c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
To ask the 'right' question is far more important than to receive the answer. The solution of a problem lies in the understanding of the problem; the answer is not outside the problem, it is in the problem.
— Jiddu Krishnamurti, The Flight of the Eagle
Guarding knowledge is not a good way to understand. Understanding means to throw away your knowledge.
— Thich Nhat Hanh, Being Peace
The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.
— Huston Smith, Beyond the Post-Modern Mind: The Place of Meaning in a Global Civilization
There is no magic. There is only knowledge, more or less hidden.
— Gene Wolfe, Shadow & Claw
Maybe I don't really want to know what's going on. Maybe I'd rather not know. Maybe I couldn't bear to know. The Fall was a fall from innocence to knowledge.
— Margaret Atwood
Your children will smash your understanding, knowledge and reality. You will be better off. Then they will leave. You'll miss them forever.
— Tibor Kalman
A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild-flower discovered on the prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East. Genius is a light which makes the darkness visible, like the lightning’s flash, which perchance shatters the temple of knowledge itself--and not a taper lighted at the hearthstone of the race, which pales before the light of common day.
— Henry David Thoreau, Walking
The books—the generous friends who met me without suspicion—the merciful masters who never used me ill! The only years of my life that I can look back on with something like pride... Early and late, through the long winter nights and the quiet summer days, I drank at the fountain of knowledge, and never wearied of the draught.
— Wilkie Collins, Armadale
I had felt the shot coming; I hadn’t realized the bow was loaded with this very quarrel, perfectly calibrated to hit him hardest. What part of me had been studying him, stockpiling knowledge as ammunition?
— Rachel Hartman, Seraphina
Knowledge is like money: To be of value it must circulate, and in circulating it can increase in quantity and, hopefully, in value.
— Louis L'Amour, Education of a Wandering Man
What we most love is not what we know, but what knows us and draws us. . . . (78)
— Ravi Ravindra, The Wisdom of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras: A New Translation and Guide by Ravi Ravindra
You may not see it now," said the Princess of Pure Reason, looking knowingly at Milo's puzzled face, "but whatever we learn has a purpose and whatever we do affects everything and everyone else, if even in the tiniest way.
— Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth
Because some information is better than no information. Life does not give you big, simple answers, Caitlyn. It demands patience, focus, and an open, intelligent mind to gather the pieces of a puzzle and fit them together into a coherent whole. Nothing worth knowing is ever easily learned.
— Lisa Cach, Wake Unto Me
I know everything, you see,' the old voice wheedled. 'The beginning, the present, the end. Everything. You now, you see the past and the present, like other low creatures: no higher faculties than memory and perception. But dragons, my boy, have a whole different kind of mind.' He stretched his mouth in a kind of smile, no trace of pleasure in it. 'We are from the mountaintop: all time, all space. We see in one instant the passionate vision and the blowout.
— John Gardner, Grendel
The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you actually don’t know.
— Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
To 'know Thyself' is considered quite an accomplishment.
— L. Frank Baum, The Marvelous Land of Oz
The sum of things to be known is inexhaustible, and however long we read, we shall never come to the end of our story-book.", 3 October 1892)
— A.E. Housman, Selected Prose
Judgement can do without knowledge: but not knowledge without judgement.
— Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays
All children are atheists, they have no idea of God.
— Paul Henri Thiry d'Holbach, System of Nature
Creativity is paradoxical. To create, a person must have knowledge but forget the knowledge, must see unexpected connections in things but not have a mental disorder, must work hard but spend time doing nothing as information incubates, must create many ideas yet most of them are useless, must look at the same thing as everyone else, yet see something different, must desire success but embrace failure, must be persistent but not stubborn, and must listen to experts but know how to disregard them.", December 6, 2011)]
— Michael Michalko
Life can give everything to whoever tries to understand and is willing to receive new knowledge.
— Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Bumi Manusia
We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster.
— Carl Sagan
I admit that reason is a small and feeble flame, a flickering torch by stumblers carried in the star-less night, -- blown and flared by passion's storm, -- and yet, it is the only light. Extinguish that, and nought remains.
— Robert G. Ingersoll
Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.
— Aldous Huxley
But maybe that isn't possible. Maybe the mind of the majority is always the healthy mind, simply by virtue of its numbers. Maybe it's the definition of madness to believe I'm right and everyone else if wrong, to find my thoughts rational and reasonable when almost the entire world finds them damaged and flawed.
— Stacey Jay, Of Beast and Beauty
Everyone in the life before was cranky, I think, because they just wanted to know.--After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned
— Dave Eggers
Knowledge counts but common sense matters.
— LouAnne Johnson, Dangerous Minds
Do you believe that you really have a desire to learn, or would you, had you been left alone from birth, be totally primitive and beastlike in your thoughts and feelings?
— William H. Armstrong
As long as reading is for us the instigator whose magic keys have opened the door to those dwelling-places deep within us that we would not have known how to enter, its role in our lives is salutary. It becomes dangerous, on the other hand, when, instead of awakening us to the personal life of the mind, reading tends to take its place, when the truth no longer appears to us as an ideal which we can realize only by the intimate progress of our own thought and the efforts of our heart, but as something material, deposited between the leaves of books like a honey fully prepared by others and which we need only take the trouble to reach down from the shelves of libraries and then sample passively in a perfect repose of mind and body.
— Marcel Proust
To sustain the belief that there is no God, atheism has to demonstrate infinite knowledge, which is tantamount to saying, “I have infinite knowledge that there is no being in existence with infinite knowledge
— Ravi Zacharias
I would teach how science works as much as I would teach what science knows. I would assert (given that essentially, everyone will learn to read) that science literacy is the most important kind of literacy they can take into the 21st century. I would undervalue grades based on knowing things and find ways to reward curiosity. In the end, it's the people who are curious who change the world.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson
Television, radio, and all the sources of amusement and information that surround us in our daily lives are also artificial props. They can give us the impression that our minds are active, because we are required to react to stimuli from the outside. But the power of those external stimuli to keep us going is limited. They are like drugs. We grow used to them, and we continuously need more and more of them. Eventually, they have little or no effect. Then, if we lack resources within ourselves, we cease to grow intellectually, morally, and spiritually. And we we cease to grow, we begin to die.
— Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading
The ability to retain a child's view of the world with at the same time a mature understanding of what it means to retain it, is extremely rare - and a person who has these qualities is likely to be able to contribute something really important to our thinking.
— Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading
Was not Hypatia the greatest philosopher of Alexandria, and a true martyr to the old values of learning? She was torn to pieces by a mob of incensed Christians not because she was a woman, but because her learning was so profound, her skills at dialectic so extensive that she reduced all who queried her to embarrassed silence. They could not argue with her, so they murdered her.
— Iain Pears, The Dream of Scipio
I felt knowledge and the unity of the world circulate in me like my own blood.
— Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
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." - Frankenstein p115
— Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein
I was drawn to horses as if they were magnets. It was in my blood. I must have inherited from my grandfather a genetic proclivity toward the equine species. Perhaps there's a quirk in the DNA that makes horse people different from everyone else, that instantly divides humanity into those who love horses and the others, who simply don't know.
— Allan J. Hamilton, Zen Mind, Zen Horse: The Science and Spirituality of Working with Horses
I also hold very strong personal convictions about censorship. I don't believe in forbidden knowledge.
— Andrea Cremer, Nightshade
Public libraries have been a mainstay of my life. They represent an individual's right to acquire knowledge; they are the sinews that bind civilized societies the world over. Without libraries, I would be a pauper, intellectually and spiritually.
— James A. Michener
Since we cannot know all there is to be known about anything, we ought to know a little about everything.
— Blaise Pascal
Everything stated or expressed by man is a note in the margin of a completely erased text. From what's in the note we can extract the gist of what must have been in the text, but there's always a doubt, and the possible meanings are many.
— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
There is, so I believe, in the essence of everything, something that we cannot call learning. There is, my friend, only a knowledge-that is everywhere, that is Atman, that is in me and you and in every creature, and I am beginning to believe that this knowledge has no worse enemy than the man of knowledge, than learning.
— Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
Then we shan’t regard anyone as a lover of knowledge or wisdom who is fussy about what he studies…
— Plato, The Republic and Other Works
Mankind have a great aversion to intellectual labor; but even supposing knowledge to be easily attainable, more people would be content to be ignorant than would take even a little trouble to acquire it.
— Samuel Johnson
It's not always what we don't know that gets in our way sometimes it's what we think we know that keeps us from learning. 
— Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
Only one who has learned much can fully appreciate his ignorance.
— Louis L'Amour, Education of a Wandering Man
Even the knowledge of my own fallibility cannot keep me from making mistakes. Only when I fall do I get up again.
— Vincent van Gogh
We do not learn for the benefit of anyone, we learn to unlearn ignorance.
— Michael Bassey Johnson
Knowing was a temptation. What you don't know won't tempt you.
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
Knowledge kills action action requires the veils of illusion. 
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
The offer of certainty, the offer of complete security, the offer of an impermeable faith that can’t give way, is an offer of something not worth having. I want to live my life taking the risk all the time that I don’t know anything like enough yet; that I haven’t understood enough; that I can’t know enough; that I’m always hungrily operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
— Christopher Hitchens
[I]t was with a good end in mind – that of acquiring the knowledge of good and evil – that Eve allowed herself to be carried away and eat the forbidden fruit. But Adam was not moved by this desire for knowledge, but simply by greed: he ate it because he heard Eve say it tasted good.
— Moderata Fonte, The Worth of Women: Wherein Is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men
Of course. You get everything from books.
— Gregory Maguire, Out of Oz
One knows so little. When one knows more it is too late.
— Agatha Christie, Three Act Tragedy
Isn’t that wonderful? That feeling of not knowing too much about something… Incomplete information… Endless possibilities… When you don’t know much about something, it’s the most exciting sensation.-Kutsnetz in TALUS
— Erol Ozan, Talus
Perhaps by now I'd come far enough that I had the guts to be afraid.
— Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
First, the avid student must be aware that when the world was young it knew only seven things: water, life and death, salt, night, birds and the length of an hour.
— Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless
No power and no treasure can outweigh the extension of our knowledge.
— Democritus
Musicians have always had a better understanding of love than the rest of us. Over the years they have told us that love: is like a rock, is here to stay, is all you need, will find a way, will keep us together, will tear us apart, sucks.
— Cuthbert Soup, Another Whole Nother Story
Enough talk, now read!
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
To furnish the means of acquiring knowledge is ... the greatest benefit that can be conferred upon mankind. It prolongs life itself and enlarges the sphere of existence.
— John Quincy Adams
When I was your age, art was a lonely thing: no galleries, no collecting, no critics, no money. We didn't have mentors. We didn't have parents. We were alone. But it was a great time, because we had nothing to lose and a vision to gain.
— John Logan, Red
From the dawn of exact knowledge to the present day, observation, experiment, and speculation have gone hand in hand; and, whenever science has halted or strayed from the right path, it has been, either because its votaries have been content with mere unverified or unverifiable speculation (and this is the commonest case, because observation and experiment are hard work, while speculation is amusing); or it has been, because the accumulation of details of observation has for a time excluded speculation.
— Thomas Henry Huxley, The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century
I freed a thousand slaves. I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves.
— Harriet Tubman
I am not omniscient, but I know a lot.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: First Part
If it were customary to send little girls to school and teach them the same subjects as are taught to boys, they would learn just as fully and would understand the subtleties of all arts and sciences.
— Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies
What we want to see is the child in pursuit of the knowledge not the knowledge in pursuit of the child.
— George Bernard Shaw
You cannot go on 'explaining away' for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on 'seeing through' things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it.
— C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
— John Archibald Wheeler
Everyone lives bound by their own knowledge and awareness. They define that as reality; but knowledge and awareness are vage, and perhaps better called illusions.
— Masashi Kishimoto
The excitable observer will pass judgement first and then make knowledge conform to judgement the prudent observer will first learn to know and then judge according to knowledge. 
— Thomas Cleary
They knew many things but had no idea why. And strangely this made them more, rather than less, certain that they were right.
— Neal Stephenson, Anathem
Man wants three things; life, knowledge, and love.
— Fulton J. Sheen, Life Is Worth Living
Knowledge unqualified is knowledge simply of something learned.
— Plato
I believe that we do not know anything for certain, but everything probably.
— Christiaan Huygens, Oeuvres Completes
The range of human knowledge today is so great that we're all specialists and the distance between specializations has become so great that anyone who seeks to wander freely between them almost has to forego closeness with the people around him.
— Robert M. Pirsig
Facts or opinions which are to pass through the hands of so many, to be misconceived by folly in one, and ignorance in another, can hardly have much truth left.
— Jane Austen, Persuasion
It is like the thirsty traveller who at first sincerely sought the water of knowledge, but who later, having found it plain perhaps, proceeded to temper his cup with the salt of doubt so that his thirst now becomes insatiable though he drinks incessantly, and that in thus drinking the water that cannot slake his thirst, he has forgotten the original and true purpose for which the water was sought.
— Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas, Islam: The Concept of Religion and The Foundation of Ethics and Morality
There is much that I do not know and I'd like to know even less.
— Martin Schuster
Nobody knows, nobody can ever know, not even in memory, because there are moments in time that are not knowable.
— Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines
Curiosity is more important than knowledge.
— Albert Einstein
There are no limitations to the mind except those that we acknowledge.
— Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich
I would suggest that science is, at least in my part, informed worship.
— Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God
The complexities of adult life get in the way of the truth.
— Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading
The Search for reason ends at the known; on the immense expanse beyond it only the sense of the ineffable can glide. It alone knows the route to that which is remote from experience and understanding. Neither of them is amphibious: reason cannot go beyond the shore, and the sense of the ineffable is out of place where we measure, where we weigh. We do not leave the shore of the known in search of adventure or suspense or because of the failure of reason to answer our questions. We sail because our mind is like a fantastic seashell, and when applying our ear to its lips we hear a perpetual murmur from the waves beyond the shore. Citizens of two realms, we all must sustain a dual allegiance: we sense the ineffable in one realm, we name and exploit reality in another. Between the two we set up a system of references, but we can never fill the gap. They are as far and as close to each other as time and calendar, as violin and melody, as life and what lies beyond the last breath.
— Abraham Joshua Heschel, Man Is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion
In order to survive, a plurality of true communities would require not egalitarianism and tolerance but knowledge, an understanding of the necessity of local differences, and respect. Respect, I think, always implies imagination - the ability to see one another, across our inevitable differences, as living souls. (pg. 181, Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community)
— Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays
Knowledge without courage is sterile.
— Baltasar Gracián
I am a man who knows nothing, guesses sometimes, finds frequently and who's always amazed.
— Villiers de L'Isle-Adam
As the biggest library if it is in disorder is not as useful as a small but well-arranged one, so you may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value to you than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself; because only through ordering what you know by comparing every truth with every other truth can you take complete possession of your knowledge and get it into your power.
— Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms
It's where we're nearest to our humanness. Useless knowledge for its own sake. Useful knowledge is good, too, but it's for the faint-hearted, an elaboration of the real thing, which is only to shine some light, it doesn't matter where on what, it's the light itself, against the darkness, it's what's left of God's purpose when you take away God.
— Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love
The meditative mind sees disagreeable or agreeable things with equanimity, patience, and good-will. Transcendent knowledge is seeing reality in utter simplicity. (146)
— Jean-Yves Leloup, Compassion and Meditation: The Spiritual Dynamic between Buddhism and Christianity
An educated man should know everything about something and something about everything
— C.V. Wedgwood
The doorstep to the temple of wisdom is a knowledge of our own ignorance.
— Benjamin Franklin
Scoring well on tests is the sort of happy thing that gets the school district the greenbacks they crave. Understanding and appreciating the material are secondary.
— Libba Bray
I want to disabuse people of the idea that knowledge is power. Knowing how to get to Detroit is not the same thing as having the bus fare.
— Andrew Vachss
There is no one who would not rather appear to know than to be taught.
— Marcus Fabius Quintilianus
Real data is messy. ...It's all very noisy out there. Very hard to spot the tune. Like a piano in the next room, it's playing your song, but unfortunately it's out of whack, some of the strings are missing, and the pianist is tone deaf and drunk- I mean, the noise! Impossible! 
— Tom Stoppard
Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it. When we enquire into any subject, the first thing we have to do is to know what books have treated of it. This leads us to look at catalogues, and at the backs of books in libraries.
— Samuel Johnson, The Life of Samuel Johnson Including a Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, Vol 2
The less you know, the more you will be knownThe less you want, the more you will haveThe less you are, the more you will be
— Vivian Amis, I Am: The Key to Manifesting
Then the edge asserts itself. You are not a god. You are not that enlarged self. Indeed, you are not even a whole self, as you now see. Your new knowledge of possibilities is also a knowledge of what is lacking in the actual.
— Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet
I'm fat because I'm greedy, and if my mind is fat it's because I'm curious.
— Stephen Fry
And whenever any one informs us that he has found a man who knows all the arts, and all things else that anybody knows, and every single thing with a higher degree of accuracy than any other man –whoever tells us this, I think that we can only imagine him to be a simple creature who is likely to have been deceived by some wizard or actor whom he met, and whom he thought all-knowing, because he himself was unable to analyze the nature of knowledge and ignorance and imitation.
— Plato, The Republic
Interpretations of interpretations interpreted.
— James Joyce
I watch people sometimes, wonder how they can walk around with the weight of what they know.
— Cate Kennedy, Dark Roots: Stories
Learning is not the accumulation of knowledge, but rather, one thing only: understanding
— Donna Jo Napoli
You know a trillion times more about art than me. But I’ve learned that it isn’t necessary to know all that much. You just make what you wanna see, right? It’s a game, right? It’s like being paid for dreaming.
— Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All
What is more important to a library than anything else -- than everything else -- is the fact that it exists.", American Scholar; Washington, DC, June 5, 1972]
— Archibald MacLeish
What would you consider a good job?" Answered as follows:"A good job is one in which I don't have to work, and get paid a lot of money."When I heard that I cheered and yelled and felt that he should be given an A+, for he had perfectly articulated the American dream of those who despise knowledge. What a politician that kid would have made.
— Isaac Asimov, The Secret of the Universe
It takes a long time to learn how to do something simple.
— Marty Rubin
Moreover, knowledge and investigation help promote wonder they do not destroy it. Whatever our tastes, we can generally appreciate such things as music, art or wine better when we understand a bit about them. We read up on our favourite singers or artists because we feel we can appreciate their work better when we know how they think and what they bring to their work. The giddy delight and curiosity that comes from marvelling at the beauty of this universe is deepened, not cheapened, by the laws and facts science gives us to aid our understanding. In a similar way, the psychological tricks at work behind many seemingly paranormal events are truly more fascinating than the explanation of other-worldiness precisely because they are of this world, and say something about how rich and complex and mysterious we are as human beings to be convinced by such trickery, indeed to want to perpetuate it in the first place.
— Derren Brown, Tricks of the Mind
The obvious can sometimes be illuminating when perceived in an unhabitual way.
— Daniel Quinn, Ishmael
If knowledge is power, let's spread it as widely as possible and dilute it to deny those who would abuse it.
— Stuart Aken
The foundation of all free government and all social order must be laid in families and in the discipline of youth. Young persons must not only be furnished with knowledge, but they must be accustomed to subordination and subjected to the authority and influence of good principles. It will avail little that youths are made to understand truth and correct principles, unless they are accustomed to submit to be governed by them.
— Noah Webster
A thousand years ago, everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, they knew the Earth was flat. Fifteen minutes ago, you knew we humans were alone on it. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow.
— Tommy Lee Jones
Better to keep it in the old heads, where no one can see it or suspect it. We are all bits and pieces of history and literature and international law. Byron, Tom Paine, Machiavelli, or Christ, it's here. And the hour's late. And the war's begun. And we are out here, and the city is there, all wrapped up in its own coat of a thousand colors... All we want to do is keep the knowledge we think we will need intact and safe. We're not out to incite or anger anyone yet. For if we are destroyed, the knowledge is dead, perhaps for good... Right now we have a horrible job; we're waiting for the war to begin and, as quickly, end. It's not pleasant, but then we're not in control, we're the odd minority crying in the wilderness. When the war's over, perhaps we can be of some use in the world.
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less until he knows absolutely everything about nothing.
— Nicholas Murray Butler
Ignorance breeds monsters to fill up the vacancies of the soul that are unoccupied by the verities of knowledge.
— Horace Mann
To be agreeable in society, you must consent to be taught many things which you already know.
— Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord
Knowledge drifts in and out of my mind", said Lestat with a little look of honest distress and a shake of his head. "I devour it and then I lose it and sometimes I can't reach for any knowledge that I ought to possess. I feel desolate, but then knowledge returns or I seek it out in a knew source."(...)"But you love books, then", Aunt Queen was saying. I had to listen."Oh, yes," Lestat said. "Sometimes they're the only thing that keeps me alive.""What a thing to say at your age", she laughed."No, but one can feel desperate at any age, don't you think? The young are eternally desperate," he said frankly. "And books, they offer one hope - that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that universe, one is saved.
— Anne Rice, Blackwood Farm
Was it wisdom? Was it knowledge? Was it, once more, the deceptiveness of beauty, so that all one’s perceptions, half-way to truth, were tangled in a golden mesh? Or did she lock up within her some secret which certainly Lily Briscoe believed people must have for the world to go on at all? Every one could not be as helter skelter, hand to mouth as she was. But if they knew, could they tell one what they knew? Sitting on the floor with her arms round Mrs. Ramsay’s knees, close as she could get, smiling to think that Mrs. Ramsay would never know the reason of that pressure, she imagined how in the chambers of the mind and heart of the woman who was, physically, touching her, were stood, like the treasures in the tombs of kings, tablets bearing sacred inscriptions, which if one could spell them out, would teach one everything, but they would never be offered openly, never made public. What art was there, known to love or cunning, by which one pressed through into those secret chambers? What device for becoming, like waters poured into one jar, inextricably the same, one with the object one adored? Could the body achieve, or the mind, subtly mingling in the intricate passages of the brain? or the heart? Could loving, as people called it, make her and Mrs. Ramsay one? for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge, she had thought, leaning her head on Mrs. Ramsay’s knee.
— Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
If then a practical end must be assigned to a University course, I say it is that of training good members of society... It is the education which gives a man a clear, conscious view of their own opinions and judgements, a truth in developing them, an eloquence in expressing them, and a force in urging them. It teaches him to see things as they are, to go right to the point, to disentangle a skein of thought to detect what is sophistical and to discard what is irrelevant.
— John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University
The Christian does not avoid sin to achieve salvation, but rather salvation brings him to a desire not to sin. The closer that one's spirit is synchronized with the holy knowledge of God, the more he comprehends how and why sin is destructive to himself and others in each and every circumstance. The dwindling desire for sin is a premature gift of Heaven - where there will be no sin, where all will, too, possess that full and complete wisdom; all will have perfect reasons not to sin. In this way, free will might still exist, but the shared wisdom of God will simply outwit all desires, impulses, and needs to sin.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
So long as we do not depend on the facts entirely, incomplete knowledge is better than complete ignorance.--Egwene al'Vere
— Brandon Sanderson, Towers of Midnight
Knowledge is the eye that must direct the foot of obedience.
— Thomas Watson
If you want to be truly successful invest in yourself to get the knowledge you need to find your unique factor. When you find it and focus on it and persevere your success will blossom.
— Sidney Madwed
Since the earliest days of our youth, we have been conditioned to accept that the direction of the herd, and authority anywhere — is always right.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
Look, you have been told everything. Lift up your eyes and look at the cloud and the light within it and the stars surrounding it. And the star that leads the way is your star." So Judas lifted up his eyes and saw the luminous cloud, and he entered it.
— Rodolphe Kasser, The Gospel of Judas Together with the Letter of Peter to Phillip, James, and a Book of Allogenes from Codex Tchacos
Everybody liked better to conjecture how the thing was, than simply to know it; for conjecture soon became more confident than knowledge, and had a more liberal allowance for the incompatible.
— George Eliot, Middlemarch
Knowledge, like money and muck (manure), serves us best when spread evenly.
— Stuart Aken
And even as each one of you stands alone in God's knowledge, so must each one of you be alone in his knowledge of God and in his understanding of the earth.
— Kahlil Gibran
Passion for knowledge, motivation for continuous learning.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!
In the new century science will defeat famine, boredom, and the plague, but . . . vital knowledge will become so elevated that nobody will know how anything works. . . . the good news is that everybody will be empowered; the bad news is nobody will understand why.
— Mark Christensen, Aloha
Before he'd met Anna, he'd thought he'd known what love was, thought he'd understood about friendship, romance, all o fit, but he hadn't - not at all. Until he'd held Anna in his arms, until he'd let her see his soul, until he'd heard her cry gently when he made love to her for the first time, he'd known nothing.
— Gemma Malley
Knowledge is the most prized commodity in the entire universe, and it is infinite in its commodity.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
Science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves.
— Richard Feynman
That which others hear or read of, I felt and practised myself; they get their knowledge by books, I mine by melancholizing.
— Robert  Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy
If you truly want to know a person, talk to their enemies.
— Jamie Leanne Gaines
It is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree -- make sure you understand the fundamental principles, ie the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to.
— Elon Musk
This magical, marvelous food on our plate, this sustenance we absorb, has a story to tell. It has a journey. It leaves a footprint. It leaves a legacy. To eat with reckless abandon, without conscience, without knowledge; folks, this ain't normal.
— Joel Salatin, Folks, This Ain't Normal: A Farmer's Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World
We must admit that simply knowing the contents of the Bible is not a sure route to spiritual growth. There is an aweful assumption in evangelical churches that if we can just get the Word of God into people's heads, then the Spirit of God will apply it to their hearts. That assumption is aweful, not because the Spirit never does what the assumption supposes, but because it excused pastors and leaders from the responsibility to tangle with people's lives. Many remain safely hidden behind pulpits, hopelessly out of touch with the struggles of their congregations, proclaiming the Scriptures with a pompous accuracy that touches no one. Pulpits should provide bridges, not barriers, to life-changing relationships.
— Larry Crabb, Inside Out: Real Change Is Possible If You're Willing to Start from The...
[She was] a creature full of eager, passionate longings for all that was beautiful and glad; thirsty for all knowledge; with an ear straining after dreamy music that died away and would not come near to her; with a blind unconscious yearning for something that would link together the wonderful impressions of this mysterious life, and give her soul a sense of home in it.
— George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss
You know what I should do?" Hoshino asked excited. "Of course," the cat said. "What'd I tell you? Cats know everything. Not like dogs.
— Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
Modest doubt is call'd the beacon of the wise.
— William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida
Oho, now I know what you are. You are an advocate of Useful Knowledge.... Well, allow me to introduce myself to you as an advocate of Ornamental Knowledge. You like the mind to be a neat machine, equipped to work efficiently, if narrowly, and with no extra bits or useless parts. I like the mind to be a dustbin of scraps of brilliant fabric, odd gems, worthless but fascinating curiosities, tinsel, quaint bits of carving, and a reasonable amount of healthy dirt. Shake the machine and it goes out of order; shake the dustbin and it adjusts itself beautifully to its new position.
— Robertson Davies, Tempest-Tost
No civilization, including Plato's, has ever been destroyed because its citizens learned too much.
— Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting
There is no limit to how good you can get in pursuit of perfection.
— Sachin Kumar Puli
You don’t know anything, but I know even less.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
The best of knowledge and righteous acts are those hidden to the people.
— Al-Fudhayl ibn Iyyadh
...wearing a turban of yellow, signifying knowledge, and a robe of purple, portraying purity and activity, Virchand Gandhi of Bombay delivered a lecture on the religions of India....
— The New York Times
After this, Boy became very curious about the mansion where the clothes and the food came from. He made me describe everything. Then he asked Good Thing 'Are there books in this mansion, too?''And pictures and jewels,' Good Thing said through me. 'What does Master wish me to fetch? There is a golden harp, a musical box like a bird, a—''Just books,' said Boy. 'I need to learn. I'm still so ignorant.
— Diana Wynne Jones, Unexpected Magic: Collected Stories
It is important to know the stories and histories of things, even if all we know is that we don't know.
— Ali Smith, There but for the
Thus, by science I mean, first of all, a worldview giving primacy to reason and observation and a methodology aimed at acquiring accurate knowledge of the natural and social world. This methodology is characterized, above all else, by the critical spirit: namely, the commitment to the incessant testing of assertions through observations and/or experiments — the more stringent the tests, the better — and to revising or discarding those theories that fail the test. One corollary of the critical spirit is fallibilism: namely, the understanding that all our empirical knowledge is tentative, incomplete and open to revision in the light of new evidence or cogent new arguments (though, of course, the most well-established aspects of scientific knowledge are unlikely to be discarded entirely).. . . I stress that my use of the term 'science' is not limited to the natural sciences, but includes investigations aimed at acquiring accurate knowledge of factual matters relating to any aspect of the world by using rational empirical methods analogous to those employed in the natural sciences. (Please note the limitation to questions of fact. I intentionally exclude from my purview questions of ethics, aesthetics, ultimate purpose, and so forth.) Thus, 'science' (as I use the term) is routinely practiced not only by physicists, chemists and biologists, but also by historians, detectives, plumbers and indeed all human beings in (some aspects of) our daily lives. (Of course, the fact that we all practice science from time to time does not mean that we all practice it equally well, or that we practice it equally well in all areas of our lives.)
— Alan Sokal
What I know about auto racing could be inscribed with a dry Magic Marker on the lip of a Coke bottle.
— David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again:  Essays and Arguments
Once a day, especially in the early years of life and study, call yourselves to an account what new ideas, what new proposition or truth you have gained, what further confirmation of known truths, and what advances you have made in any part of knowledge.
— Isaac Watts, The Improvement of the Mind to Which Are Added a Discourse on the Education of Children
There is no knowing that does not begin with knowing God.
— John Calvin
Belief in the traditional sense, or certitude, or dogma, amounts to the grandiose delusion, "My current model" -- or grid, or map, or reality-tunnel -- "contains the whole universe and will never need to be revised." In terms of the history of science and knowledge in general, this appears absurd and arrogant to me, and I am perpetually astonished that so many people still manage to live with such a medieval attitude.
— Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger: Die letzten Geheimnisse der Illuminaten oder An den Grenzen des erweiterten Bewusstseins
Only through Beauty's morning-gate, dost thou penetrate the land of knowledge.
— Friedrich Schiller
In the beginning..when ray and day hadn't yet come into existence at all, there was a kind of radiance that illuminates universe. That radiance is the light of knowledge and goodness. That radiance will persistently and consistently shines brightly even after all the stars and moons in this vast universe died out.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
In order to be really good as a librarian, everything counts towards your work, every play you go see, every concert you hear, every trip you take, everything you read, everything you know. I don’t know of another occupation like that. The more you know, the better you’re going to be.
— Allen Smith
Through learning we re-create ourselves. Through learning we become able to do something we never were able to do. Through learning we reperceive the world and our relationship to it. Through learning we extend our capacity to create, to be part of the generative process of life
— Peter M. Senge
That knowledge which purifies the mind and heart alone is true Knowledge, all else is only a negation of Knowledge.
— Ramakrishna
The dilemma is this. In the modern world knowledge has been growing so fast and so enormously, in almost every field, that the probabilities are immensely against anybody, no matter how innately clever, being able to make a contribution in any one field unless he devotes all his time to it for years. If he tries to be the Rounded Universal Man, like Leonardo da Vinci, or to take all knowledge for his province, like Francis Bacon, he is most likely to become a mere dilettante and dabbler. But if he becomes too specialized, he is apt to become narrow and lopsided, ignorant on every subject but his own, and perhaps dull and sterile even on that because he lacks perspective and vision and has missed the cross-fertilization of ideas that can come from knowing something of other subjects.
— Henry Hazlitt
We oft know little of who we were, only something of who we are, and nothing of who we may be.
— Charlie Fletcher, Silvertongue
The motive that impels modern reason to know must be described as the desire to conquer and dominate. For the Greek philosophers and the Fathers of the church, knowing meant something different: it meant knowing in wonder. By knowing or perceiving one participates in the life of the other. Here knowing does not transform the counterpart into the property of the knower; the knower does not appropriate what he knows. On the contrary, he is transformed through sympathy, becoming a participant in what he perceives.
— Jürgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom
Only the subject's individual consciousness can testify for the unwitnessed acts, and there is no act more deprived of external testimony than the act of knowing.
— Olavo de Carvalho
But shortcuts are dangerous we cannot delude ourselves that our knowledge is further along than it actually is. 
— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life
Those swift to think are not always secure.
— Sophocles
I only know everything if you ask the right questions.
— Doc Coleman
Whatever people in general do not understand, they are always prepared to dislike; the incomprehensible is always the obnoxious.
— Letitia Landon
Shall any gazer see with mortal eyes,Or any searcher know by mortal mind,Veil after veil will lift--but there must be Veil upon veil behind.
— Edwin Arnold, The Light of Asia
The man who sees both sides of a question is a man who sees absolutely nothing.
— Oscar Wilde
It's common platitude that knowledge is neutral but every now and then it would be useful if it was on your side and not theirs.
— John Brunner, The Jagged Orbit
Oh, I have a habit of letting myself be lectured on the things I know best. I like to see if they are understood in the same way I understand; for there are many ways of knowing the same thing
— Alfred de Vigny, Stello
All things are strange which are worth knowing.
— Catherynne M. Valente, In the Cities of Coin and Spice
Mercy!" cried Gandalf. "If the giving of knowledge is to be the cure of your inquisitiveness, I shall spend all the rest of my days in answering you. What more should you like to know?""The names of all the stars, and of all living things, and the whole history of Middle-Earth and Over-heave and of the Sundering Seas," laughed Pippin. "Of course! What less?
— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers
Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.
— Baruch Spinoza, Ethics
Always hear others out and remain open-minded the day you think you know everything is the day you have the most yet to learn. 
— A.J. Darkholme, Rise of the Morningstar
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, The Essence of Christianity
The family is the cradle of the world's misinformation.
— Don DeLillo, White Noise
If it is not strong upon your heart to practice what you read, to what end do you read? To increase your own condemnation? If your light and knowledge be not turned into practice, the more knowing a man you are, the more miserable a man you will be in the day of recompense; your light and knowledge will more torment you than all the devils in hell. Your knowledge will be that rod that will eternally lash you, and that scorpion that will forever bite you, and that worm that will everlastingly gnaw you; therefore read, and labor to know that you may do--or else you are undone forever.
— Thomas Brooks
Knowing is not enough. You must accept My blessings in order to attain a better life. You must embrace a higher level of consciousness.
— Mary B. Morrison
When I wanted to know something, I wanted it undistorted by somebody else's imperfect knowledge.
— Milton H. Erickson
A love affair with knowledge will never end in heartbreak.
— Michael Marino
Life, just like the stars, the planets and the galaxies, is just a temporary structure on the long road from order to disorder. But that doesn't make us insignificant, because we are the Cosmos made conscious. Life is the means by which the universe understands itself. And for me, our true significance lies in our ability to understand and explore this beautiful universe.
— Brian Cox
If things far away don’t concern you, you’ll soon mourn things close at hand.
— Confucius, The Analects
There was, I found, always more to learn.
— David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest
Her searches after knowledge were arbitrary and without context. It was as if she were shining a small flashlight of curiosity into the dark room of the world.
— Gloria Steinem, Marilyn
Those people who develop the ability to continuously acquire new and better forms of knowledge that they can apply to their work and to their lives will be the movers and shakers in our society for the indefinite future.
— Brian Tracy
A monk should surely love his books with humility, wishing their good and not the glory of his own curiosity; but what the temptation of adultery is for laymen and the yearning for riches is for secular ecclesiastics, the seduction of knowledge is for monks.
— Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
... informed ignorance provides the natural state of mind for research scientists at the ever-shifting frontiers of knowledge. People who believe themselves ignorant of nothing have neither looked for, nor stumbled upon, the boundary between what is known and unknown in the cosmos.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson, Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution
One had to live a long time to know a man's true nature.
— Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera