c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Jace?""Yeah?""How did you know I had Shadowhunter blood? Was there some way you could tell?"The elevator arrived with a final groan. Jace unlatched the gate and slid it open. The inside reminded Clary of a birdcage, all black metal and decorative bits of gilt. "I guessed," he said, latching the door behind them. "It seemed like the most likely explanation.""You guessed? You must have been pretty sure, considering you could have killed me."He pressed a button in the wall, and the elevator lurched into action with a vibrating groan that she felt all through the bones in her feet. "I was ninety percent sure.""I see," Clary said.There must have been something in her voice, because he turned to look at her. Her hand cracked across his face, a slap that rocked him back on his heels. He put a hand to his cheek, more in surprise than pain. "What the hell was that for?"The other ten percent," she said, and they rode the rest of the way down to the street in silence.
— Cassandra Clare, City of Bones
It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.
— Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in.
— Isaac Asimov
Doctor Who: You want weapons? We're in a library. Books are the best weapon in the world. This room's the greatest arsenal we could have. Arm yourself!(from Tooth and Claw in Season 2)
— Russell T. Davies
The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.
— Anaïs Nin
If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you'd be doomed. You'd be ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to.
— Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
Knowledge is power. Power to do evil...or power to do good. Power itself is not evil. So knowledge itself is not evil.
— Veronica Roth, Allegiant
The surest way of concealing from others the boundaries of one's own knowledge is not to overstep them.
— Giacomo Leopardi
People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care
— Theodore Roosevelt
Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Cat's Cradle
I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian god may exist; so may the gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them.
— Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects
Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social enviroment. Most people are incapable of forming such opinions.", 1953)
— Albert Einstein
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. So is a lot.
— Alexander Pope
Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow.
— Ronald E. Osborn
An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.
— Benjamin Franklin, The Way to Wealth: Ben Franklin on Money and Success
It was better to know the worst than to wonder.
— Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
Remember it all, every insult, every tear. Tattoo it on the inside of your mind. In life, knowledge of poisons is essential. I've told you, nobody becomes an artist unless they have to.
— Janet Fitch
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
— Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man
Don't fuck with an English major. They keep lots of useless crap trapped in their heads. Once in a while they let some of it out and it bites you square on the ass.
— P.C. Cast, Divine By Mistake
The knowledge of all things is possible
— Leonardo da Vinci
To know that you do not know is the best.To think you know when you do not is a disease.Recognizing this disease as a disease is to be free of it.
— Lao Tzu
The first men to be created and formed were called the Sorcerer of Fatal Laughter, the Sorcerer of Night, Unkempt, and the Black Sorcerer … They were endowed with intelligence, they succeeded in knowing all that there is in the world. When they looked, instantly they saw all that is around them, and they contemplated in turn the arc of heaven and the round face of the earth … [Then the Creator said]: 'They know all … what shall we do with them now? Let their sight reach only to that which is near; let them see only a little of the face of the earth!… Are they not by nature simple creatures of our making? Must they also be gods?
— Anonymous, Popol Vuh
A woman, especially if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.
— Jane Austen
Remember my friend, that knowledge is stronger than memory, and we should not trust the weaker
— Bram Stoker, Dracula
Doubt … is an illness that comes from knowledge and leads to madness.
— Gustave Flaubert, Memoirs of a Madman
Information is not knowledge.
— Albert Einstein
And so seated next to my father in the train compartment, I suddenly asked, "Father, what is sexsin?"He turned to look at me, as he always did when answering a question, but to my surprise he said nothing. At last he stood up, lifted his traveling case off the floor and set it on the floor.Will you carry it off the train, Corrie?" he said.I stood up and tugged at it. It was crammed with the watches and spare parts he had purchased that morning.It's too heavy," I said.Yes," he said, "and it would be a pretty poor father who would ask his little girl to carry such a load. It's the same way, Corrie, with knowledge. Some knowledge is too heavy for children. When you are older and stronger, you can bear it. For now you must trust me to carry it for you.
— Corrie ten Boom, The Hiding Place: The Triumphant True Story of Corrie Ten Boom
What transforms this world is — knowledge. Do you see what I mean? Nothing else can change anything in this world. Knowledge alone is capable of transforming the world, while at the same time leaving it exactly as it is. When you look at the world with knowledge, you realize that things are unchangeable and at the same time are constantly being transformed.
— Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
Knowledge is a treasure, but practice is the key to it.
— Lao Tzu
Don't be in a hurry to condemn because he doesn't do what you do or think as you think or as fast. There was a time when you didn't know what you know today.
— Malcolm X
nothing that is worth knowing can be taught
— Oscar Wilde
...We now know the basic rules governing the universe, together with the gravitational interrelationships of its gross components, as shown in the theory of relativity worked out between 1905 and 1916. We also know the basic rules governing the subatomic particles and their interrelationships, since these are very neatly described by the quantum theory worked out between 1900 and 1930. What's more, we have found that the galaxies and clusters of galaxies are the basic units of the physical universe, as discovered between 1920 and 1930....The young specialist in English Lit, having quoted me, went on to lecture me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern 'knowledge' is that it is wrong...My answer to him was, when people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.The basic trouble, you see, is that people think that 'right' and 'wrong' are absolute; that everything that isn't perfectly and completely right is totally and equally wrong.However, I don't think that's so. It seems to me that right and wrong are fuzzy concepts, and I will devote this essay to an explanation of why I think so.When my friend the English literature expert tells me that in every century scientists think they have worked out the universe and are always wrong, what I want to know is how wrong are they? Are they always wrong to the same degree?
— Isaac Asimov
The power of human thought grows exponentially with the number of minds that share that thought.
— Dan Brown, The Lost Symbol
That is just the way with some people. They get down on a thing when they don’t know nothing about it.
— Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.
— Plato, The Republic
Belief is the wound that knowledge heals.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Telling
Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.
— Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
When you reach the end of what you should know, you will be at the beginning of what you should sense.
— Kahlil Gibran, Sand and Foam
The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty.
— James Madison
Let us tenderly and kindly cherish therefore, the means of knowledge. Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write .
— John  Adams, The Works Of John Adams, Second President Of The United States
Then why do you want to know?""Because learning does not consist only of knowing what we must or we can do, but also of knowing what we could do and perhaps should not do.
— Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic.
— Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
He was twenty. I remembered twenty. I'd known everything at twenty. It took me another year to realize I knew nothing. I was still hoping to learn something before I hit thirty, but I wasn't holding my breath.
— Laurell K. Hamilton, Circus of the Damned
Small minds have always lashed out at what they don't understand.
— Dan Brown
I have always thirsted for knowledge, I have always been full of questions.
— Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
Do not repeat after me words that you do not understand. Do not merely put on a mask of my ideas, for it will be an illusion and you will thereby deceive yourself.
— Jiddu Krishnamurti
Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge.
— Audre Lorde
All knowledge that is about human society, and not about the natural world, is historical knowledge, and therefore rests upon judgment and interpretation. This is not to say that facts or data are nonexistent, but that facts get their importance from what is made of them in interpretation… for interpretations depend very much on who the interpreter is, who he or she is addressing, what his or her purpose is, at what historical moment the interpretation takes place.
— Edward Said
The way of success is the way of continuous pursuit of knowledge.
— Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich: The Landmark Bestseller - Now Revised and Updated for the 21st Century
Knowledge is a weapon. I intend to be formidably armed.
— Terry Goodkind
The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty. And yet our species is young and curious and brave and shows much promise. In the last few millennia we have made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the Cosmos and our place within it, explorations that are exhilarating to consider. They remind us that humans have evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy, that knowledge is prerequisite to survival. I believe our future depends on how well we know this Cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky.
— Carl Sagan, Cosmos
All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.
— Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
Knowledge grows exponentially. The more we know, the greater our ability to learn, and the faster we expand our knowledge base.
— Dan Brown, The Lost Symbol
You differ from a great man in only one respect: the great man was once a very little man, but he developed one important quality: he recognized the smallness and narrowness of his thoughts and actions. Under the pressure of some task that meant a great deal to him, he learned to see how his smallness, his pettiness endangered his happiness. In other words, a great man knows when and in what way he is a little man. A little man does not know he is little and is afraid to know. He hides his pettiness and narrowness behind illusions of strength and greatness, someone else's strength and greatness. He's proud of his great generals but not of himself. He admires an idea he has not had, not one he has had. The less he understands something, the more firmly he believes in it. And the better he understands an idea, the less he believes in it.
— Wilhelm Reich, Listen, Little Man!
Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.
— Ezra Pound
Dr. Watson's summary list of Sherlock Holmes's strengths and weaknesses:"1. Knowledge of Literature: Nil.2. Knowledge of Philosophy: Nil.3. Knowledge of Astronomy: Nil.4. Knowledge of Politics: Feeble.5. Knowledge of Botany: Variable. Well up in belladonna, opium, and poisons generally. Knows nothing of practical gardening.6. Knowledge of Geology: Practical but limited. Tells at a glance different soils from each other. After walks has shown me splashes upon his trousers, and told me by their colour and consistence in what part of London he had received them.7. Knowledge of Chemistry: Profound.8. Knowledge of Anatomy: Accurate but unsystematic.9. Knowledge of Sensational Literature: Immense. He appears to know every detail of every horror perpetrated in the century.10. Plays the violin well.11. Is an expert singlestick player, boxer, and swordsman.12. Has a good practical knowledge of British law.
— Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet
Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know.
— Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays
What an author doesn't know could fill a book.
— Holly Black, Lucinda's Secret
The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have known since long.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
She said we all not only could know everything. We do. We just tell ourselves we don't to make it all bearable.
— Neil Gaiman, Brief Lives
To light a candle is to cast a shadow...
— Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure — that is all that agnosticism means.
— Clarence Darrow
It is an infantile superstition of the human spirit that virginity would be thought a virtue and not the barrier that separates ignorance from knowledge.
— Voltaire
The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn and change.
— Carl R. Rogers
No one knows anything, really. It's all rented, or borrowed.
— Ian McEwan
The only defense against the world is a thorough knowledge of it.
— John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education
Valuing knowledge above all else results in a lust for power, and that leads men into dark and empty places.
— Veronica Roth, Divergent
She was heartily ashamed of her ignorance - a misplaced shame. Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a well−informed mind is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.
— Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
Habit is the intersection of knowledge (what to do), skill (how to do), and desire (want to do).
— Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change
Knowledge is a better weapon than a sword.
— Patricia Briggs, Raven's Shadow
When learning is purposeful, creativity blossoms. When creativity blossoms, thinking emanates. When thinking emanates, knowledge is fully lit. When knowledge is lit, economy flourishes.
— A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, Indomitable Spirit
Knowledge is a tool, and like all tools, its impact is in the hands of the user.
— Dan Brown, The Lost Symbol
The true birthplace is that wherein for the first time one looks intelligently upon oneself; my first homelands have been books, and to a lesser degree schools.
— Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian
They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretense, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew. Their bearing, which was simply the bearing of commonplace individuals going about their business in the assurance of perfect safety, was offensive to me like the outrageous flauntings of folly in the face of a danger it is unable to comprehend. I had no particular desire to enlighten them, but I had some difficulty in restraining myself from laughing in their faces, so full of stupid importance.
— Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
....a good book can teach you about the world and about yourself. You learn more than how to read better; you also learn more about life. You become wiser. Not just more knowledgeable - books that provide nothing but information can produce that result. But wiser, in the sense that you are more deeply aware of the great and enduring truths of human life.
— Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading
Words define us,' Mom continued, as I struggled to make my clumsy marks look like her elegant script. 'We must protect our knowledge and pass it on whenever we can. If we are ever to become a society again, we must teach others how to remain human.
— Julie Kagawa, The Immortal Rules
Opinion is really the lowest form of human knowledge. It requires no accountability, no understanding. The highest form of knowledge… is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another’s world. It requires profound purpose larger than the self kind of understanding.
— Bill Bullard
Share your knowledge. It is a way to achieve immortality.
— Dalai Lama XIV
I think a lot of psychopaths are just geniuses who drove so fast that they lost control.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation -rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays Including Essays, First & Second Series, English Traits, Nature & Considerations by the Way
New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Breakfast of Champions
We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.
— Richard Feynman
Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.
— Plato
Nobody is smarter than you are. And what if they are? What good is their understanding doing you?
— Terence McKenna
These people have learned not from books, but in the fields, in the wood, on the river bank. Their teachers have been the birds themselves, when they sang to them, the sun when it left a glow of crimson behind it at setting, the very trees, and wild herbs.
— Anton Chekhov
Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.
— Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia
His priority did not seem to be to teach them what he knew, but rather to impress upon them that nothing, not even... knowledge, was foolproof.
— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Beware you be not swallowed up in books! An ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge.
— John Wesley, Letters of John Wesley
Only two kinds of people can attain self-knowledge: those who are not encumbered at all with learning, that is to say, whose minds are not over-crowded with thoughts borrowed from others; and those who, after studying all the scriptures and sciences, have come to realise that they know nothing.
— Ramakrishna, Sayings of Sri Ramakrishna
People think that epilepsy is divine simply because they don't have any idea what causes epilepsy. But I believe that someday we will understand what causes epilepsy, and at that moment, we will cease to believe that it's divine. And so it is with everything in the universe
— Hippocrates
A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.
— Thomas Carlyle
Only a blind man can easily define what light is. When you do not know, you are bold. Ignorance is always bold; knowledge hesitates. And the more you know, the more you feel that the ground underneath is dissolving. The more you know, the more you feel how ignorant you are.
— Osho, The Book of Secrets
And a new philosophy emerged called quantum physics, which suggest that the individual’s function is to inform and be informed. You really exist only when you’re in a field sharing and exchanging information. You create the realities you inhabit.
— Timothy Leary, Chaos & Cyber Culture
Learn to distinguish the difference between errors of knowledge and breaches of morality. An error of knowledge is not a moral flaw, provided you are willing to correct it; only a mystic would judge human beings by the standard of an impossible, automatic omniscience. But a breach of morality is the conscious choice of an action you know to be evil, or a willful evasion of knowledge, a suspension of sight and of thought. That which you do not know, is not a moral charge against you; but that which you refuse to know, is an account of infamy growing in your soul. Make every allowance for errors of knowledge; do not forgive or accept any break of morality.
— Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance.
— Hippocrates
Do not think of knocking out another person's brains because he differs in opinion from you. It would be as rational to knock yourself on the head because you differ from yourself ten years ago.
— Horace Mann
Knowledge is the ultimate weapon. It always has been.
— Jim Butcher, White Night
Meditation is the dissolution of thoughts in Eternal awareness or Pure consciousness without objectification, knowing without thinking, merging finitude in infinity.
— Voltaire
Know what you are talking about.
— John Paul II
I believe in intuition and inspiration. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research.
— Albert Einstein, On Cosmic Religion and Other Opinions and Aphorisms
A teacher who cannot explain any abstract subject to a child does not himself thoroughly understand his subject; if he does not attempt to break down his knowledge to fit the child's mind, he does not understand teaching.
— Fulton J. Sheen, Life Is Worth Living
Either we shall find what it is we are seeking or at least we shall free ourselves from the persuasion that we know what we do not know.
— Plato, The Republic
Anna's eyes soften, and the stubborn tears begin to recede. The way she stands, the way she breathes, I know she wants to come closer. New knowledge fills up the air between us and neither of us wants to breathe it in.
— Kendare Blake, Anna Dressed in Blood
Alas, how terrible is wisdomwhen it brings no profit to the man that's wise!This I knew well, but had forgotten it,else I would not have come here.
— Sophocles, Oedipus Rex
Many much-learned men have no intelligence.
— Democritus
He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
But need alone is not enough to set power free: there must be knowledge.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
I am too much of a skeptic to deny the possibility of anything.
— Thomas Henry Huxley, Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley - Volume 1
We all suffer under a curse, the curse that we know more than we can endure, and there is nothing, absolutely nothing we can do about the force and the lure of this knowledge.
— Anne Rice, Vittorio, The Vampire
Science replaces private prejudice with public, verifiable evidence.
— Richard Dawkins
Are you really surprised by the endurance of religion? What ideology is likely to be more durable than one that conforms, at every turn, to our powers of wishful thinking? Hope is easy; knowledge is hard. Science is the one domain in which we human beings make a truly heroic effort to counter our innate biases and wishful thinking. Science is the one endeavor in which we have developed a refined methodology for separating what a person hopes is true from what he has good reason to believe. The methodology isn't perfect, and the history of science is riddled with abject failures of scientific objectivity. But that is just the point-these have been failures of science, discovered and corrected by-what, religion? No, by good science.
— Sam Harris
Very few beings really seek knowledge in this world. Mortal or immortal, few really ask. On the contrary, they try to wring from the unknown the answers they have already shaped in their own minds -- justifications, confirmations, forms of consolation without which they can't go on. To really ask is to open the door to the whirlwind. The answer may annihilate the question and the questioner.
— Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat
Peace does not mean an absence of conflicts; differences will always be there. Peace means solving these differences through peaceful means; through dialogue, education, knowledge; and through humane ways.
— Dalai Lama XIV
You know, it's pretty easy reading this book to see why I was angry and confused for all those years. I lived my life being told different stories: some true, some lies and I still don't know which is which. Children are born innocent. At birth we are very much like a new hard drive - no viruses, no bad information, no crap that's been downloaded into it yet. It's what we feed into that hard drive, or in my case "head drive" that starts the corruption of the files.
— Nikki Sixx, The Heroin Diaries: A Year In The Life Of A Shattered Rock Star
The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.
— John Berger, Ways of Seeing
The thing that's important to know is that you never know. You're always sort of feeling your way.
— Diane Arbus, Diane Arbus: Revelations
Knowledge, like all things, is best in moderation," intoned the Will. "Knowing everything means you don't need to think, and that is very dangerous.
— Garth Nix, Lady Friday
Ah, child and youth, if you knew the bliss which resides in the taste of knowledge, and the evil and ugliness that lies in ignorance, how well you are advised to not complain of the pain and labor of learning.
— Christine de Pizan, The Treasure of the City of Ladies
When walking alone in a jungle of true darkness, there are three things that can show you the way: instinct to survive, the knowledge of navigation, creative imagination. Without them, you are lost.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
Knowledge is the food of the soul.
— Plato
Of whom and of what can I say: "I know that"! This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction. For if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers. I can sketch one by one all the aspects it is able to assume, all those likewise that have been attributed to it, this upbringing, this origin, this ardor or these silences, this nobility or this vileness. But aspects cannot be added up. This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance the gap will never be filled.
— Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject, and how to avoid them.
— Werner Heisenberg
Opinion is usually something which people have when they lack comprehensive information.
— Idries Shah, Reflections
... there is no shame in not knowing. The problem arises when irrational thought and attendant behavior fill the vacuum left by ignorance.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson, The Sky Is Not the Limit: Adventures of an Urban Astrophysicist
If a person holds no ambitions in this world, he suffers unknowingly. If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.
— Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams
You read a book for the story, for each of its words," Gordy said, "and you draw your cartoons for the story, for each of the words and images. And, yeah, you need to take that seriously, but you should also read and draw because really good books and cartoons give you a boner."I was shocked:"Did you just say books should give me a boner?""Yes, I did.""Are you serious?""Yeah... don't you get excited about books?""I don't think that you're supposed to get THAT excited about books.""You should get a boner! You have to get a boner!" Gordy shouted. "Come on!"We ran into the Reardan High School Library."Look at all these books," he said."There aren't that many," I said. It was a small library in a small high school in a small town."There are three thousand four hundred and twelve books here," Gordy said. "I know that because I counted them.""Okay, now you're officially a freak," I said."Yes, it's a small library. It's a tiny one. But if you read one of these books a day, it would still take you almost ten years to finish.""What's your point?""The world, even the smallest parts of it, is filled with things you don't know."Wow. That was a huge idea.Any town, even one as small as Reardan, was a place of mystery. And that meant Wellpinit, the smaller, Indian town, was also a place of mystery."Okay, so it's like each of these books is a mystery. Every book is a mystery. And if you read all of the books ever written, it's like you've read one giant mystery. And no matter how much you learn, you keep on learning so much more you need to learn.""Yes, yes, yes, yes," Gordy said. "Now doesn't that give you a boner?""I am rock hard," I said.
— Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
I know how you feel," I said. "You run into something you totally don't get, and it's scary as hell. But once you learn something about it, it gets easier to handle. Knowledge counters fear. It always has.
— Jim Butcher, Dead Beat
When you have wisdom that another person knows that he needs, you give it freely. But when the other person doesn't yet know that he needs your wisdom you keep it to yourself. Food only looks good to a hungry man.
— Orson Scott Card, Xenocide
Acquiring knowledge is a form of imitation.
— Jiddu Krishnamurti
Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information on it.
— Samuel Johnson
When we make judgements we're inevitably acting on limited knowledge, isn't it best to ask if we seek to understand, or simply let them be?
— Jay Woodman
If you do not know where you come from, then you don't know where you are, and if you don't know where you are, then you don't know where you're going. And if you don't know where you're going, you're probably going wrong.
— Terry Pratchett, I Shall Wear Midnight
Someone said, 'The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.' Precisely, and they are that which we know.
— T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays
Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.
— C.G. Jung
I can't protect you from knowledge.
— Patricia Briggs, Dragon Bones
The more a man knows, the more willing he is to learn. The less a man knows, the more positive he is that he knows everything...
— Robert G. Ingersoll
I think that knowledge enslaves us, that at the base of all knowledge there is a servility, the acceptation of a way of life wherein each moment has meaning only in relation to another or others that will follow it.
— Georges Bataille, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge
I see... the way you're always searching. How much you hate anything fake or phony. How you're older than your years, but still... playful, like a little girl. How you're always looking into people, or wondering what they see when they look back at you. Your eyes. It's all in the eyes.
— Claudia Gray, A Thousand Pieces of You
Astrology is assured of recognition from psychology, without further restrictions, because astrology represents the summation of all the psychological knowledge of antiquity.
— C.G. Jung
Those who don't know must learn from those who do.
— Plato, The Republic
Qui plussait, plus se tait. French, you know. The more a man knows, the less he talks.
— Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time
What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.
— Bertrand Russell
Darkness feeds on apathy.
— Dan Brown, The Lost Symbol
Human knowledge consists not only of libraries of parchment and ink - it is also comprised of the volumes of knowledge that are written on the human heart, chiselled on the human soul, and engraved on the human psyche. 
— Michael  Jackson
Yeah. Floyd is his batman."His what?"Batman, like in the British army, each officer had a batman, a personal servant."You spend too much time reading, Spenser. You know more stuff that don't make you money than anybody I know.
— Robert B. Parker, Mortal Stakes
Some people still think knowledge is power.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby
I was hugely impressed... was the ultimate example of a man who knew what he didn't know, was perfectly willing to admit it, and didn't want to leave until he understood. That's heroic to me. I wish every grad student had that attitude.
— Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture
Depending on the situation, sometimes you can know a person better in ten minutes than someone you have crossed paths with all your life.
— David Baldacci, The Simple Truth
Everything I need to know... I learned in kindergarten.
— Robert Fulghum, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten
When most of the greatest individuals in history were misunderstood and you've spent so much of your own adult life misunderstood, you can't help but believe that the majority of people know very little worth knowing.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
The soil needs the seed and the seed needs the soil. The one only has meaning with the other. It is the same thing with human beings. When male knowledge joins with female transformation, then the great magical union is created, and its name is wisdom. Wisdom means both to know and to transform.
— Paulo Coelho, Brida
Because a doubt is not a denial. Doubt is a powerful tool, and it should be applied to history.
— Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz
We need learn what we need to learn, know what we need to know, and do what we need to do.
— Thomas S. Monson
...Turn our thoughts, in the next place, to the characters of learned men. The priesthood have, in all ancient nations, nearly monopolized learning. Read over again all the accounts we have of Hindoos, Chaldeans, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Celts, Teutons, we shall find that priests had all the knowledge, and really governed all mankind. Examine Mahometanism, trace Christianity from its first promulgation; knowledge has been almost exclusively confined to the clergy. And, even since the Reformation, when or where has existed a Protestant or dissenting sect who would tolerate a free inquiry? The blackest billingsgate, the most ungentlemanly insolence, the most yahooish brutality is patiently endured, countenanced, propagated, and applauded. But touch a solemn truth in collision with a dogma of a sect, though capable of the clearest proof, and you will soon find you have disturbed a nest, and the hornets will swarm about your legs and hands, and fly into your face and eyes.]
— John  Adams, The Letters of John and Abigail Adams
People are invariably surprised to hear me say I am both an atheist and an agnostic, as if this somehow weakens my certainty. I usually reply with a question like, 'Well, are you a Republican or an American?' The two words serve different concepts and are not mutually exclusive. Agnosticism addresses knowledge; atheism addresses belief. The agnostic says, 'I don't have a knowledge that God exists.' The atheist says, 'I don't have a belief that God exists.' You can say both things at the same time. Some agnostics are atheistic and some are theistic.
— Dan Barker, Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America's Leading Atheists
The more you study, the more you know; how less you know.
— Imran Khan
Knowledge is something which you can use.Belief is something which uses you.
— Idries Shah, Reflections
Knowledge was like candy: you never turned it down, especially if you didn't have to work too hard to get it.
— Robert Liparulo, House of Dark Shadows
Chaos needs no allies, for it dwells like a poison in every one of us.
— Steven Erikson, Midnight Tides
Sometimes you're not ready to give the world quite what it wants. And that's okay, because the Earth is generously patient.
— Jaree Francis
A few nights later, I secretly hope that I might be a genius. Why else can no amount of sleeping pills fell my brain? But in the morning my daughter asks me what a cloud is and I cannot say.
— Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation
Detachment is not the absence of emotion, it is the process of becoming one with the Oneness that is the Universe. To be detached, is to realize that the fullness of all there is, is too much to react to with just one emotion, one thought, or any bias. To be detached, is to acknowledge all, without owning any of it. To be detached, is to summon forth the whole entirety of understanding, to the fragment that is the void.
— Justin K. McFarlane Beau
Those who know nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maxims and Reflections
I set out to discover the why of it, and to transform my pleasure into knowledge.
— Charles Baudelaire
There is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know.
— W.E.B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn
Parents are always more knowledgeable than their children, and children are always smarter than their parents.
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you have lost something.
— George Bernard Shaw, Major Barbara
You remember only what you want to remember. You know only what your heart allows you to know.
— Amy Tan, Saving Fish from Drowning
Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. Books, the oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves of every cottage. They have no cause of their own to plead, but while they enlighten and sustain the reader his common sense will not refuse them. Their authors are a natural and irresistible aristocracy in every society, and, more than kings or emperors, exert an influence on mankind.
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
No one has free will until they are an adult, and by then the choices that were made for them, have already set them on a course that gives limited freedom in the choices to be made.
— J.D. Stroube, Caged in Darkness
We women talk too much, but even then we don't tell half what we know.
— Nancy Astor the Viscountess Astor
The acquisition of knowledge is always of use to the intellect, because it may thus drive out useless things and retain the good. For nothing can be loved or hated unless it is first known.
— Leonardo da Vinci
Each day is an adventure in discovering the meaning of life. It is each little thing that you do that day - whether it be spending time with your friends, running in a cross-country meet or just simply staring at the crashing ocean- that holds the key to discovering the meaning of life. I would rather be out enjoying these things than pondering them. We may never really discover the meaning of life, but the knowledge we gain in our quest to discover it is truly more valuable. 
— Jack Canfield, Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul II
Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns- the ones we don't know we don't know.
— Donald Rumsfeld
Experience is more important than knowledge.
— Santosh Kalwar, Quote Me Everyday
How had this happened? Everyone in the world knew more than us, about everything, and this I hated then found hugely comforting.
— Dave Eggers, You Shall Know Our Velocity!
Those at too great a distance may, I am well are, mistake ignorance for perspective.
— Carl Sagan, Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence
Knowledge is not made for understanding it is made for cutting. 
— Michel Foucault
He felt a spasm of excitement because he knew instinctively who it was, or at least knew who it was he wanted it to be, and once you know what it is you want to be true, instinct is a very useful device for enabling you to know that it is.
— Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
for whenever men are right they are not young
— E.E. Cummings, 22 and 50 Poems
I am blind and limited. I would be a fool think myself wise. And so, not knowing what the universe means, I can only try to be responsible with the knowledge, the strength, and the time given to me. I must be true to my heart.
— Jim Butcher, Death Masks
It is said there are flowers that bloom only once in a hundred years. Why should there not be some that bloom once in a thousand, in ten thousand years? Perhaps we never know about them simply because this "once in a thousand years" has come today.
— Yevgeny Zamyatin, We
Maybe you are already lost and just do not know it.
— Christine Feehan, Dark Demon
If knowledge isn't self-knowledge it isn't doing much, mate. Is the universe expanding? Is it contracting? Is it standing on one leg and singing 'When Father Painted the Parlour'? Leave me out. I can expand my universe without you. 'She walks into beauty, like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies, and all that's best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes.
— Tom Stoppard, Arcadia
He who replies to words of doubtdoth put the light of knowledge out.
— William Blake, Auguries of Innocence
If the ignorance of nature gave birth to such a variety of gods, the knowledge of this nature is calculated to destroy them.
— Paul Henri Thiry d'Holbach, System of Nature
It is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge.
— Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim
My wealth is in my knowledge of self, love, and spirituality.
— Muhammad Ali, The Soul of a Butterfly: Reflections on Life's Journey
But the world is out there, and it understands that the illusion of knowledge and freedom is not the same as the real thing. Eventually it will fade, and there are those who will do whatever it takes to make that happen sooner rather than later.
— Aimee Carter, Pawn
I sold my soul for knowledge of the future, only to have that very pact render me forever ignorant (Gerald Tarrant).
— C.S. Friedman, When True Night Falls
A manager is responsible for the application and performance of knowledge. 
— Peter F. Drucker
Knowledge is power, and the right knowledge lets man perform miraculous, almost godlike tasks.
— Dan Brown, The Lost Symbol
But honestly... I just don't know what anyone's thinking. To me, that's scarier than any half-rotten ghoul trying to eat my flesh.
— Robert Kirkman, The Walking Dead, Compendium 1
And if Amsterdam was hell, and if hell was a memory, then he realized that perhaps there was some purpose to his being lost. Cut off from everything that was familiar to him, unable to discover even a single point of reference, he saw that his steps, by taking him nowhere, were taking him him nowhere but into himself. He was wandering inside himself, and he was lost. Far from troubling him, this state of being lost because a source of happiness, of exhilaration. He breathed it into his very bones. As if on the brink of some previously hidden knowledge, he breathed it into his very bones and said to himself, almost triumphantly: I am lost.
— Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude
The knowledge that he had left me with no intent ever to return had come over me in tiny droplets of realization spread over the years. And each droplet of comprehension brought its own small measure of hurt...He had wished me well in finding my own fate to follow, and I never doubted his sincerity. But it had taken me years to accept that his absence in my life was a deliberate finality, an act he had chosen, a thing completed even as some part of my soul still dangled, waiting for his return.
— Robin Hobb, Fool's Assassin
...I sense that stepping into the light is also a powerful metaphor for consciousness, for the birth of the knowing mind, for the simple and yet momentous coming of the sense of self into the world of the mental.
— António R. Damásio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness
As our circle of knowledge expands, so does the circumference of darkness surrounding it.
— Albert Einstein
Until every soul is freely permitted to investigate every book, and creed, and dogma for itself, the world cannot be free. Mankind will be enslaved until there is mental grandeur enough to allow each man to have his thought and say. This earth will be a paradise when men can, upon all these questions differ, and yet grasp each other's hands as friends. It is amazing to me that a difference of opinion upon subjects that we know nothing with certainty about, should make us hate, persecute, and despise each other. Why a difference of opinion upon predestination, or the trinity, should make people imprison and burn each other seems beyond the comprehension of man; and yet in all countries where Christians have existed, they have destroyed each other to the exact extent of their power. Why should a believer in God hate an atheist? Surely the atheist has not injured God, and surely he is human, capable of joy and pain, and entitled to all the rights of man. Would it not be far better to treat this atheist, at least, as well as he treats us?Christians tell me that they love their enemies, and yet all I ask is—not that they love their enemies, not that they love their friends even, but that they treat those who differ from them, with simple fairness.We do not wish to be forgiven, but we wish Christians to so act that we will not have to forgive them. If all will admit that all have an equal right to think, then the question is forever solved; but as long as organized and powerful churches, pretending to hold the keys of heaven and hell, denounce every person as an outcast and criminal who thinks for himself and denies their authority, the world will be filled with hatred and suffering. To hate man and worship God seems to be the sum of all the creeds.
— Robert G. Ingersoll, Some Mistakes of Moses
For if we're destroyed, the knowledge is dead...We're nothing more than dust jackets for books...so many pages to a person...
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
If you don't know everything, you must go on with what you do know.
— Robert Jordan, A Crown of Swords