c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
If you want to really know something you have to observe or experience it in person; if you claim to know something on the basis of hearsay, or on happening to see it in a book, you'll be a laughingstock to those who really know.
— Jonathan D. Spence, Emperor of China: Self-Portrait of K'ang-Hsi
We dream, we wake on a cold hillside, we pursue the dream again. In the beginning was the dream, and the work of disenchantment never ends.
— Kim Stanley Robinson, Icehenge
Go on, my dear," urges the snake. "Take one. Hear it? 'Pluck me,' it's saying. That big, shiny red one. 'Pluck me, pluck me now and pluck me hard.' You know you wan
— David Mitchell, Ghostwritten
Neglect of mathematics work injury to all knowledge, since he who is ignorant of it cannot know the other sciences or things of this world. And what is worst, those who are thus ignorant are unable to perceive their own ignorance, and so do not seek a remedy.
— Roger Bacon, Mathematics
The ability to withstand the flinch comes with the knowledge that the future will be better than the past.
— Julien Smith, The Flinch
Knowing trees, I came to realize, understand and appreciate the act of patience.
— Ogwo David Emenike
She had discovered that her love of knowing was not unnatural or sinful but the direct consequence of a God-given ability to reason.
— Donna Woolfolk Cross, Pope Joan
I have sent books and music there, and all / Those instruments with which high spirits call / The future from its cradle, and the past / Out of its grave, and make the present last / In thoughts and joys which sleep, but cannot die, / Folded within their own eternity.
— Percy Bysshe Shelley, Poetry and Prose
The greatest challenge that has surreptitiously arisen in our age is the challenge of knowledge, indeed, not as against ignorance; but knowledge as conceived and disseminated throughout the world by Western civilization; knowledge whose nature has become problematic because it has lost its true purpose due to being unjustly conceived, and has thus brought about chaos in man's life instead of, and rather than, peace and justice; knowledge which pretends to be real but which is productive of confusion and scepticism, which has elevated doubt and conjecture to the 'scientific' rank in methodology; knowledge which has, for the first time in history, brought chaos to the Three Kingdom of Nature; the animal, vegetal and mineral.
— Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas, Islam: The Concept of Religion and The Foundation of Ethics and Morality
Politics:Lies about the truth,or the truth about lies?
— Silverwolf
If you ask me what remains to be known in the future, I’ll say, ‘Memorize all the world’s encyclopedias.’ Once you do that, forget all that fancy junk and rake the leaves – else I’m gonna take a stick to you, boy.
— M.C. Humphreys
The purpose of collecting so much information can only be power.
— Nick Drake, Nefertiti: The Book of the Dead
Wandering across the vast room, I stopped at a set of shelves as high as the ceiling, and holding about six hundred volumes - all classics on the history of Soalris, starting with the nine volumes of Giese's monumental and already relatively obsolescent monograph. Display for its own sake was improbable in these surroundings. The collection was a respective tribute to the memory of the pioneers. I took down the massive volumes of Giese and sat leafing through them. Rheya had also located som reading matter. Looking over her shoulder, I saw that she had picked one of the many books brought out by the first expedition, the Interplanetary Cookery Book, which could have been the personal property of Giese himself. She was pouring over the recipes adapted to the arduous conditions of interstellar flight. I said nothing, and returned to the book resting on my knees. Solaris - Ten Years of Exploration had appeared as volumes 4-12 of the Solariana collection whose most recent additions were numbered in the thousands.
— Stanisław Lem, Solaris
When all this is over, people will try to blame the Germans alone, and the Germans will try to blame the Nazis alone, and the Nazis will try to blame Hitler alone. They will make him bear the sins of the world. But it's not true. You suspected what was happening, and so did I. It was already too late over a year ago. I caused a reporter to lose his job because you told me to. He was deported. The day I did that I made my little contribution to civilization, the only one that matters.
— Iain Pears, The Dream of Scipio
You can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completely ignorant of it. A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.
— Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
The propensity to excessive simplification is indeed natural to the mind of man, since it is only by abstraction and generalisation, which necessarily imply the neglect of a multitude of particulars, that he can stretch his puny faculties so as to embrace a minute portion of the illimitable vastness of the universe. But if the propensity is natural and even inevitable, it is nevertheless fraught with peril, since it is apt to narrow and falsify our conception of any subject under investigation. To correct it partially - for to correct it wholly would require an infinite intelligence - we must endeavour to broaden our views by taking account of a wide range of facts and possibilities; and when we have done so to the utmost of our power, we must still remember that from the very nature of things our ideas fall immeasurably short of the reality.
— James George Frazer, The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings, Vol 1. The Golden Bough, Part 1
We must not attach knowledge to the mind, we have to incorporate it there.
— Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays
One might suppose that reality must be held to at all costs. However, though that may be the moral thing to do, it is not necessarily the most useful thing to do. The Greeks themselves chose the ideal over the real in their geometry and demonstrated very well that far more could be achieved by consideration of abstract line and form than by a study of the real lines and forms of the world; the greater understanding achieved through abstraction could be applied most usefully to the very reality that was ignored in the process of gaining knowledge.
— Isaac Asimov
The acquisition of knowledge always involves the revelation of ignorance - almost is the revelation of ignorance. Our knowledge of the world instructs us first of all that the world is greater than our knowledge of it. To those who rejoice in the abundance and intricacy in Creation, this is a source of joy, as it is to those who rejoice in freedom...To those would-be solvers of "the human problem," who hope for knowledge equal to (capable of controlling) the world, it is a source of unremitting defeat and bewilderment. The evidence is overwhelming that knowledge does not solve "the human problem." Indeed, the evidence overwhelmingly suggests - with Genesis - that knowledge is the problem. Or perhaps we should say instead that all our problems tend to gather under two questions about knowledge: Having the ability and desire to know, how and what should we learn? And, having learned, how and for what should we use what we know? (pg. 183, People, Land, and Community)
— Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays
Wilderness gave us knowledge. Wilderness made us human. We came from here. Perhaps that is why so many of us feel a strong bond to this land called Serengeti it is the land of our youth. 
— Boyd Norton, Serengeti: The Eternal Beginning
At present nothing is possible except to extend the area of sanity little by little. We cannot act collectively. We can only spread our knowledge outwards from individual to individual, generation after generation.
— George Orwell, 1984
Ignorance is a knowledge illiteracy.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
The novel was born with the Modern Era, which made man, to quote Heidegger, the "only real subject," the ground for everything. It is largely through the novel that man as an individual was established on the European scene. Away from the novel, in our real lives, we know very little about our parents as they were before our birth; we have only fragmentary knowledge of the people close to us: we see them come and go and scarcely have they vanished than their place is taken over by others: they form a long line of replaceable beings. Only the novel separates out an individual, trains a light on his biography, his ideas, his feelings, makes him irreplaceable: makes him the center of everything.
— Milan Kundera, Encounter
Its a bit mad. Too bad, I mean, that getting to know each just for a fleeting second Must be replaced by unperfect knowledge of the featureless wholeLike some pocket history of the world, so generalAs to constitute a sob or wail
— John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
...knowledge imprisons you. You cannot escape it. What you know you cannot unknow. That's why knowledge is dangerous. Learning will redefine your world, irreversibly.
— Noam Shpancer, The Good Psychologist
In that case, on behalf of Earthlife, I urge that, with full knowledge of our limitations, we vastly increase our knowledge of the Solar System and then begin to settle other worlds.
— Carl Sagan
But there are roughly two sorts of informed people, aren't there? People who start off right by observing the pitfalls and mistakes and going round them, and the people who fall into them and get out and know they're there because of that. They both come to the same conclusions but they don't have quite the same point of view.
— Margery Allingham, Dancers in Mourning
Trivia are not knowledge. Lists of facts don't comprise knowledge. Analyzing, hypothesizing, concluding from data, sharing insights, those comprise knowledge. You can't google for knowledge.
— Elaine Ostrach Chaika
In order to exert influence over people, there were other things that could be used besides love. Knowledge seemed to be an equally strong force, perhaps even stronger. Whoever possessed knowledge not only had power over the changeable passions of people, but also power over their thinking, over their minds, hearts and souls.
— Peter Prange, The Philosopher's Kiss
Whoever possessed knowledge not only had power over the changeable passions of people, but also power over their thinking, over their minds, hearts and souls.
— Peter Prange, The Philosopher's Kiss
New knowledge enhances an ever increasing sense of our own ignorance. The more we know, the more we know we don't know. Feynman called it 'the expanding frontier of ignorance'.
— Matt Baldwin, Snow rising
The phrase ‘popular science’ has in itself a touch of absurdity. That knowledge which is popular is not scientific.
— Maria Mitchell
It is high time for the living to get tough, for toughness is indispensable in the struggle to safeguard and develop the life-force; this will not detract from their goodness, as long as they stand courageously by the truth. There is ground for hope in the fact that among millions of decent, hard-working people there are only a few plague-ridden individuals, who do untold harm by appealing to the dark, dangerous drives of the armored average man and mobilizing him for political murder. There is but one antidote to the average man's predisposition to plague: his own feelings for true life. The life force does not seek power but demands only to play its full and acknowledged part in human affairs. It manifests itself through love, work and knowledge.
— Wilhelm Reich, Listen, Little Man!
Curiosity is a call from knowledge.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
A book is a product of a pact with the Devil that inverts the Faustian contract, he'd told Allie. Dr Faustus sacrificed eternity in return for two dozen years of power; the writer agrees to the ruination of his life, and gains (but only if he's lucky) maybe not eternity, but posterity, at least. Either way (this was Jumpy's point) it's the Devil who wins.
— Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
A nation which expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, expects that which never was and never will be.
— Thomas Jefferson
The more you test him, the slower he will learn and the less he'll want to do. The less you test him, the quicker he will learn and the more he'll want to learn. Knowledge is the most precious gift you can give your child. Give it as generously as you give him food.
— Glenn Doman, How to Teach Your Baby Math
The knowledge that we consider knowledge proves itself in action. What we now mean by knowledge is information in action, information focused on results.
— Peter F. Drucker
Mind of a loving heart is the fountain of knowledge.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
We live in the hope that life will be different. Just a little more substance perhaps in the intrinsic frailty of the days. Such resignation frightens me. Between gunshots I get drunk. In secret, all knowledge becomes anxiety.
— Floriano Martins
One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
Foresight of phenomenon and power over them depend on knowledge of their sequences, and not upon any notion we may have formed respecting their origin or inmost nature.
— John Stuart Mill, Auguste Comte And Positivism
Knowledge was the great thing--not abstract knowledge in which Dr. Forester had been so rich, the theories which lead one enticingly on with their appearance of nobility, of transcendent virtue, but detailed, passionate, trivial human knowledge.
— Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear
Ignorance of the law of irreducibility was no excuse. I could no longer excuse myself with the claim that I didn't know the law -- for knowledge of self and of the world is the law that, even though unattainable, cannot be broken, and no one can excuse himself by saying that he doesn't know it. . . . The renewed originality of the sin is this: I have to carry out my unknowing, I shall be sinning originally against life.
— Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.
There is nothing so minute or inconsiderable that I would not rather know it than not know it.
— Samuel Johnson
The final discovery is the discovery of knowledge.
— Kedar Joshi
They had applied their doubts to the very head that had introduced doubt as a tool for advancing knowledge. And in the end they gave the head a nod.
— Russell Shorto, Descartes' Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason
Amory, sorry for them, was still not sorry for himself - art, politics, religion, whatever his medium should be, he knew he was safe now, free from all hysteria - he could accept what was acceptable, roam, grow, rebel, sleep deep through many nights...There was no God in his heart, he knew; his ideas were still in riot; there was ever the pain of memory; the regret for his lost youth - yet the waters of disillusion had left a deposit on his soul, responsibility and a love of life, the faint stirring of old ambitions and unrealized dreams...And he could not tell why the struggle was worth while, why he had determined to use to the utmost himself and his heritage from the personalities he had passed...He stretched out his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky."I know myself," he cried, "but that is all.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
And so even the righteous heart is besieged by the blinding light of false knowledge. Falsity is like an ocean that presses around solitary moments of truth, treatening to overwhelm or blind the seekers of knowledge, to eradicate them in an instant of self-deceiving brilliance.Knowledge is power; it guards our souls - guard it well.
— C.S. Goto
Nothing good was learnt too swiftly. Knowledge should be a purposeful accumulance of observed experience, applied and tested to the full.
— Jane Borodale, The Book of Fires
We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and there is no learning. There is no learning without having to pose a question. And a question requires doubt. People search for certainty. But there is no certainty. People are terrified — how can you live and not know? It is not odd at all. You only think you know, as a matter of fact. And most of your actions are based on incomplete knowledge and you really don't know what it is all about, or what the purpose of the world is, or know a great deal of other things. It is possible to live and not know.
— Richard Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman
Ignorance, when voluntary, is criminal, and a man may be properly charged with that evil which he neglected or refused to learn how to prevent.
— Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia
Later times have laid all the blame upon the Goths and Vandals, but, however unwilling the partizans of the Christian system may be to believe or to acknowledge it, it is nevertheless true, that the age of ignorance commenced with the Christian system.There was more knowledge in the world before that period, than for many centuries afterwards; and as to religious knowledge, the Christian system, as already said, was only another species of mythology; and the mythology to which it succeeded, was a corruption of an ancient system of theism.; and if we take our stand about the beginning of the sixteenth century, we look back through that long chasm, to the times of the Ancients, as over a vast sandy desert, in which not a shrub appears to intercept the vision to the fertile hills beyond.
— Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason
What is the universe but a lot of wavesAnd a craving desire is a wave…
— Jack Kerouac, Scattered Poems
One of the dumbest things you were ever taught was to write what you know. Because what you know is usually dull. Remember when you first wanted to be a writer? Eight or ten years old, reading about thin-lipped heroes flying over mysterious viny jungles toward untold wonders? That's what you wanted to write about, about what you didn't know. So. What mysterious time and place don't we 
— Ken Kesey
We all grow up with the weight of history on us. Our ancestors dwell in the attics of our brains as they do in the spiraling chains of knowledge hidden in every cell of our bodies.
— Shirley Abbott
The path of light is the quest for knowledge.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Pearls of  Wisdom: Great  mind
The phaenomena afforded by trades, are a part of the history of nature, and therefore may both challenge the naturalist's curiosity and add to his knowledge, Nor will it suffice to justify learned men in the neglect and contempt of this part of natural history, that the men, from whom it must be learned, are illiterate mechanicks... is indeed childish, and too unworthy of a philosopher, to be worthy of an honest answer.
— Robert Boyle
You can’t destroy knowledge. You can stamp it under and burn it up and forbid it to be, but somewhere it will survive.
— Leigh Brackett, The Long Tomorrow
Knowledge may be power, but cake has great bargaining properties
— Julia Seitz
Most often, what I don’t know will have a vastly greater bearing on my life that what I do know.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
Anger has its place, but it will not serve you here, the way of the warrior is the way of knowing. Of that knowledge requires you to use anger, then you use anger, but you cannot wrest forth knowledge by losing your temper.
— Christopher Paolini, Inheritance
A person must earn enlightenment, Eragon. It is not handed down to you by others, regardless of how revered they be.
— Christopher Paolini, Brisingr
Total knowledge is annihilation Of the desire to see, to touch, to feel The world sensed only through senses And immune to the knowledge without feeling.
— Dejan Stojanovic
By the time of the arrival of Islam in the early seventeenth century CE, what we now call the Middle East was divided between the Persian and Byzantine empires. But with the spread of this new religion from Arabia, a powerful empire emerged, and with it a flourishing civilization and a glorious golden age.Given how far back it stretches in time, the history of the region -- and even of Iraq itself -- is too big a canvas for me to paint. Instead, what I hope to do in this book is take on the nonetheless ambitious task of sharing with you a remarkable story; one of an age in which great geniuses pushed the frontiers of knowledge to such an extent that their work shaped civilizations to this day.
— Jim Al-Khalili
...to her all books were the same and, as with her subjects, she felt a duty to approach them without prejudice...Lauren Bacall, Winifred Holtby, Sylvia Plath - who were they? Only be reading could she find out.
— Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader
Pursue knowledge as though it is your life-blood, then you will know greatness!
— Monique Rockliffe
People don't want to know. They have to be made to know. Whether they act on what they know is up to them. But they have to know.
— Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers
Many modern artists, philosophers, and theologians reject the knowledge of the past. Thus they must continually start over again from ground zero, their vision restricted to their own narrow perspectives, making themselves artificially primitive.
— Gene Edward Veith Jr., Loving God with All Your Mind: Thinking as a Christian in a Postmodern World
Collaborations are the black holes of knowledge regimes. They willingly produce nothingness, opulence and ill behavior. And it is their very vacuity that is their strength...It does not entail the transmission of something from those who have to those who do not, but rather the setting in motion of a chain of unforeseen accesses.
— Florian Schneider
Omnipotence and omniscience are the end of power and knowledge.
— Dejan Stojanovic
I would address one general admonition to all, that they consider what are the true ends of knowledge, and that they seek it not either for pleasure of the mind, or for contention, or for superiority to others, or for profit, or for fame, or power, or any of these inferior things, but for the benefit and use of life; and that they perfect and govern it in charity. For it was from lust of power that the Angels fell, from lust of knowledge that man fell, but of charity there can be no excess, neither did angel or man come in danger by it.
— Francis Bacon
Awareness is above intellect.Intellect is above speech. Speech is above knowledge. For knowledge in itself is just a name.
— Gian Kumar
So, your best defense is knowledge. It really is power, as they say...The more you know, the more easily you will develop your own philosophies about child rearing. When you have your facts straight, and when you have a parenting plan, you will be able to respond with confidence to those who are well-meaning but offering contrary or incorrect advice.
— Elizabeth Pantley
They don't understand it. They're not old enough to know the first instinct of irritation should be avoided in order to keep an open mind.
— Amelia Gray, Museum of the Weird
There's no short-cut in life but with right knowledge, you can fast-track things to come to pass.
— Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha
We have not given science too big a place in our education, but we have made a perilous mistake in giving it too great a preponderance in method in every other branch of study.
— Woodrow Wilson
A farmer friend of mine told me recently about a busload of middle school children who came to his farm for a tour. The first two boys off the bus asked, "Where is the salsa tree?" They thought they could go pick salsa, like apples and peaches. Oh my. What do they put on SAT tests to measure this? Does anybody care? How little can a person know about food and still make educated decisions about it? Is this knowledge going to change before they enter the voting booth? Now that's a scary thought.
— Joel Salatin, Folks, This Ain't Normal: A Farmer's Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World
Remember, always, that everything you know, and everything everyone knows, is only a model. Get your model out there where it can be viewed. Invite others to challenge your assumptions and add their own.
— Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer
In my small way, I preserved and catalogued, and dipped into the vast ocean of learning that awaited, knowing all the time that the life of one man was insufficient for even the smallest part of the wonders that lay within. It is cruel that we are granted the desire to know, but denied the time to do so properly. We all die frustrated; it is the greatest lesson we have to learn.
— Iain Pears, An Instance of the Fingerpost
Time after time have nations, ay, and rich and strong nations, learned in the arts, been, and passed away to be forgotten, so that no memory of them remains. This is but one of several; for Time eats up the works of man.
— H. Rider Haggard, She
Farms and food production should be, I submit, at least as important as who pierced their navel in Hollywood this week. Please tell me I'm not the only one who believes this. Please. As a culture, we think we're well educated, but I'm not sure that what we've learned necessarily helps us survive.
— Joel Salatin, Folks, This Ain't Normal: A Farmer's Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World
With words at your disposal, you can see more clearly. Finding the words is another step in learning to see.
— Robin Wall Kimmerer
You have a lot to learn, young man. Philosophy. Theology. Literature. Poetry. Drama. History. Archeology. Anthropology. Mythology. Music. These are your tools as much as brush and pigment. You cannot be an artist until you are civilized. You cannot be civilized until you learn. To be civilized is to know where you belong in the continuum of our art and your world. To surmount the past, you must know the past.
— John Logan
For you see, when us people who know run into each other that's an event. It almost never happens. Sometimes we meet each other and neither guesses that the other is one who knows. That's a bad thing. It's happened to me a lot of times. But you see there are so few of us.
— Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
...I like stories very much,” the priest said. “They help me understand myself better.
— Simon Van Booy, Love Begins in Winter: Five Stories
Foolish men always believe that a little knowledge will give them control over the world, but it is no more than a display of their vanity.
— J. P. Vinluca, Aiko and the Dragon
We feel that, for the honour of God (and also, though we do not say this, for the sake of our own reputation as spiritual Christians), it is necessary for us to claim that we are, so to speak, already in the signal-box, here and now enjoying the inside information as to the why and wherefore of God’s doings. This comforting pretence becomes part of us: we feel sure that God has enabled us to understand all His ways with us and our circle thus far, and we take if for granted that we shall be able to see at once the reason for anything that may happen to us in the future. And then something very painful and quite inexplicable comes along, and our cheerful illusion of being in God’s secret councils is shattered. Our pride is wounded; we feel that God has slighted us; and unless at this point we repent, and humble ourselves very thoroughly for our former presumption, our whole subsequent spriritual life may be blighted.
— J.I. Packer, Knowing God
While we can learn or study techniques for almost anything we might want to accomplish, real understanding is not the mere accumulation of knowledge. Understanding cannot be realized by listening or reading about the realization of others. It must be achieved firsthand via substantive, direct perception in the moment.
— H.E. Davey, Japanese Yoga: The Way of Dynamic Meditation
Maybe knowledge is as fundamental, or even more fundamental than [material] reality.
— Anton Zeilinger
So we couldn't mingle with them, but we could eavesdrop. We got our knowledge that way--we caught it like germs.
— Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood
I thought that to get to know a desert it was enough to have been there. I thought that to have seen the dogs dying along the Cholula road, or to have seen the eyes of the lepers at Chiengmai gave me the right to talk about it. To have seen! To have been there! Rubbish! The world is not a book, it proves nothing. The spaces one has crossed were dark corridors with closed doors. The faces of the women to whom one gave oneself up completely: did they speak for anyone but themselves? The cities of man are secret. One walks along their streets, one sees them shine under one's feet, but one is not there, one never enters them. The dusty fields inhabited by people who are hungry, who wait patiently, are paradises of luxury and nourishment; shining at a vast distance from intelligence, at a vast distance from reason. They are not to be subjugated.
— Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio, The Book of Flights
Information is what you put in empty heads to keep them empty.
— Marty Rubin
There is no quarrel between science and spirituality. I often hear people of science trying to use it to prove the nonexistence of the spiritual, but I simply can't see a chasm in between the two. What is spiritual produces what is scientific and when science is used to disprove the spiritual, it's always done with the intent to do so; a personal contempt. As a result, scientists today only prove their inferiority to the great founding fathers of the sciences who were practitioners of alchemy. Today's science is washed-out and scrubbed-down and robbed of everything mystical and spiritual, a knowledge born of contempt and discontent. Or perhaps, there are a few who wish to keep those secrets to themselves and serve everyone else up with a tasteless version of science and the idiots of today blindly follow their equally blind leaders.
— C. JoyBell C.
Every other knowledge is harmful to him who does not have knowledge of goodness.
— Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays
Science is often misrepresented as ‘the body of knowledge acquired by performing replicated controlled experiments in the laboratory.’ Actually, science is something broader: the acquisition of reliable knowledge about the world.
— Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
There is no arguing with the pretenders to a divine knowledge and to a divine mission. They are possessed with the sin of pride. They have yielded to the perennial temptation.
— Walter Lippmann
The computer focuses ruthlessly on things that can be represented in numbers. In so doing, it seduces people into thinking that other aspects of knowledge are either unreal or unimportant. The computer treats reason as an instrument for achieving things, not for contemplating things. It narrows dramatically what we know and intended by reason.
— George Friedman, The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century
In mysticism, knowledge cannot be separated from a certain way of life which becomes its living manifestation. To acquire mystical knowledge means to undergo a transformation; one could even say that the knowledge is the transformation. Scientific knowledge, on the other hand, can often stay abstract and theoretical. Thus most of today’s physicists do not seem to realize the philosophical, cultural and spiritual implications of their theories.
— Lois McMaster Bujold, The Curse of Chalion
Continued observations in clinical psychological practice lead almost inevitably to the conclusion that deeper and more fundamental than sexuality, deeper than the craving for social power, deeper even than the desire for possessions, there is a still more generalized and universal craving in the human make-up. It is the craving for knowledge of the right direction - for orientation.
— William Sheldon
Nothing is born of nothing, least of all knowledge, modernity, or enlightened thought; progress is made in tiny surges, in successive laps, like an endless relay race. But there are links without which nothing would be passed on, and for that reason, they deserve the gratitude of all who benefited from them.
— Amin Maalouf, Orígenes
Accepting the reality of change gives rise to equanimity.
— Allan Lokos, Pocket Peace: Effective Practices for Enlightened Living
To be too knowing is a downfall.
— Laura Linney
Flame is not the only fire.” Her tone turned almost stern. “You have brought your folk another spark far greater than any flame. You have opened their eyes to the world, Aljan, shown them lands and peoples formerly beyond their ken. You have whistled them out of their cramped, closed, inward-facing ring and led them into my Dance, the Great Circle and Cycle encompassing all. <…> Nay, flame has not been the greatest of my gifts to you. Knowledge, Aljan, that even now remakes the world. Knowledge is the fire.
— Meredith Ann Pierce, The Son of Summer Stars
Nothing is more beautiful than to know all.
— Athanasius Kircher
Whereas a novice makes moves until he gets checkmated (proof), a Grand Master realizes 20 moves in advance that it’s futile to continue playing (conceptualizing).
— Bill Gaede
The acquisition of a book signalled not just the potential acquisition of knowledge but also something like the property rights to a piece of ground: the knowledge became a visitable place.
— James    Wood
One might have said that reason made him flee from reason.
— André Maurois, Disraeli: A Picture of the Victorian Age
But nothing in India is identifiable, the mere asking of a question causes it to disappear and merge into something else.
— E.M. Forster
Each language is a unique repository of facts and knowledge about the world that we can ill afford to lose, or, at the least, facts and knowledge about some history and people that have their place in the understanding of mankind. Every language is a treasury of human experience. Eyak doesn't give a damn about tenses. But it sure does give a damn about other things, much more than I do. Therefore it broadens your thinking, enriches your ability to understand the world- to deal with reality and experience.
— Michael E. Krauss
I’ve learned one thing-people who know the least anyways seem to know it the loudest.
— Al Capp
A man of logic is a man of sin.
— Mike  Norton
In an age when mass pleasures like television are becoming more feeble and homogeneous, the very act of discrimination becomes a form of protest. At a time when mass marketing of food produces a product so disgusting that it has to be wrapped in distracting gimmicks to be sold, the mere fact of paying attention to what you eat and drink and telling the truth about taste is a revolutionary act.
— Lynn Hoffman
The worn soles of Daffy's boots skidded on the icy stones. He'd been saving up for a new pair for Christmas, but then he'd come across an encyclopaedia in ten volumes, going cheap. Boots might last ten years, at best, but knowledge was eternal.
— Emma Donoghue, Slammerkin
But it was Aldo’s pen that became his most forceful tool. He started a newsletter for rangers called the Carson Pine Cone. Aldo used it to “scatter seeds of knowledge, encouragement, and enthusiasm.” Most of the Pine Cone’s articles, poems, jokes, editorials, and drawings were Aldo’s own. His readers soon realized that the forest animals were as important to him as the trees. His goal was to bring back the “flavor of the wilds.
— Marybeth Lorbiecki, Things, Natural, Wild, and Free: The Life of Aldo Leapold
There were long stretches of DNA in between genes that didn't seem to be doing very much; some even referred to these as "junk DNA," though a certain amount of hubris was required for anyone to call any part of the genome "junk," given our level of ignorance.
— Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief
Wolf's wool is the best wool, but it cannot be sheared, because the wolf will not comply. With knowledge as with wolves' surliness, the student studies voluntarily, refusing to be less than individual. He "gives his opinion and then rests upon it"; he renders service when there is no reward, and is too reclusive for some things to seem to touch him; not because he has no feeling but because he has so much.
— Marianne Moore, Complete Poems
knowledge without application is like a book that is never read' Christopher Crawford, Hemel Hempstead.
— Christopher Crawford
Sharing will enrich everyone with more knowledge.
— Ana Monnar
Books whose topics I thoroughy depsise are accapteble because they often force the reader to think and to examine his own beliefs. In an age where most people are either blindly obedient or radical, exposing oneself to the ideas contained in even the most controversial of books is a good thing.
— Tiffini Johnson, The Character
Certainty is the most vivid condition of ignorance and the most necessarycondition for knowledge.
— Kedar Joshi
As the Promethean fire which banished Darkness, so Knowledge bears the Power and the Light.
— Leanna Renee Hieber, The Strangely Beautiful Tale of Miss Percy Parker
As outsiders looking in, my readers and I must reform how we think so we may open ourselves to new forms of knowledge.
— Cristina Marrero
You believe me wise because I taught you once, but I have not been north, as you have. You have seen (what) I have never seen...You flatter me by asking my opinion.
— Gene Wolfe, The Citadel of the Autarch
[Photography] allows me to accede to an infra-knowledge; it supplies me with a collection of partial objects and can flatter a certain fetishism of mine: for this 'me' which like knowledge, which nourishes a kind of amorous preference for it. In the same way, I like certain biographical features which, in a writer's life, delight me as much as certain photographs; I have called these features 'biographemes'; Photography has the same relation to History that the biographeme has to biography.
— Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
The English novels are the only relaxation of the intellectually unemployed. But one should not be too severe on them. They show a want of knowledge that must be the result of years of study.
— Oscar Wilde
Ideas were found by the freethinker, expressed by poet with the new words,formulated by scholar into knowledge.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
But God caused knowledge to be given to Adam and those with him, so that the kings of chaos and the underworld might not lord it over them." [--Jesus]
— Rodolphe Kasser, The Gospel of Judas Together with the Letter of Peter to Phillip, James, and a Book of Allogenes from Codex Tchacos
I suppose it was a dream that lasted really about fifty years. By the time universal education had begun to work properly, say 1925, and the time the first teachers started to hold back information, say 1975. So a fifty-year dream.""I think what's happened is that because they themselves know less than their predecessors, innovators and leaders today have remade the world in their own image. Spellchecks. Search engines. They've remodeled the world so that ignorance is not really a disadvantage. And I should think that increasingly they'll carry on reshaping the world to accommodate a net loss of knowledge.
— Sebastian Faulks, A Week in December
Fear of God is a beginning of knowledge.The fear lessened on a higher knowledge.Walk with God is on the top of knowledge.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
But the main reason you should read this is that I don't see why I should have to know all these terrible, terrible things and you should get off scot free.
— David Strorm, How Animals Have Sex: A Guide to the Reproductive Habits of Creatures Great and Small
Knowledge is a social construct, a consensus among the members of a community of knowledgeable peers.
— Kenneth A. Bruffee, Collaborative Learning: Higher Education, Interdependence, and the Authority of Knowledge
The knowledge of the Universe is not secret, but is placed in the heart of every grandma and grandpa who have nothing and yet give everything to their grandchildren, in the eyes of every mother holding her baby close to her heart, in the spirit of every father holding the hand of his child walking for the first time.
— Dragos Bratasanu, Ph.D.
People who just float around in life without any direction will tell you that your dreams are not possible. Their knowledge is the perfect mirror of their results. Logic makes perfect sense.
— Dragos Bratasanu, Ph.D.
You cannot do anything with knowledge unless you know where it stops, and the costs of using it.
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Knowledge alone benefits no one unless the person acquiring it does something with it. And great ideas are worthless unless they are implemented.
— Brian P. Morgan
Every penny NOT spent on investing in yourself (after basic needs of course) may be a wasted future opportunity from missing learns and connects.
— Richie Norton
Knowing without loving is frankly dangerous for the soul and for society. You'll critique most everything you encounter and even have the hubris to call this mode of reflexive cynicism "thinking" (whereas it's really your ego's narcissistic reaction to the moment). You'll position things to quickly as inferior or superior, "with me" or "against me," and most of the time you'll be wrong.
— Richard Rohr, The Divine Dance: The Trinity and Your Transformation
I wish you were small again, so I could hold you in my arms and comfort you. But you are grown, and you know that for some things there is no comfort.
— Patricia A. McKillip, The Forgotten Beasts of Eld
What matters is not the facts but how you discover and think about them.
— Richard Dawkins, Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist
Knowledge is just a foundation. The whole point of a foundation is to build on it.
— Marty Rubin
It is more important that we listen to others than to always be speaking, for in that way we learn what there is to know. We should be easy to talk to, and grateful for new information.
— Wu Wei, I Ching Wisdom: More Guidance from the Book of Answers
The greatest knowledge ever created is the one created when one is challenged or criticized by his/her subordinate. Creativity lies in challenges and criticisms .
— Adewale Osunsakin, Time To Awake Christian Magazine
Knowing leads to caring.
— Shaun David Hutchinson, The Five Stages of Andrew Brawley
Before you assume, learn. Before you judge, understand. Before you hurt, feel. Before you say, think.
— Unknown
…the more things you know, or pretend to know, the more powerful you are. It doesn’t matter if things are true. What counts, remember, is to possess a secret.
— Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum
For it is not needful, to use a common proverb, that one should drink up the ocean who wishes to learn that its water is salt.
— Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies 2
Knowledge accumulated and lived inside of you. He wasn’t sure how it happened, but if you had the pieces of a puzzle in your mind, they would eventually drift close enough to fit together. It had happened too many times for him to doubt it. The answer always came. You just had to be able to recognise when it did. And then you had to figure out what to do with it. In some cases, it might come and go without you even noticing.
— V Moody
What should be boundless is one's love of life, not one's love of art or knowledge.
— Marty Rubin
[A]ll knowledge goes through both stages, the annunciation out of noise into fact, and the disintegration back into noise again. The process involved was the making of increasingly finer distinctions. The outcome was an endless series of theoretical catastrophes.
— James Blish, A Case of Conscience
Now there are four chief obstacles in grasping truth, which hinder every man, however learned, and scarcely allow anyone to win a clear title to learning, namely, submission to faulty and unworthy authority, influence of custom, popular prejudice, and concealment of our own ignorance accompanied by an ostentatious display of our knowledge.
— Roger Bacon, The Opus Majus of Roger Bacon
Science is thus a paradigm for how we ought to gain knowledge—not the particular methods or institutions of science but its value system, namely to seek to explain the world, to evaluate candidate explanations objectively, and to be cognizant of the tentativeness and uncertainty of our understanding at any time.
— Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
The most powerful affirmation doesn’t come from the conscious mind but from your Soul, an affirmation in which you are not trying to convince yourself of something you don’t believe, but rather you are becoming aware of the truth and the reality of what you truly are.
— Dragos Bratasanu, Ph.D.
A short while ago I foolishly thought I could learn everything - all the knowledge in the world. Now I hope only to be able to know of its existence, and to understand one grain of it.
— Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon
We can only transform our lives by renewal of mind via renewed knowledge.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Every novel which is truly written contributes to the total of knowledge which is there at the disposal of the next writer who comes, but the next writer must pay, always, a certain nominal percentage in experience to be able to understand and assimilate what is available as his birthright and what he must, in turn, take his departure from. If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing. A writer who appreciates the seriousness of writing so little that he is anxious to make people see he is formally educated, cultured or well-bred is merely a popinjay. And this too remember; a serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.
— Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon
Uthlubul ilma walau bisshin,” meaning, “Seek knowledge, even if it’s as far as China.” -17
— Ahmad Fuadi, Negeri 5 Menara
How lucky are you as seekers of knowledge because God will ease your way into heaven, angels will spread their wings for you, even the inhabitants of the heart and sky, down to the whales beneath the sea, will ask mercy for those who have knowledege...” -48
— Ahmad Fuadi, Negeri 5 Menara
knowledge is like nur, a ray of light. And light cannot come and be in a dark place. Because of that, clean your hearts and your minds, so that light can come, touch, and brighten your soul,” -178
— Ahmad Fuadi, Negeri 5 Menara
Uthlubul ilma minal mahdi ila lahdi. Seek knowledge from the cradle to the grave. -178
— Ahmad Fuadi, Negeri 5 Menara
B E H A V I O U R is Sometimes greater than knowledge, because in Life there are many situations where knowledge fails..but ..Behaviour can handle E V E R Y T H I N G.
— viral panchal
When Socrates said he knew nothing he still thought he knew more than anyone else.
— Marty Rubin
Given the opportunity of 'Earth-School' enrollment - some are humble enough to learn and grow, stubborn enough to fail and repeat, and wise enough to graduate and never return.
— T.F. Hodge, From Within I Rise: Spiritual Triumph Over Death and Conscious Encounters with "The Divine Presence"
Knowledge perpetuates luck and luck perpetuates knowledge
— Zakhaddin Khalidov
The only good knowledge is the knowledge of God.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Look how far we have come;then the fight was to save the libraries, to save knowledge and today the fight is to save the weapons, to save power.
— Mahrukh
People should know, only what they need to know.
— Amy Rachiele, Mobster's Angel
Ignorance is the darkest depths.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
People suffering from insecurity and intellectual deficiency thrive on constant vilification rarely engaging in a communication based on sound reasoning. 
— Amitav Chowdhury
The people of the light, loves the light of knowledge.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
What do I know about life? What does a windmill know about the wind?
— Marty Rubin
A man has only so much knowledge as he puts to work.
— Francis of Assisi
This ignorance of what to do with time is the number one reason why people get bored so easily when alone with nothing to do.
— Sunday Adelaja, How To Become Great Through Time Conversion: Are you wasting time, spending time or investing time?
The world gives a way to the man who knows where he is going.
— Sunday Adelaja, How To Become Great Through Time Conversion: Are you wasting time, spending time or investing time?