, Literature, Study

“Preparatory Men. — I welcome all signs that a more virile, warlike age is about to begin, which will restore honor to courage above all! For this age shall prepare the way for one yet higher, and it shall gather the strength that this higher age will require some day — the age that will carry heroism into the search for knowledge and that will wage wars for the sake of ideas and their consequences.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

The Gay Science (1882)

Men, War, Age, Way

“I had translated the first twelve books of the Odyssey. For a while I learnt English also, merely so as to gain an accurate knowledge of Shakespeare; and I made a metrical translation of Romeo's monologue. Though I soon left English on one side, yet Shakespeare remained my exemplar, and I projected a great tragedy which was almost nothing but a medley of Hamlet and King Lear. The plan was gigantic in the extreme; two- and-forty human beings died in the course of this piece, and I saw myself compelled, in its working-out, to call the greater number back as ghosts, since otherwise I should have been short of characters for my last Acts. This play occupied my leisure for two whole years.”

Richard Wagner (1813–1883) German composer, conductor

Autobiographical Sketch (1843)

Books

“Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified. The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it.”

Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist

Die Natur baut keine Maschinen, keine Lokomotiven, Eisenbahnen, electric telegraphs, selfacting mules etc. Sie sind Produkte der menschlichen Industrie; natürliches Material, verwandelt in Organe des menschlichen Willens über die Natur oder seiner Betätigung in der Natur. Sie sind von der menschlichen Hand geschaffene Organe des menschlichen Hirns; vergegenständliche Wissenskraft. Die Entwicklung des capital fixe zeigt an, bis zu welchem Grade das allgemeine gesellschaftliche Wissen, knowledge, zur unmittelbaren Produktivkraft geworden ist und daher die Bedingungen des gesellschaftlichen Lebensprozesses selbst unter die Kontrolle des general intellect gekommen, und ihm gemäß umgeschaffen sind.
(1857/58)
Source: Notebook VII, The Chapter on Capital, p. 626.

Life, Nature

“Under whatever name or form we worship It, It leads us on to knowledge of the nameless, formless Absolute. Yet, to see one's true Self in the Absolute, to subside into It and be one with It, this is the true Knowledge of the Truth.”

Ramana Maharshi (1879–1950) Indian religious leader

Reality in Fourty Verses

Truth

“I wanted certainty in the kind of way in which people want religious faith. I thought that certainty is more likely to be found in mathematics than elsewhere. But I discovered that many mathematical demonstrations, which my teachers expected me to accept, were full of fallacies, and that, if certainty were indeed discoverable in mathematics, it would be in a new field of mathematics, with more solid foundations than those that had hitherto been thought secure. But as the work proceeded, I was continually reminded of the fable about the elephant and the tortoise. having constructed an elephant upon which the mathematical world could rest, I found the elephant tottering, and proceeded to construct a tortoise to keep the elephant from falling. But the tortoise was no more secure than the elephant, and after some twenty years of very arduous toil, I came to the conclusion that there was nothing more that I could do in the way of making mathematical knowledge indubitable.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Source: 1950s, Portraits from Memory and Other Essays (1956), p. 53

People, World, Faith, Way

“Without the support of your father (practically and metaphysically), without that behind you, without the knowledge of you as both a biological and cultural creature, with that depth of knowledge, you don't have the courage to do it, because you don't know what you are or what you could be. And so without that – because you're a historical creature, so you need all this collected wisdom, and all this dream-like information, and all this mythology and all this narrative, to inform you about what you are beyond what you see of yourself. And you're pummeled down, and people picked on you, and there's fifty things about you that are horrible, and you have a self-esteem problem, and you're sort of hunched over – you've got all these problems, and so it's not easy to see the divinity that lurks behind that. Unless you're aware of the heroic stories of the past – the metaphysics of consciousness – I don't think you can have the courage that regards yourself as the sort of creature that can stand up underneath that intense existential burden and move forward in courage and grace.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdrLQ7DpiWs "Biblical Series II: Genesis 1: Chaos & Order"

Wisdom, People, Dreams, Courage

“What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U. S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies? I know this is a formidable, technical task, one that may not be accomplished before the end of this century. Yet, current technology has attained a level of sophistication where it's reasonable for us to begin this effort. It will take years, probably decades of effort on many fronts. There will be failures and setbacks, just as there will be successes and breakthroughs. And as we proceed, we must remain constant in preserving the nuclear deterrent and maintaining a solid capability for flexible response. But isn't it worth every investment necessary to free the world from the threat of nuclear war? We know it is.”

Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) American politician, 40th president of the United States (in office from 1981 to 1989)

1980s, First term of office (1981–1985), Address on the Strategic Defense Initiative (1983)

War, People, World, Failure

“Contemplating the universe, the whole system of creation, in this point of light, we shall discover, that all that which is called natural philosophy is properly a divine study— It is the study of God through his works — It is the best study, by which we can arrive at a knowledge of the existence, and the only one by which we can gain a glimpse of his perfection.
Do we want to contemplate his power? We see it in the immensity of the Creation. Do we want to contemplate his wisdom? We see it in the unchangeable order by which the incomprehensible Whole is governed. Do we want to contemplate his munificence? We see it in the abundance with which he fills the earth. Do we want to contemplate his mercy? We see it in his not withholding that abundance even from the unthankful. In fine, do we want to know what God is? Search not written or printed books, but the Scripture called the Creation.”

Thomas Paine (1737–1809) English and American political activist

1790s, Discourse to the Theophilanthropists (1798)

Wisdom, God, Books, Search

“And how is not this the most reprehensible ignorance, to think that one knows what one does not know? But I, O Athenians! in this, perhaps, differ from most men; and if I should say that I am in any thing wiser than another, it would be in this, that not having a competent knowledge of the things in Hades, I also think that I have not such knowledge.”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

29b [alternate translation]
Plato, Apology

Men, Thinking

“Truly there is no cause for you to be miserable and unhappy. You yourself impose limitations on your true nature of infinite Being and then weep that you are but a finite creature. Then you take up this or that sadhana to transcend the nonexistent limitations. But if your sadhana itself assumes the existence of the limitations, how can it help you to transcend them? Hence I say know that you are really the infinite, pure Being, the Self Absolute. You are always that Self and nothing but that Self. Therefore, you can never be really ignorant of the Self; your ignorance is merely a formal ignorance… Know then that true Knowledge does not create a new Being for you; it only removes your "ignorant ignorance." Bliss is not added to your nature; it is merely revealed as your true and natural state, eternal and imperishable. The only way to be rid of your grief is to know and be the Self.”

Ramana Maharshi (1879–1950) Indian religious leader

Abide as the Self

Way, Nature, Help

“Had it not been for you, I should have remained what I was when we first met, a prejudiced, narrow-minded being, with contracted sympathies and false knowledge, wasting my life on obsolete trifles, and utterly insensible to the privilege of living in this wondrous age of change and progress.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Source: Books, Coningsby (1844), Lothair (1870), Ch. 49.

Life, Age, Change, Falseness

“Only through Beauty's morning gate, dost thou enter the land of Knowledge.”

Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) German poet, philosopher, historian, and playwright

Die Künstler (The Artists)

Beauty

“Those who receive this privilege therefore, have a duty to repay the sacrifice which others have made. They are like the man who has been given all the food available in a starving village in order that he might have strength to bring supplies back from a distant place. If he takes this food and does not bring help to his brothers, he is a traitor. Similarly, if any of the young men and women who are given an education by the people of this republic adopt attitudes of superiority, or fail to use their knowledge to help the development of this country, then they are betraying our union.”

Julius Nyerere (1922–1999) Tanzanian politician and writer, first Prime Minister and President of Tanzania

On higher education, 1960s. UDSM Alumni Newletter, volume 7. No. 2, November 2007, ISSN 0856 - 8805

Women, Men, People, Education

“What does opening your eyes and realizing your vulnerability have to do with the knowledge of good and evil? Here's the key: You know you're vulnerable. No other animal knows that. You know what hurts you, because you're vulnerable. And now that you know what hurts you, you can figure out what hurts someone else. And as soon as you know what can hurt someone as, and you can use that, then you have the knowledge of good and evil. Well it's a pretty good trick that the snake pulled because it doesn't seem like the thing that we would have exactly wanted if we knew what the consequence was going to be. As soon as a human being is self conscious and aware of his nakedness, then he has the capacity for evil. That's introduced into the world right at that point.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Concepts

World, Evil, Animals, Hurt

“We cannot suppose that an individual’s thinking survives bodily death, since that destroys the organization of the brain and dissipates the energy which utilized the brain tracks. God and immortality, the central dogma of the Christian religion, find no support in science. But we in the West have come to think of them as the irreducible minimum of theology. No doubt people will continue to entertain these beliefs, because they are pleasant, just as it is pleasant to think ourselves virtuous and our enemies wicked. But for my part I cannot see any grounds for either. I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove Satan is a fiction. The Christian God may exist, so might the Gods of Olympus, Ancient Egypt or Babylon; but no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other. They lie outside the region of provable knowledge and there is no reason to consider any of them.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

1920s, What I Believe (1925)

Death, God, People, Lie

“My delegation cannot refrain from speaking on this question — we who have such an intimate knowledge of boxcars and of deportations to unknown destinations that we cannot be silent.”

Golda Meir (1898–1978) former prime minister of Israel

On Soviet actions in Hungary to the UN General Assembly (21 November 1956)

Question

“One of the main reasons for my interest early on in the art and technology relationship was that during my studies of movement and light in art I was struck by the technical components in this art. Contrary to most, if not all, specialists in the field who put the stress on purely plastic issues and in the first place on the constructivist tradition, I was convinced that the technical and technological elements played a decisive part in this art. One almost paradoxical experience was my encounter with the kinetic artist and author of the book Constructivism, George Rickey, and my discovery of the most subtle technical movements in his mobile sculptures. But what seemed to me still more decisive for my option towards the art and technology problematic was the encounter in the early 1950s with artists like Nicholas Schöffer and Frank Malina whose works were based on some first hand or second hand scientific knowledge and who effectively or symbolically employed contemporary technological elements that gave their works a prospective cultural meaning. The same sentiment prevailed in me when I encountered similar artistic endeavors from the 1950s onwards in the works of Piotr Kowalski, Roy Ascott and many others which confirmed me in the aesthetic option I had taken, particularly when I discovered that this option was not antinomic (contradictory) to another aspect of the creative works of the time, i. e. spectator participation.”

Frank Popper (1918) French art historian

Source: Joseph Nechvatal. in: " Origins of Virtualism: An Interview with Frank Popper http://www.mediaarthistory.org/refresh/Programmatic%20key%20texts/pdfs/Popper.pdf," in: Media Art History, 2004.

Books, Art, Decision, Study

“Under these conditions it is no wonder, that the movement of atheists, which declares religion to be just a deliberate illusion, invented by power-seeking priests, and which has for the pious belief in a higher Power nothing but words of mockery, eagerly makes use of progressive scientific knowledge and in a presumed unity with it, expands in an ever faster pace its disintegrating action on all nations of the earth and on all social levels. I do not need to explain in any more detail that after its victory not only all the most precious treasures of our culture would vanish, but — which is even worse — also any prospects at a better future.”

Max Planck (1858–1947) German theoretical physicist

Religion und Naturwissenschaft (1958)

Religion, Future, Victory

“Rationality requires a complete knowledge and anticipation of the consequences that will follow on each choice. In fact, knowledge of consequences is always fragmentary”

Herbert A. Simon book Administrative Behavior

1940s-1950s, Administrative Behavior, 1947

“Feelings were running high, for the conviction of Esterhazy would inevitably lead to a retrial of Dreyfus, an eventuality that the General Staff wanted at all cost to avoid.
This must have led to a brief moment of psychological anguish. Note that, so far, General Billot was in no way compromised. Newly appointed to his position, he had the authority to bring out the truth. He did not dare, no doubt in terror of public opinion, certainly for fear of implicating the whole General Staff, General de Boisdeffre, and General Gonse, not to mention the subordinates. So he hesitated for a brief moment of struggle between his conscience and what he believed to be the interest of the military. Once that moment passed, it was already too late. He had committed himself and he was compromised. From that point on, his responsibility only grew, he took on the crimes of others, he became as guilty as they, if not more so, for he was in a position to bring about justice and did nothing. Can you understand this: for the last year General Billot, Generals Gonse and de Boisdeffre have known that Dreyfus is innocent, and they have kept this terrible knowledge to themselves?”

Emile Zola J’accuse…!

J'accuse! (1898)

Truth, Fear, Justice, Way

“MALCOLM X: Freedom, justice and equality are our principal ambitions. And to faithfully serve and follow the Honorable Elijah Muhammad is the guiding goal of every Muslim. Mr. Muhammad teaches us the knowledge of our own selves, and of our own people. He cleans us up--morally, mentally and spiritually--and he reforms us of the vices that have blinded us here in the Western society. He stops black men from getting drunk, stops their dope addiction if they had it, stops nicotine, gambling, stealing, lying, cheating, fornication, adultery, prostitution, juvenile delinquency. I think of this whenever somebody talks about someone investigating us. Why investigate the Honorable Elijah Muhammad? They should subsidize him. He's cleaning up the mess that white men have made. He's saving the Government millions of dollars, taking black men off of welfare, showing them how to do something for themselves. And Mr. Muhammad teaches us love for our own kind. The white man has taught the black people in this country to hate themselves as inferior, to hate each other, to be divided against each other. Messenger Muhammad restores our love for our own kind, which enables us to work together in unity and harmony. He shows us how to pool our financial resources and our talents, then to work together toward a common objective. Among other things, we have small businesses in most major cities in this country, and we want to create many more. We are taught by Mr. Muhammad that it is very important to improve the black man's economy, and his thrift. But to do this, we must have land of our own. The brainwashed black man can never learn to stand on his own two feet until he is on his own. We must learn to become our own producers, manufacturers and traders; we must have industry of our own, to employ our own. The white man resists this because he wants to keep the black man under his thumb and jurisdiction in white society. He wants to keep the black man always dependent and begging--for jobs, food, clothes, shelter, education. The white man doesn't want to lose somebody to be supreme over. He wants to keep the black man where he can be watched and retarded.”

Malcolm X (1925–1965) American human rights activist

Mr. Muhammad teaches that as soon as we separate from the white man, we will learn that we can do without the white man just as he can do without us. The white man knows that once black men get off to themselves and learn they can do for themselves, the black man's full potential will explode and he will surpass the white man.
Playboy interview, regarding the ambition of the Black Muslims
Attributed

Love, Men, Hate, People

“Only the descent into the hell of self-knowledge can pave the way to godliness.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

[N]ur die Höllenfahrt des Selbsterkenntnisses bahnt den Weg zur Vergötterung ...
Ak 6:441
Metaphysics of Morals (1797)

Way, Hell

“The nearest way to God
Leads through love's open door;
The path of knowledge is
Too slow for evermore”

Angelus Silesius (1624–1677) German writer

The Cherubinic Wanderer

Love, God, Way

“There is no self-knowledge except historical self-knowledge. No one knows what he is if he doesn’t know what his contemporaries are.”

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) German poet, critic and scholar

Es giebt keine Selbstkenntniss als die historische. Niemand weiss was er ist, wer nicht weiss was seine Genossen sind.

“Ideas,” Lucinde and the Fragments, P. Firchow, trans. (1991), § 139

“Mrs Ramsay sat silent. She was glad, Lily thought, to rest in silence, uncommunicative; to rest in the extreme obscurity of human relationships. Who knows what we are, what we feel? Who knows even at the moment of intimacy, This is knowledge? Aren't things spoilt then, Mrs Ramsay may have asked (it seemed to have happened so often, this silence by her side) by saying them?”

Virginia Woolf book To the Lighthouse

Part III, Ch. 5
To the Lighthouse (1927)

Feeling, Silence

“[…] knowledge is our greatest wealth and the love of others the most beautiful human value.”

Jacques Dubochet (1942) Nobel prize winning Swiss chemist

French: [...] la connaissance est notre plus grande richesse et l'amour d'autrui la plus belle valeur humaine.
Source, in French: Jacques Dubochet, Parcours, Éditions Rosso, 2018, page 9 (ISBN 9782940560097).

Love, Beauty, Wealth

“Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends — hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism — these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility — a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2009, First Inaugural Address (January 2009)

Truth, World, History, Courage

“During his illness, Lenin repeatedly addressed letters and proposals to the leading bodies and congresses of the party. It must be definitely stated that all these letters and suggestions were invariably delivered to their destination and they were all brought to the knowledge of the delegates to the Twelfth and Thirteenth Congresses, and have invariably exercised their influence on the decisions of the party. If all of these letters have not been published, it is because their author did not intend them to be published. Comrade Lenin has not left any “Testament”; the character of his relations to the party, and the character of the party itself, preclude the possibility of such a “Testament.” The bourgeois and Menshevik press generally understand under the designation of “Testament” one of Comrade Lenin’s letters (which is so much altered as to be almost unrecognizable) in which he gives the party some organizational advice. The Thirteenth Party Congress devoted the greatest attention to this and to the other letters, and drew the appropriate conclusions. All talk with regard to a concealed or mutilated “Testament” is nothing but a despicable lie, directed against the real will of Comrade Lenin and against the interests of the party created by him.”

Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) Marxist revolutionary from Russia

https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1925/07/lenin.htm,Letter on Max Eastman's Book, July 1, 1925

Lie, Exercises, Understanding, Decision

“The very pure spirit does not bother about the regard of others or human respect, but communes inwardly with God, alone and in solitude as to all forms, and with delightful tranquility, for the knowledge of God is received in divine silence.”

John of the Cross (1542–1591) Spanish mystic and Roman Catholic saint

The Sayings of Light and Love

God, Communication, Solitude, Silence

“Christianity is not satisfied with producing merely the specious guise of virtue. She requires the substantial reality, which may stand the scrutinizing eye of that Being “who searches the heart.” Meaning therefore that the Christian should live and breathe; in an atmosphere, as it were, of benevolence, she forbids whatever can tend to obstruct its diffusion or vitiate its purity. It is on this principle that Emulation is forbidden: for, besides that this passion almost insensibly degenerates into envy, and that it derives its origin chiefly from pride and a desire of self-exaltation; how can we easily love our neighbour as ourselves, if we consider him at the same time our rival, and are intent upon surpassing him in the pursuit of whatever is the subject of our competition?
Christianity, again, teaches us not to set our hearts on earthly possessions and earthly honours; and thereby provides for our really loving, or even cordially forgiving, those who have been more successful than ourselves in the attainment of them, or who have even designedly thwarted us in the pursuit. “Let the rich,” says the Apostle, “rejoice in that he is brought low.” How can he who means to attempt, in any degree, to obey this precept, be irreconcilably hostile towards any one who may have been instrumental in his depression?
Christianity also teaches us not to prize human estimation at a very high rate; and thereby provides for the practice of her injunction, to love from the heart those who, justly or unjustly, may have attacked our reputation, and wounded our character. She commands not the shew, but the reality of meekness and gentleness; and by thus taking away the aliment of anger and the fomenters of discord, she provides for the maintenance of peace, and the restoration of good temper among men, when it may have sustained a temporary interruption.
It is another capital excellence of Christianity, that she values moral attainments at a far higher rate than intellectual acquisitions, and proposes to conduct her followers to the heights of virtue rather than of knowledge. On the contrary, most of the false religious systems which have prevailed in the world, have proposed to reward the labour of their votary, by drawing aside the veil which concealed from the vulgar eye their hidden mysteries, and by introducing him to the knowledge of their deeper and more sacred doctrines.”

William Wilberforce (1759–1833) English politician

Source: Real Christianity (1797), p. 257.

Love, Men, Hostility, World

“Evil is the force that believes its knowledge is complete.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Other

Evil

“Knowledge begins with practice, and theoretical knowledge, which is acquired through practice, must then return to practice. The active function of knowledge manifests itself not only in the active leap from perceptual to rational knowledge, but - and this is more important - it must manifest itself in the leap from rational knowledge to revolutionary practice.”

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

On Practice (1937)

“Mathematical Analysis is… the true rational basis of the whole system of our positive knowledge.”

Auguste Comte (1798–1857) French philosopher

Bk. 1, chap. 1; as cited in: Robert Edouard Moritz. Memorabilia mathematica; or, The philomath's quotation-book https://archive.org/stream/memorabiliamathe00moriiala#page/81/mode/2up, (1914), p. 224 System of positive polity (1852)

Mathematics

“The best authorities are unanimous in saying that a war with H-bombs might possibly put an end to the human race. It is feared that if many H-bombs are used there will be universal death, sudden only for a minority, but for the majority a slow torture of disease and disintegration.
Many warnings have been uttered by eminent men of science and by authorities in military strategy. None of them will say that the worst results are certain. What they do say is that these results are possible, and no one can be sure that they will not be realized. We have not yet found that the views of experts on this question depend in any degree upon their politics or prejudices. They depend only, so far as our researches have revealed, upon the extent of the particular expert's knowledge. We have found that the men who know most are the most gloomy.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

1950s, The Russell-Einstein Manifesto (1955)

Death, Men, War, Fear

“Oh! human stupidity, do you not perceive that, though you have been with yourself all your life, you are not yet aware of the thing you possess most of, that is of your folly? and then, with the crowd of sophists, you deceive yourselves and others, despising the mathematical sciences, in which truth dwells and the knowledge of the things included in them. And then you occupy yourself with miracles, and write that you possess information of those things of which the human mind is incapable and which cannot be proved by any instance from nature. And you fancy you have wrought miracles when you spoil a work of some speculative mind, and do not perceive that you are falling into the same error as that of a man who strips a tree of the ornament of its branches covered with leaves mingled with the scented blossoms or fruit.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XIX Philosophical Maxims. Morals. Polemics and Speculations.

Life, Truth, Stupidity, Error

“In-depth learning means learning as much about a topic as possible – learning for the sake of knowledge and understanding itself as opposed to learning for the sake of passing a test with high grades or trying to impress people.”

Ben Carson (1951) 17th and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; American neurosurgeon

Source: Think Big (1996), p. 233

People, Understanding, Learning

“To acquire knowledge is neccessary at all times.”

Ja'far al-Sadiq (702–765) Muslim religious person

Majlisi, Bihārul Anwār, vol.1, p. 172
Regarding Knowledge & Wisdom, General

Time

“I always look for colleagues who are smart, and who know a lot in many fields. The obvious advantage is that he or she may be able to solve the problem that has produced trouble in your work. Also smart and knowledgeable colleagues can save you time, and are interesting and inspiring!”

Martin Lewis Perl (1927–2014) American scientist

Essay on Creativity in Science and Engineering

Problem, Time

“3. Finally, we are contemporaries of a new departure in the doctrine of truth, following the dissolution of its relation of organic concretion to knowledge. It is noticeable, after the fact, that to this day veracity, as I call it, has reigned without quarter: however strange it may seem, it is quite appropriate to say that truth is a new word in Europe (and elsewhere). Moreover, this theme of truth crosses the paths of Heidegger (who was the first to subtract it from knowledge), the mathematicians (who broke with the object at the end of the last century, just as they broke with adequation), and the modern theories of the subject (which displace truth from its subject pronunciation).”

Alain Badiou (1937) French writer and philosopher

Introduction
Being and Event (1988)

Truth, Departure

“The power of thought is the light of knowledge, the power of will is the energy of character, the power of heart is love. Reason, love and power of will are perfections of man.”

Ludwig Feuerbach book The Essence of Christianity

Introduction, Z. Hanfi, trans., in The Fiery Brook (1972), p. 99
The Essence of Christianity (1841)

Love, Light, Heart, Perfection

“The movement of the middle classes for the abolition of slavery was virtuous, but it was not wise. It was an ignorant movement. It showed a want of knowledge both of the laws of commerce and the stipulations of treaties; and it has alike ruined the colonies and aggravated the slave trade…The history of the abolition of slavery by the English and its consequences, would be a narrative of ignorance, injustice, blundering, waste, and havoc, not easily paralleled in the history of mankind.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Lord George Bentinck: A Political Biography (1852), pp. 324-325.
1850s

Law, History

“What a pity and what a poverty of spirit, to assert that beasts are machines deprived of knowledge and sentiment, which affect all their operations in the same manner, which learn nothing, never improve, &c. […] Some barbarians seize this dog, who so prodigiously excels man in friendship, they nail him to a table, and dissect him living, to show the mezarian veins. You discover in him all the same organs of sentiment which are in yourself. Answer me, machinist, has nature arranged all the springs of sentiment in this animal that he should not feel? Has he nerves to be incapable of suffering? Do not suppose this impertinent contradiction in nature. […] The animal has received those of sentiment, memory, and a certain number of ideas. Who has bestowed these gifts, who has given these faculties? He who has made the herb of the field to grow, and who makes the earth gravitate towards the sun.”

Voltaire (1694–1778) French writer, historian, and philosopher

" Beasts https://books.google.it/books?id=WQpJAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA8", in A Philosophical Dictionary, Volume 2, J. and H. L. Hunt, 1824, p. 9 Citas, Dictionnaire philosophique (1764)

Friendship, Dogs, Feeling, Spring

“Blow, blow your trumpets till they crack,
Ye little men of little souls!
And bid them huddle at your back -
Gold-sucking leeches, shoals on shoals!Fill all the air with hungry wails -
"Reward us, ere we think or write!
Without your Gold mere Knowledge fails
To sate the swinish appetite!"”

Lewis Carroll (1832–1898) English writer, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer

Fame's Penny-Trumpet st. 1 & 2
Rhyme? and Reason? (1883)

Men, Soul, Thinking

“The truth is that, promoting science isn't just about providing resources, it's about protecting free and open inquiry. It's about ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology. It's about listening to what our scientists have to say, even when it's inconvenient, especially when it's inconvenient. Because the highest purpose of science is the search for knowledge, truth and a greater understanding of the world around us. That will be my goal as President of the United States, and I could not have a better team to guide me in this work.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

President-elect Obama's Weekly Address (20 December 2008) http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/barackobama/barackobamaweeklytransition7.htm 2008

Truth, World, Search, Understanding

“Question: Guru Maharaji Ji, are you God? – Answer: No. My Knowledge is God”

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

Who is Guru Maharaj Ji?, (November 1973), Bantam Books, Inc.
1970s

God, Question

“Rationalism in politics, as I have interpreted it, involves an identifiable error, a misconception with regard to the nature of human knowledge, which amounts to a corruption of the mind. And consequently it is without the power to correct its own short-comings; it has no homeopathic quality; you cannot escape its errors by becoming more sincerely or more profoundly rationalistic.”

Michael Oakeshott (1901–1990) British philosopher

Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (1962)

Error, Nature, Sincerity

“The fruit of the tree of knowledge, always drives man from some paradise or other.”

William Ralph Inge The Idea of Progress

"The Idea of Progress" http://books.google.com/books?id=TbgYAAAAYAAJ&q=%22The+fruit+of+the+tree+of+knowledge+always+drives+man+from+some+paradise+or+other%22&pg=PA5#v=onepage, Romanes Lecture (27 May 1920), reprinted in Outspoken Essays: Second Series (1922)

Tree