“He that knew all that ever Learning writ,
Knew only this - that he knew nothing yet.”
The Emperor of the Moon, Act III, sc. iii.
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Aphra Behn15
British playwright, poet, translator and fiction writer 1640–1689Related quotes
Victor Hugo (1802–1885) French poet, novelist, and dramatist
Part 2, Book 1, Ch. 2
Ninety-Three (1874)
Context: Cimourdain was one of those men who have a voice within them, and who listen to it. Such men seem absent-minded; they are not; they are all attention.
Cimourdain knew everything and nothing. He knew everything about science, and nothing at all about life. Hence his inflexibility. His eyes were bandaged like Homer's Themis. He had the blind certainty of the arrow, which sees only the mark and flies to it. In a revolution, nothing is more terrible than a straight line. Cimourdain went straight ahead, as sure as fate.
Cimourdain believed that, in social geneses, the extreme point is the solid earth; an error peculiar to minds which replace reason with logic.
“He declared that he knew nothing, except the fact of his ignorance.”
Diogenes Laërtius (180–240) biographer of ancient Greek philosophers
Socrates, 16.
The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (c. 200 A.D.), Book 2: Socrates, his predecessors and followers
“She knew nothing but she had everything he had lost.”
Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray
Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray
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The Education of Henry Adams (1907)
Sei Shonagon book The Pillow Book
Source: The Pillow Book
Source: The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon (1002), p. 44
Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist
Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)
