Motivational Quotes

Knowledge

Knowledge always demands increase; it is like fire, which must first be kindled by some external agent, but will afterwards always propagate itself.

- Johnson, Samuel

Best Quotes about Knowledge

To know oneself, one should assert oneself. Psychology is action, not thinking about oneself. We continue to shape our personality all our life. If we knew ourselves perfectly, we should die.

Camus, Albert

We are in fact convinced that if we are ever to have pure knowledge of anything, we must get rid of the body and contemplate things by themselves with the soul by itself. It seems, to judge from the argument, that the wisdom which we desire and upon which we profess to have set our hearts will be attainable only when we are dead and not in our lifetime.

Socrates

It is what we think we know already that often prevents us from learning.

Bernard, Claude

I know myself as a human entity; the scene, so to speak, or thoughts are affection; and am sensible of certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another. However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is no part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you.

Thoreau, Henry David

He knows the universe and does not know himself.

La Fontaine, Jean De

Know, first, who you are, and then adorn yourself accordingly.

Epictetus

Our treasure lies in the beehive of our knowledge. We are perpetually on the way thither, being by nature winged insects and honey gatherers of the mind.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil. For the matter itself is only a deposit, a stratum, which yields only to the most meticulous examination what constitutes the real treasure hidden within the earth: the images, severed from all earlier associations, that stand --like precious fragments or torsos in a collector's gallery --in the prosaic rooms of our later understanding.

Benjamin, Walter

Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes.

Drucker, Peter F.

10.

There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge available to us: observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination. Our observation of nature must be diligent, our reflection profound, and our experiments exact. We rarely see these three means combined; and for this reason, creative geniuses are not common.

Diderot, Denis

11.

Vague and mysterious forms of speech, and abuse of language, have so long passed for mysteries of science; and hard or misapplied words with little or no meaning have, by prescription, such a right to be mistaken for deep learning and height of speculation, that it will not be easy to persuade either those who speak or those who hear them, that they are but the covers of ignorance and hindrance of true knowledge.

Locke, John

12.

Knowledge must come through action; you can have no test which is not fanciful, save by trial.

Sophocles

13.

Mankind have a great aversion to intellectual labor; but even supposing knowledge to be easily attainable, more people would be content to be ignorant than would take even a little trouble to acquire it.

Samuel Johnson

14.

A man can only attain knowledge with the help of those who possess it. This must be understood from the very beginning. One must learn from him who knows.

Gurdjieff, George

15.

I honestly believe it is better to know nothing than to know what ain't so.

Billings, Josh

16.

One secures the gold of the spirit when he finds himself.

Bristol, Claude M.

17.

God grant that not only the love of liberty but a thorough knowledge of the rights of man may pervade all the nations of the earth, so that a philosopher may set his foot anywhere on its surface and say: This is my country!

Franklin, Benjamin

18.

Knowledge is the small part of ignorance that we arrange and classify.

Bierce, Ambrose

19.

Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorized in a new production: in both cases, the goal is exchange. Knowledge ceases to be an end in itself, it loses its use-value.

Lyotard, Jean Francois

20.

The degree of one's emotions varies inversely with one's knowledge of the facts- the less you know the hotter you get.

Russell, Bertrand

21.

Sin, guilt, neurosis --they are one and the same, the fruit of the tree of knowledge.

Miller, Henry

22.

To me the charm of an encyclopedia is that it knows and I needn't.

Brown, Francis Yeats

23.

It's a dangerous thing to think we know everything.

Kuehler, Jack

24.

Oh how fine it is to know a thing or two!

Moliere

25.

Many people think of knowledge as money, They would like knowledge, but do not want to face the perseverance and self-denial that goes into the acquisition of it.

Morely, John

26.

Knowledge is like money: the more he gets, the more he craves.

Billings, Josh

27.

Inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that is where I renew my springs that never dry up.

Buck, Pearl S.

28.

You have to believe in God before you can say there are things that man was not meant to know. I don't think there's anything man wasn't meant to know. There are just some stupid things that people shouldn't do.

Cronenberg, David

29.

To know yourself you have only to set down a true statement of those that ever loved or hated you.

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

30.

'Tis not need we know our every thought or see the work shop where each mask is wrought wherefrom we view the world of box and pit, careless of wear, just so the mask shall fit and serve our jape's turn for a night or two.

Pound, Ezra

31.

Those who think they know it all are very annoying to those of us who do.

Mueller, Robert K.

32.

Become aware of internal, subjective, sub-verbal experiences, so that these experiences can be brought into the world of abstraction, of conversation, of naming, etc. with the consequence that it immediately becomes possible for a certain amount of control to be exerted over these hitherto unconscious and uncontrollable processes.

Maslow, Abraham H.

33.

Knowledge is ancient error reflecting on its youth.

Picabia, Francis

34.

Knowledge is power. Rather, knowledge is happiness, because to have knowledge -- broad, deep knowledge -- is to know true ends from false, and lofty things from low. To know the thoughts and deeds that have marked man's progress is to feel the great heartthrobs of humanity through the centuries; and if one does not feel in these pulsations a heavenward striving, one must indeed be deaf to the harmonies of life.

Keller, Helen

35.

What's scary in life is not what people know (or don't know), but what they know that ain't so.

Paige, Leroy ''Satchel''

36.

Man is distinguished, not only by his reason; but also by this singular passion from other animals... which is a lust of the mind, that by a perseverance of delight in the continual and indefatigable generation of knowledge, exceeds the short vehemence of any carnal pleasure.

Hobbes, Thomas

37.

Knowledge is not a passion from without the mind, but an active exertion of the inward strength, vigor and power of the mind, displaying itself from within.

Cudworth, Ralph J.

38.

You can live a lifetime and at the end, know more about other people than you know about yourself.

Markham, Beryl

39.

The greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorance unfolds.

Kennedy, John F.

40.

Every man gets a narrower and narrower field of knowledge in which he must be an expert in order to compete with other people. The specialist knows more and more about less and less and finally knows everything about nothing.

Lorenz, Konrad

41.

I wish I knew what I know now before.

Stewart, Rod

42.

Knowledge is the most democratic source of power.

Toffler, Alvin

43.

We own almost all our knowledge not to those who have agreed but to those who have differed.

Colton, Charles Caleb

44.

One thing only I know, and that is that I know nothing.

Socrates

45.

The self-explorer, whether he wants to or not, becomes the explorer of everything else. He learns to see himself, but suddenly, provided he was honest, all the rest appears, and it is as rich as he was, and, as a final crowning, richer.

Canetti, Elias

46.

Know thyself? If I knew myself I would run away.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

47.

I have tried to know absolutely nothing about a great many things, and I have succeeded fairly well.

Benchley, Robert

48.

A little knowledge that acts is worth infinitely more than much knowledge that is idle.

Gibran, Kahlil

49.

You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing -- that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.

Richard Feynman

50.

The knower and the known are one. Simple people imagine that they should see God as if he stood there and they here. This is not so. God and I, we are one in knowledge.

Eckhart, Meister