Quotes about know-how
page 8

Thom Yorke photo

“You never really know how or when your life is going to change, and that's for the best.”

Caroline Myss (1952) author from the United States

Defy Gravity : Healing Beyond the Bounds of Reason (2009), p. 17

“If you know how to handle the verbs, you know how to handle the language. Everything else is just vocabulary.”

Michel Thomas (1914–2005) American linguist and language teacher

Speak German with Michel Thomas, Disc 5

Maurice Jones-Drew photo
Norman Mailer photo
Bill Hicks photo
Bob Dylan photo

“They talk about a life of brotherly love? Show me someone who knows how to live it.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Song lyrics, Slow Train Coming (1979), Slow Train

Claire Danes photo

“Anybody who knows how to make a good movie, knows that it's a collaborative undertaking. To deny that its really dangerous.”

Claire Danes (1979) American actress

"Interview: Steve Martin and Claire Danes" by Jeff Otto at IGN.com (19 October 2005)

Christopher Hitchens photo

“What preoccupies most scientists now is not how much they know compared to 50 years ago, though that is enormous as a difference, but how little they know compared to what they're finding out […] For a few milliseconds really of cosmic time our species has lived on one very very small rock, in a very small solar system that's a part of a fantastically unimportant suburb, in one of an uncountable number of galaxies […] Every single second since the big bang a star the size of our sun has blown up, gone to nothing […] And indeed physicists now exist who can tell you the date on which our sun will follow suit […] We know when it's [the world] coming to an end and we know how it will be, but we know something even more extraordinary which is the rate of expansion of this explosion we're looming through is actually speeding up. Our universe is flying apart further and faster than we thought it was […] Everyone who studies it professionally finds it impossible to reconcile this extraordinarily destructive, chaotic, self-destructive process, to find in it the finger of god, to find in that the idea of a design. And it's not just because we know so little about it, it's because what we know about it that's essential doesn't seem as if it's the intended result brought about by a divine-benign creator who loves every single one of us living as we do on this tiny rock in this negligible suburb of the cosmos.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

Christopher Hitchens vs. William Dembski, 18/11/2010 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctuloBOYolE&t=11m29s
2010s, 2010

Robert Frost photo
Louis Althusser photo
Salvador Dalí photo

“In 1951 the two most subversive things that could happen to an ex-surrealist were: firstly, to become a mystic and secondly, to know how to draw. These two models of rigour happened to me at the same time.”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

Quote from Dali's lecture, 1951 'Pablo Picasso et moi', (MPC 65)
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1951 - 1960

Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Shane Black photo

“The cult surprised me. I didn't even realise it had been successful. I loved it, I had fun working on it and it was one of the first things I'd ever written. And it wasn't just that it wasn't a hit - it was a huge failure. No one saw it. I don't know how on earth it caught on years later.”

Shane Black (1961) American actor, screenwriter and film director

SHANE BLACK THINKS A MONSTER SQUAD SEQUEL “COULD BE FUN” https://www.ign.com/articles/2016/08/15/shane-black-thinks-a-monster-squad-sequel-acould-be-funa (August 15 2016)

“Parodies are hard to do well, as is shown by the mediocrity of so many recent attempts. No matter how ripe a genre is for satirizing, unless you know how to do it, there are no guarantees.”

James Berardinelli (1967) American film critic

Review http://www.reelviews.net/movies/r/robin_tights.html of Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993).
Two-and-a-half star reviews

Hồ Xuân Hương photo
Karl Pilkington photo

“You know how they say people have six senses? There's loads more than that. [The ability to feel someone looking at you], that's been around since man and dinosaur were knockin' about.”

Karl Pilkington (1972) English television personality, social commentator, actor, author and former radio producer

Podcast Series 1 Episode 1
On Biology

“An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't. It's knowing where to go to find out what you need to know, and it's knowing how to use the information once you get it.”

William Feather (1889–1981) Publisher, Author

As quoted in Telephony, Vol. 150 (1956), p. 23 http://books.google.com/books?id=Wm0jAQAAMAAJ&q=%22being+able+to+differentiate+between+what+you+do+know%22&dq=%22being+able+to+differentiate+between+what+you+do+know%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=qYJOU9dAzoXRAYumgcAP&ved=0CMsCEOgBMDQ; the first two sentences of this statement began to be attributed to Anatole France in the 1990s, but without any citations of sources.

J.M.W. Turner photo

“Dear Jones.. [I] give you some account of.... the last sad ceremonies paid yesterday to departed talent gone to that bourne from whence no traveller returns. Alas, only two short months Sir Thomas followed the coffin of Dawe to the same place. We then were his pall-bearers. Who will do the like for me, or when, God only knows how soon; my poor father's death [Sept. 1829] proved a heavy blow upon me, and has been followed by others of the same dark kind.”

J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851) British Romantic landscape painter, water-colourist, and printmaker

Quote from Turner's letter, London Feb. 1830, to his friend George Jones in Rome; as cited in 'The life of J.M.W. Turner', Volume II, George Walter Thornbury; https://ia801207.us.archive.org/18/items/lifeofjmwturnerr02thor/lifeofjmwturnerr02thor.pdf Hurst and Blackett Publishers, London, 1862, p. 233
1821 - 1851

Gertrude Stein photo
Frank McCourt photo
Jiddu Krishnamurti photo
John Godfrey Saxe photo

“Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made.”

John Godfrey Saxe (1816–1887) American poet

As quoted in University Chronicle. University of Michigan (27 March 1869) books.google.de http://books.google.de/books?id=cEHiAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA164, Daily Cleveland Herald (29 March 1869), McKean Miner (22 April 1869), and "Quote... Misquote" http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/21/magazine/27wwwl-guestsafire-t.html by Fred R. Shapiro in The New York Times (21 July 2008); similar remarks have long been attributed to Otto von Bismarck, but this is the earliest known quote regarding laws and sausages, and according to Shapiro's research, such remarks only began to be attributed to Bismarck in the 1930s.

John McLaughlin photo

“Whether people accept this music or not, I don’t give a damn. I know how good—and right—the group is. We all sell out to a point. And don’t get me wrong, I like living comfortably and having a nice car. But if money determines your art, then what’s the point?”

John McLaughlin (1942) guitarist, founder of the Mahavishnu Orchestra

On the criticism of his acoustic band Shakti, after temporarily retiring his electric period with the Mahavishnu Orchestra, as quoted in Jerome, Jim. "John McLaughlin Pulls the Plug on His Guitar, but He's as Electrifying as Ever", People Magazines. 21 June 1976. http://people.com/archive/john-mc-laughlin-pulls-the-plug-on-his-guitar-but-hes-as-electrifying-as-ever-vol-5-no-24/

Luther Burbank photo
Herman J. Mankiewicz photo

“I don't know how it is that you start working at something you don't like, and before you know it you're an old man.”

Herman J. Mankiewicz (1897–1953) American screenwriter

Source: Halliwell, Leslie, Halliwell's Who's Who in the Movies http://books.google.com/books?id=cnMelOEV10YC, 4th ed. (2006) HarperCollins

Miyamoto Musashi photo
Brendan Fraser photo
Alex Ferguson photo
Alain photo

“We are advised and led along by second-rate moralists who only know how to work themselves into a delirium and pass their illness onto others.”

Alain (1868–1951) French philosopher

The Eloquence of Our Passions
Alain On Happiness (1928)

Michael Elmore-Meegan photo
Warren Farrell photo
Bhakti Tirtha Swami photo

“In the end nobody knows how it's done — how art is made. It can't be explained. Optical devices are just tools. Understanding a tool doesn't explain the magic of creation. Nothing can.”

David Hockney (1937) British artist

Interview with Martin Gayford, "Hockney and the secrets of the Old Masters" http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2001/09/22/bagay22.xml The Telegraph(22 September 2001)
2000s

Mike Tyson photo
Haruki Murakami photo
Christopher Reeve photo
Stephen King photo
Albert Camus photo

“The direction of the world overwhelms me at this time. In the long run, all the continents (yellow, black and brown) will spill over onto Old Europe. They are hundreds and hundreds of millions. They are hungry and they are not afraid to die. We no longer know how to die or how to kill. We could preach, but Europe believes in nothing. So, we must wait for the year 1000 or a miracle. For my part, I find it harder and harder to live before a wall.”

Albert Camus (1913–1960) French author and journalist

Correspondance: 1932-1960, p.220, Gallimard, 1981. Letter to Jean Granier, 1957 https://books.google.com.br/books?id=56VcAAAAMAAJ&q=le+train+du+monde+m%27accable+en+ce+moment.+a+longue+%C3%A9ch%C3%A9ance,+tous+les+continents+(jaune,+noir+et+bistre)&dq=le+train+du+monde+m%27accable+en+ce+moment.+a+longue+%C3%A9ch%C3%A9ance,+tous+les+continents+(jaune,+noir+et+bistre)&hl=pt-BR&sa=X&ved=0CCEQ6AEwAWoVChMIqfiA3aHcyAIVgw6QCh3IngRL

L. Frank Baum photo

“There's no way to know how good a player you are except by measuring against others.”

Aaron C. Brown (1956) American financial analyst

Source: The Poker Face of Wall Street (2006), Chapter 3, Finance Basics, p. 69

Steve Jobs photo

“I know how to say Allah, and that's it. I'm a citizen of Sarajevo and a Bosnian and full stop.”

Jusuf Prazina (1962–1993) Bosnian mobster

On being "Muslim" (official term for Bosniaks in the former Yugoslavia) http://www.scc.rutgers.edu/serbian_digest/120/t120-5.htm
Unsourced

William M. Tweed photo

“I don't care a straw for your newspaper articles; my constituents don't know how to read, but they can't help seeing them damned pictures.”

William M. Tweed (1823–1878) United States politician

On the political cartoons of Thomas Nast in Harper's Weekly, as quoted in "Article IV: An Episode in Municipal Government" by Charles F. Wingate in The North American Review (July 1875), p. 150

John Derbyshire photo
Chinmayananda Saraswati photo
Ivana Trump photo

“He’s no politician. He’s a businessman. He knows how to talk. He can give an hour speech without notes... He’s blunt.”

Ivana Trump (1949) Czech model and entrepreneur

Ivana Trump on how she advises Donald — and those hands https://nypost.com/2016/04/03/ivana-trump-opens-up-about-how-she-advises-donald-his-hands/ (April 3, 2016)

Heather Brooke photo
Neil deGrasse Tyson photo
Joanna MacGregor photo
Michelle Obama photo

“When I first arrived at school as a first-generation college student, I didn’t know anyone on campus except my brother. I didn’t know how to pick the right classes or find the right buildings. I didn’t even bring the right size sheets for my dorm room bed. I didn’t realize those beds were so long. So I was a little overwhelmed and a little isolated.”

Michelle Obama (1964) lawyer, writer, wife of Barack Obama and former First Lady of the United States

Statements proceeding introduction of husband at College Opportunity Summit (16 January 2014) http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/01/16/remarks-president-and-first-lady-college-opportunity-summit
2010s

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël photo

“A man must know how to fly in the face of opinion; a woman to submit to it.”

Un homme doit savoir braver l'opinion; une femme s'y soumettre.
Delphine (1802), epigraph
The epigraph is taken from the writings of de Staël's mother, Suzanne Necker.

John of St. Samson photo
Richard Feynman photo
Stanley Cavell photo

“I know how to give the meaning of a word but not how to give the intention of a word.”

Stanley Cavell (1926–2018) American philosopher

The Division of Talent (1985)

Lin Yutang photo

“The secret of contentment is knowing how to enjoy what you have, and to be able to lose all desire for things beyond your reach.”

Lin Yutang (1895–1976) Chinese writer

As quoted in Remarks of Famous People (1965) by Jacob Morton Braude, p. 23

Joseph Heller photo
Peter Beckford photo
Josip Broz Tito photo
Evelyn Waugh photo

“The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant they are”

Part 1, Chapter 3
Brideshead Revisited (1945)

Stanley Baldwin photo

“I have often thought, with reference to the late War…that it has shown the whole world how thin is the crust of civilisation on which this generation is walking. The realisation of that must have come with an appalling shock to most of us here. But more than that. There is not a man in this House who does not remember the first air raids and the first use of poisoned gas, and the cry that went up from this country. We know how, before the War ended, we were all using both those means of imposing our will upon our enemy. We realise that when men have their backs to the wall they will adopt any means for self-preservation. But there was left behind an uncomfortable feeling in the hearts of millions of men throughout Europe that, whatever had been the result of the War, we had all of us slipped down in our views of what constituted civilisation. We could not help feeling that future wars might provide, with further discoveries in science, a more rapid descent for the human race. There came a feeling, which I know is felt in all quarters of this House, that if our civilisation is to be saved, even at its present level, it behoves all people in all nations to do what they can by joining hands to save what we have, that we may use it as the vantage ground for further progress, rather than run the risk of all of us sliding in the abyss together.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1923/jul/23/military-expenditure-and-disarmament in the House of Commons (23 July 1923).
1923

Peter Kropotkin photo

“You know how I always believe in the future … Without disorder, the revolution is impossible; knowing that, I did not lose hope, and I do not lose it now.”

Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) Russian zoologist, evolutionary theorist, philosopher, scientist, revolutionary, economist, activist, geogr…

Letter to a friend (November 1920), as quoted in Peter Kropotkin : From Prince to Rebel (1990) by George Woodcock and Ivan Avakumovic, p. 428

Arthur Penrhyn Stanley photo
Michael Chabon photo
Auguste Rodin photo

“Then I gathered the éléments of what people call my symbolism. I do not understand anything about long words and theories. But I am willing to be a symbolist, if that defines the ideas that Michael Angelo gave me, namely that the essence of sculpture is the modelling, the general scheme which alone enables us to render the intensity, the supple variety of movement and character. If we can imagine the thought of God in creating the world, He thought first of the construction, which is the sole principle of nature, of living things and perhaps of the planets. Michael Angelo seems to me rather to derive from Donatello than from the ancients; Raphaël proceeds from them. He understood that an architecture can be built up with the human body, and that, in order to possess volume and harmony, a statue or a group ought to be contained in a cube, a pyramid or some simple figure. Let us look at a Dutch interior and at an interior painted by an artist of the present day. The latter no longer touches us, because it docs not possess the qualities of depth and volume, the science of distances. The artist who paints it does not know how to reproduce a cube. An interior by Van der Meer is a cubic painting. The atmosphere is in it and the exact volume of the objects; the place of these objects has been respected, the modem painter places them, arranges them as models. The Dutchmen did not touch them, but set themselves to render the distances that separated them, that is, the depth. And then, if I go so far as to say that cubic truth, not appearance, is the mistress of things, if I add that the sight of the plains and woods and country views gives me the principle of the plans that I employ on my statues, that I feel cubic truth everywhere, and that plan and volume appear to me as laws of all life and ail beauty, will it be said that I am a symbolist, that I generalise, that I am a metaphysician? It seems to me that I have remained a sculptor and a realist. Unity oppresses and haunts me.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Source: Auguste Rodin: The Man, His Ideas, His Works, 1905, p. 65-67

Molière photo

“Grammar, which knows how to control even kings.”

La grammaire qui sait régenter jusqu'aux rois.
Act II, sc. vi. An apparent reference to Sigismund I, at the Council of Constance, 1414, said to a prelate who had objected to his Majesty's grammar, "Ego sum rex Romanus, et supra grammaticam" (I am the Roman emperor, and am above grammar).
Les Femmes Savantes (1672)

Donald A. Schön photo

“Belief in the stable state serves primarily to protect us from apprehension of the threats inherent in change. Belief in stability is a means of maintaining stability, or at any rate the illusion of stability. But the most threatening situations are those that confront us with uncertainty, and by ‘uncertainty’, I don’t mean risk, which is a probability ratio which we all know how to handle, particularly those who are managers of industry. We can deal with risk.”

Donald A. Schön (1930–1997) American academic

Donald Schon " REITH LECTURES 1970: Change and Industrial Society: Lecture 1: The Loss of the Stable State http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rmhttp/radio4/transcripts/1970_reith1.pdf" at the BBC, 15 November 1970 – Radio 4; cited in: Richard Duane Carter (1981) Future challenges of management education. p. 102

Aron Ra photo

“There are basically two types of creationists; the professional or political creationists; these are the activists who lead the movement and who will regularly deliberately lie to promote their propaganda; and the second type which are the innocently-deceived followers commonly known as “sheep”. I know lots of intellectual Christians, but I can’t get any of them to actually watch the televangelists, because they either already know how phony they are, or they don’t want to find out. But that only allows a radical fringe to claim support from they masses they now also claim to represent. So there’s nothing to stop them. Professional creationists are making money hand over fist with faith-healing scams or bilking little old ladies out of prayer donations, or selling books and videos at their circus-like seminars where they have undeserved respect as powerful leaders. All of them feign knowledge they can’t really possess, and some of them claim degrees they’ve never actually earned… Were it not for this con, they’d have to go back to selling used cars, wonder drugs, and multi-level marketing schemes. They will never change their minds no matter what it costs anyone else.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

"1st Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnJX68ELbAY, Youtube (November 11, 2007)
Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Warren Farrell photo
Frank Stella photo

“I don't know how I got into sculpture. I liked its physicality, that's the only reason. I didn't have a program.”

Frank Stella (1936) American artist

Quote: Stella's response to the question: Is that one of the reasons you went into sculpture?
Source: Quotes, 1971 - 2000, Bomb: X Motion Picture and Center for New Art Activities, 2000, p. 28,

Ray Comfort photo
Thérèse of Lisieux photo
George Harrison photo

“I don't know how you were diverted
You were perverted too.
I don't know how you were inverted
No one alerted you.”

George Harrison (1943–2001) British musician, former member of the Beatles

While My Guitar Gently Weeps (1968)
Lyrics

Brian Mulroney photo
L. Frank Baum photo
Bob Dylan photo

“Don't know how it all got started, I don't know what they do with their lives…”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Song lyrics, Blood on the Tracks (1975), Tangled Up In Blue

François Fénelon photo
Anne-Thérèse de Marguenat de Courcelles, marquise de Lambert photo

“The most necessary disposition to relish pleasures is to know how to be without them.”

Source: A Mother's Advice to Her Son, 1726, p. 160

Janeane Garofalo photo

“I actually was class clown, but I don't know how that happened because I've never been considered an outwardly funny person — as the people in this room will attest.”

Janeane Garofalo (1964) comedian, actress, political activist, writer

standup performance, date unknown[citation needed]
Standup routines

Bel Kaufmanová photo
William Trufant Foster photo
George Hendrik Breitner photo

“What I consider to do with the new course [at The Academy of Art in The Hague] is: in the morning doing large plaster and in the afternoon painting or drawing after Nature, what I am doing already for some time, and [drawing] horses in the Municipal Horse Riding School. The Director is Sir Krüger, a very charming German who has seen of course many horses and so he knows how to show me the mistakes I make, which are not few.”

George Hendrik Breitner (1857–1923) Dutch painter and photographer

translation from the original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek
version in original Dutch (citaat van Breitner's brief, in het Nederlands:) Wat ik mij voorstel met de nieuwe cursus te doen is: 's morgens grootpleister en 's middags schilderen of naar de natuur teekenen. waarmede ik reeds eenige tijd bezig ben. en paarden in de Stadsrijschool. De Dir. daarvan is den Heer Krüger een alleraardigste duitscher, die nat. veel paarden gezien heeft en me dus de fouten weet te zeggen, die ik maak en die niet weinige zijn.
early quote of Breitner in his letter to his Maecenas A.P. van Stolk, 11 April 1878; original text in RKD-Archive, The Hague https://rkd.nl/explore/excerpts/585
before 1890

Giacomo Casanova photo
Chinmayananda Saraswati photo
Lana Turner photo

“I had cut a typing class because I hated to type, and I still don't know how to type, but [now] I can afford to have people type for me.”

Lana Turner (1921–1995) American actress

On her being discovered at a soda shop while skipping school, quoted in interview with Bryant Grumbel (1982). [Euq-IkmMMWE].
On her career

Thérèse of Lisieux photo
Patrick Stump photo
Bobby Clarke photo
Peter Sloterdijk photo

“Our lethargic modernity certainly knows how to “think historically,” but it has long doubted that it lives in a meaningful history.”

Peter Sloterdijk (1947) German philosopher

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. xxviii

Nathanael Greene photo
Victor Villaseñor photo
Haruki Murakami photo
Helen Keller photo