Quotes about knowledge

How do you know so much about everything? was asked of a very wise and intelligent man; and the answer was By never being afraid or ashamed to ask questions as to anything of which I was ignorant.

— John Abbott

I find that a great part of the information I have, was acquired by looking up something and finding something else on the way.

— Franklin P. Adams

Knowledge is that which, next to virtue, truly raises one person above another.

— Joseph Addison

Man knows more than he understands.

— Alfred Adler

Real knowledge, like everything else of value, is not to be obtained easily. It must be worked for, studied for, thought for, and, more that all, must be prayed for.

— Thomas Arnold

Be curious always! For knowledge will not acquire you: you must acquire it.

— Sudie Back

Knowledge is power.

— Francis Bacon

Knowledge and human power are synonymous.

— Francis Bacon

Knowledge is power, but enthusiasm pulls the switch.

— Ivern Ball

I think knowing what you cannot do is more important than knowing what you can.

— Lucille Ball

Knowledge is the best eraser in the world for disharmony, distrust, despair, and the endless physical deficiencies of man.

— Orlando A. Battista

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

— Robert Benchley

It is not good to know more unless we do more with what we already know.

— R. K. Bergethon

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

— Claude Bernard

Better indeed is knowledge than mechanical practice. Better than knowledge is meditation. But better still is surrender of attachment to results, because there follows immediate peace.

— Bhagavad Gita

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction. [King Solomon]

— Bible

And you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free. [John 8:32]

— Bible

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

— Ambrose Bierce

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

— Josh Billings

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

— Josh Billings

The trouble with most folks ain't so much their ignorance as knowing so many things that ain't so.

— Josh Billings

The shortest and surest way of arriving at real knowledge is to unlearn the lessons we have been taught, to mount the first principles, and take nobody's word about them.

— Henry Bolingbroke

Some people drink deeply from the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.

— Grant M. Bright

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

— Francis Yeats Brown

To know the right means of getting something done is virtually to have done it.

— Mark Caine

Never mistake knowledge for wisdom. One helps you make a living; the other helps you make a life.

— Sandara Carey

I think I could, if I only knew how to begin. For, you see, so many out-of-the-way things had happened lately that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible.

— Lewis Carroll

There's a theory, one I find persuasive, that the quest for knowledge is, at bottom, the search for the answer to the question: Where was I before I was born. In the beginning was what? Perhaps, in the beginning, there was a curious room, a room like this one, crammed with wonders; and now the room and all it contains are forbidden you, although it was made just for you, had been prepared for you since time began, and you will spend all your life trying to remember it.

— Angela Carter

A man of knowledge lives by acting, not by thinking about acting.

— Carlos Castaneda

It is not the quantity but the quality of knowledge which determines the mind's dignity.

— William Ellery Channing

Knowledge may give weight, but accomplishments give luster, and many more people see than weigh.

— Lord Chesterfield

Knowledge of the world in only to be acquired in the world, and not in a closet.

— Lord Chesterfield

Learning is acquired by reading books, but the much more necessary learning, the knowledge of the world, is only to be acquired by reading men, and studying all the various facets of them.

— Lord Chesterfield

One may understand the Cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

If you have knowledge, let others light their candles with it.

— Winston Churchill

Knowledge which is divorced from justice, may be called cunning rather than wisdom.

— Marcus T. Cicero

To despise our own species is the price we must often pay for knowledge of it.

— Charles Caleb Colton

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

— Charles Caleb Colton

Each department of knowledge passes through three stages. The theoretic stage; the theological stage and the metaphysical or abstract stage.

— Auguste Comte

Acquire new knowledge whilst thinking over the old, and you may become a teacher of others.

— Confucius

To know is to know that you know nothing. That is the meaning of true knowledge.

— Confucius

The essence of knowledge is, having it, to apply it; not having it, to confess your ignorance.

— Confucius

When you know a thing, to hold that you know it; and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it--this is knowledge.

— Confucius

You can't know too much, but you can say too much.

— Calvin Coolidge

Knowledge, a rude unprofitable mass, the mere materials with which wisdom builds, till smoothed and squared and fitted to its place, does but encumber whom it seems to enrich. Knowledge is proud that he has learned so much; wisdom is humble that he knows no more.

— William Cowper

Knowledge is proud that it knows so much; Wisdom is humble that it knows no more.

— William Cowper

To know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody.

— Quentin Crisp

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.

— David Cronenberg

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.

— Ralph J. Cudworth

Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.

— E.E. (Edward. E.) Cummings

Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things.

— Edgar Degas

Search not to find things too deeply hid; Nor try to know things whose knowledge is forbid.

— Sir John Denham

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.

— Denis Diderot

Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.

— Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Today knowledge has power. It controls access to opportunity and advancement.

— Peter F. Drucker

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

— Peter F. Drucker

Knowledge is the eye of desire and can become the pilot of the soul.

— William J. Durant

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.

— Meister Eckhart

We don't know one-millionth of one percent about anything.

— Thomas A. Edison

During the last century, and part of the one before, it was widely held that there was an unreconcilable conflict between knowledge and belief.

— Albert Einstein

Knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be.

— Albert Einstein

Of a truth, Knowledge is power, but it is a power reined by scruple, having a conscience of what must be and what may be; whereas Ignorance is a blind giant who, let him but wax unbound, would make it a sport to seize the pillars that hold up the long-wrought fabric of human good, and turn all the places of joy as dark as a buried Babylon.

— George Eliot

I would have the studies elective. Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge. The wise instructor accomplishes this by opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for himself. The marking is a system for schools, not for the college; for boys, not for men; and it is an ungracious work to put on a professor.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Knowledge is the only elegance.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Knowledge comes by eyes always open and working hands; and there is no knowledge that is not power.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

— Epictetus

It is impossible to begin to learn that which one thinks one already knows.

— Epictetus

The mark of a well educated person is not necessarily in knowing all the answers, but in knowing where to find them.

— Douglas Everett

Knowledge, without common sense, says Lee, is folly; without method, it is waste; without kindness, it is fanaticism; without religion, it is death. But with common sense, it is wisdom with method, it is power; with clarity, it is beneficence; with religion, it is virtue, and life, and peace.

— Austin Farrar

Knowledge is a process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification.

— Martin H. Fischer

For lust of knowing what should not be known, we take the Golden Road to Samarkand.

— James Elroy Flecker

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!

— Benjamin Franklin

Proclaim not all thou knowest, all thou knowest, all thou hast, nor all thou cans't.

— Benjamin Franklin

It seems to me that man is made to act rather than to know: the principles of things escape our most persevering researches.

— (Frederick II) Frederick The Great

Knowledge is a treasure, but practice is the key to it.

— Thomas Fuller

To succeed in business, to reach the top, an individual must know all it is possible to know about that business.

— J. Paul Getty

Perplexity is the beginning of knowledge.

— Kahlil Gibran

No man can reveal to you nothing but that which already lies half-asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.

— Kahlil Gibran

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

— Kahlil Gibran

Know thyself. A maxim as pernicious as it is ugly. Whoever studies himself arrest his own development. A caterpillar who seeks to know himself would never become a butterfly.

— Andre Gide

He knows so little and knows it so fluently.

— Ellen Glasgow

The greater the knowledge, the greater the doubt.

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

What is not fully understood is not possessed.

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Never by reflection, but only by doing is self-knowledge possible to one.

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

True knowledge lies in knowing how to live.

— Baltasar Gracian

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.

— George Gurdjieff

All knowledge is ambiguous.

— J. S. Habgood

Seldom if ever was knowledge given to keep, but always to impart. The grace of this rich jewel is lost in concealment.

— Bishop Hall

The man who is too old to learn was probably always too old to learn.

— Caryl Haskins

Say oh wise man how you have come to such knowledge? Because I was never ashamed to confess my ignorance and ask others.

— Johann Gottfried Von Herder

There is, so I believe, in the essence of everything, something that we cannot call learning. There is, my friend, only a knowledge -- that is everywhere.

— Hermann Hesse

Knowledge is only potential power.

— Napoleon Hill

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.

— Thomas Hobbes

Knowledge like timber shouldn't be mush use till they are seasoned.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

Since we can't know what knowledge will be most needed in the future, it is senseless to try to teach it in advance. Instead, we should try to turn out people who love learning so much and learn so well that they will be able to learn whatever needs to be learned.

— John Holt

Knowledge without education is but armed injustice.

— Horace

You can always draw as well as you know how to. I flatter myself that I feel more than I express on canvas; but I know that is not so.

— William Morris Hunt

Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.

— Thomas H. Huxley

Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.

— William James