Quotes about knowledge
page 8
Interview All Songs Considered, NPR, May 20, 2008
“Habit is the intersection of knowledge (what to do), skill (how to do), and desire (want to do).”
Source: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change
“Knowledge is freedom and ignorance is slavery”
Source: Miles: The Autobiography
Variant: If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness. For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation.
Source: "Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 6: The Vocation of Eloquence
Context: Freedom has nothing to do with lack of training; it can only be the product of training. You're not free to move unless you've learned to walk, and not free to play the piano unless you practise. Nobody is capable of free speech unless he knows how to use the language, and such knowledge is not a gift: it has to be learned and worked at.
Source: John Muir: His Life and Letters and Other Writings
As A Man Thinketh (1902), Serenity
Source: As a Man Thinketh
Source: Ideas Have Consequences
“That’s all anyone wants from anyone else, not love itself but the knowledge that love is there.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Part I : Ambiguity and Freedom
The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947)
Variant: Let us try to assume our fundamental ambiguity. It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our life that we must draw our strength to live and our reason for acting
Context: In spite of so many stubborn lies, at every moment, at every opportunity, the truth comes to light, the truth of life and death, of my solitude and my bond with the world, of my freedom and my servitude, of the insignificance and the sovereign importance of each man and all men. There was Stalingrad and there was Buchenwald, and neither of the two wipes out the other. Since we do not succeed in fleeing it, let us therefore try to look the truth in the face. Let us try to assume our fundamental ambiguity. It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our life that we must draw our strength to live and our reason for acting [C'est dans la connaissance des conditions authentiques de notre vie qu'il nous faut puiser la force de vivre et des raisons d'agir].
Source: The Bridge of San Luis Rey
Source: 1960s, The Medium is the Message (1967), p. 26
Source: The Medium is the Massage
On Regine Olsen (2 February 1839)
1830s, The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 1830s
Context: Oh, can I really believe the poet's tales, that when one first sees the object of one's love, one imagines one has seen her long ago, that all love like all knowledge is remembrance, that love too has its prophecies in the individual. … it seems to me that I should have to possess the beauty of all girls in order to draw out a beauty equal to yours; that I should have to circumnavigate the world in order to find the place I lack and which the deepest mystery of my whole being points towards, and at the next moment you are so near to me, filling my spirit so powerfully that I am transfigured for myself, and feel that it's good to be here.
“Experiment is the mother of knowledge.”
Source: A Wrinkle in Time: With Related Readings
"The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy" in Esquire (May 1961); republished in Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961)
1920s, Viereck interview (1929)
Act I, scene i.
Manfred (1817)
Source: Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science
"Why We Need To Understand Science" in The Skeptical Inquirer Vol. 14, Issue 3 (Spring 1990)
Context: Science is much more than a body of knowledge. It is a way of thinking. This is central to its success. Science invites us to let the facts in, even when they don’t conform to our preconceptions. It counsels us to carry alternative hypotheses in our heads and see which ones best match the facts. It urges on us a fine balance between no-holds-barred openness to new ideas, however heretical, and the most rigorous skeptical scrutiny of everything — new ideas and established wisdom. We need wide appreciation of this kind of thinking. It works. It’s an essential tool for a democracy in an age of change. Our task is not just to train more scientists but also to deepen public understanding of science.
Source: The Raven Warrior
Source: We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
Letter to Elizabeth Shaw (20 March 1791)
Source: Education of a Wandering Man
Source: Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994), p. 398
Source: Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
“Understanding means throwing away your knowledge.”
Source: Being Peace
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
Source: Think Big: Unleashing Your Potential for Excellence
“Wonder is the desire of knowledge.”
“You look like a boy who has eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge and doesn't like the taste.”
Source: The Warrior Heir
Source: The Walking Drum (1984), Ch. 25
Source: Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
1960s, Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963)
Context: I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth concerning time in relation to the struggle for freedom. I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: "All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth." Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.
Source: Faith Precedes the Miracle
Source: The Anatomy of Melancholy
Source: The Finkler Question
"A Cult of Ignorance", Newsweek (21 January 1980) http://media.aphelis.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/ASIMOV_1980_Cult_of_Ignorance.pdf
General sources
Context: There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
"How To Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later" (1978)
“I had given up some youth for knowledge, but my gain was more valuable than the loss”
Source: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Source: Summa Contra Gentiles
“The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.”
“Wonder rather than doubt is the root of all knowledge.”
“Knowledge is power, community is strength and positive attitude is everything”
Source: You Are Here: Discovering the Magic of the Present Moment
“Information is not knowledge. The only source of knowledge is experience.”
According to Barbara Wolff, of The Hebrew University's Albert Einstein Archives, this is not one of Einstein's identifiable quotations. (Source: paralegalpie.com http://www.paralegalpie.com/paralegalpie/2009/11/did-anybody-really-say-that.html.)
The phrase "the only source of knowledge is experience" is found in an English-language essay from 1896: "We can only be guided by what we know, and our only source of knowledge is experience" (Arthur J. Pillsbury, "The Final Word" https://books.google.com/books?id=Mw9IAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA595&dq=%22only+source", Overland Monthly, November 1896). The thought can be seen as a paraphrase of John Locke's argument from his Essay Concerning Human Understanding: "Whence has it [the Mind] all the materials of Reason and Knowledge? To this I answer, in one Word, From Experience". (Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding/Book II/Chapter I, 2.)
The phrase "information is not knowledge" is also found from the nineteenth century https://books.google.com/books?id=W2oAAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA59&dq=%22information+is+not+knowledge%22.
Misattributed
"Religion: A Dialogue."
Variant translation: To free a man from error does not mean to take something from him, but to give him something.
Essays
Source: Essays and Aphorisms
Context: To free a man from error is to give, not to take away. Knowledge that a thing is false is a truth. Error always does harm; sooner or later it will bring mischief to the man who harbors it. Then give up deceiving people; confess ignorance of what you don't know, and leave everyone to form his own articles of faith for himself. Perhaps they won't turn out so bad, especially as they'll rub one another's corners down, and mutually rectify mistakes. The existence of many views will at any rate lay a foundation of tolerance. Those who possess knowledge and capacity may betake themselves to the study of philosophy, or even in their own persons carry the history of philosophy a step further.
1760s, A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law (1765)
Source: The Works Of John Adams, Second President Of The United States
Context: Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right, from the frame of their nature, to knowledge, as their great Creator, who does nothing in vain, has given them understandings, and a desire to know; but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean, of the characters and conduct of their rulers. Rulers are no more than attorneys, agents, and trustees, of the people; and if the cause, the interest, and trust, is insidiously betrayed, or wantonly trifled away, the people have a right to revoke the authority that they themselves have deputed, and to constitute other and better agents, attorneys and trustees.