quotations about knowledge
Men are more readily contented with no intellectual light than a little; and wherever they have been taught to acquire some knowledge in order to please others, they have most generally gone on to acquire more, to please themselves.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
The surest way of concealing from others the boundaries of one's own knowledge is not to overstep them.
GIACOMO LEOPARDI
Leopardi: Poems and Prose
Of what a strange nature is knowledge! It clings to a mind when it has once seized on it like a lichen on a rock.
MARY SHELLEY
Frankenstein
Learned men fall into error oftenest by mistaking knowledge for wisdom.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
The knowledge of useful things is a purse seldom lost.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
The Way to Wealth: Ben Franklin on Money and Success
Knowledge is twofold and consists not only in an affirmation of what is true, but in the negation of what is false.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
We just do not see how very specialized the use of "I know" is.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
On Certainty
In things which we know, everyone will trust us ... and we may do as we please, and no one will like to interfere with us; and we are free, and masters of others; and these things will be really ours, for we shall turn them to our good.
PLATO
Lysis
Those who have knowledge are more confident than those who have no knowledge, and they are more confident after they have learned than before.
PLATO
Protagoras
Our human knowledge is a candle burnt
On a dim altar to a sun-vast Truth.
SRI AUROBINDO
Gems from Sri Aurobindo
Humans crave knowledge, and when that craving ends, we are no longer human.
TIM LEBBON
Fallen
Information is the mortar that both builds and destroys empires.
TOBSHA LEARNER
The Witch of Cologne
Knowledge is the most democratic source of power.
ALVIN TOFFLER
Powershift
Man is an ignoramus athirst for knowledge.
CHARLES WAGNER
Justice
If there's anything worse than knowing too little, it's knowing too much. Education will broaden a narrow mind, but there's no known cure for a big head. The best you can hope is that it will swell up and bust.
GEORGE HORACE LORIMER
Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son
Hence the strong attraction which magic and science alike have exercised on the human mind; hence the powerful stimulus that both have given to the pursuit of knowledge. They lure the weary enquirer, the footsore seeker, on through the wilderness of disappointment in the present by their endless promises of the future: they take him up to the top of an exceeding high mountain and show him, beyond the dark clouds and rolling mists at his feet, a vision of the celestial city, far off, it may be, but radiant with unearthly splendour, bathed in the light of dreams.
JAMES FRAZER
The Golden Bough
I do not approve the maxim which desires a man to know a little of everything. Superficial knowledge, knowledge without principles, is almost always useless and sometimes harmful knowledge.
LUC DE CLAPIERS
MARQUIS DE VAUVENARGUES, Reflections and Maxims
Knowledge alone doth not amount to Virtue; but certainly there is no Virtue without Knowledge.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
Mathematicians have sought knowledge in figures, Philosophers in systems, Logicians in subtleties, and Metaphysicians in sounds. It is not in any nor in all of these. He that studies only men, will get the body of knowledge without the soul, and he that studies only books, the soul without the body.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon