Famous Quotes & Sayings

Herman Melville

People seem to have a great love for names. For to know a great many names seems to look like knowing a good many things.

Herman Melville

You know nothing till you know all; which is the reason we never know any thing.

Henry David Thoreau

Every man has to learn the points of the compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction.

Henry David Thoreau

While England endeavors to cure the potato-rot, will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?

Henry David Thoreau

What is chastity? How shall a man know if he is chaste? He shall not know it. We have heard of this virtue, but we know not what it is.

Henry David Thoreau

Long enough I had heard of irrelevant things; now at length I was glad to make acquaintance with the light that dwells in rotten wood. Where is all your knowledge gone to? It evaporates completely, for it has no depth.

Henry David Thoreau

That is a pathetic inquiry among travelers and geographers after the site of ancient Troy. It is not near where they think it is.When a thing is decayed and gone, how indistinct must be the place it occupied!

Henry David Thoreau

Such is always the pursuit of knowledge. The celestial fruits, the golden apples of the Hesperides, are ever guarded by a hundred-headed dragon which never sleeps, so that it is an Herculean labor to pluck them.

Henry David Thoreau

We bless and curse ourselves.

Henry David Thoreau

Since all things are good, men fail at last to distinguish which is the bane and which the antidote.

Henry David Thoreau

If I ever see more clearly at one time than at another, the medium through which I see is clearer.

Henry David Thoreau

Always the laws of light are the same, but the modes and degrees of seeing vary.

Henry David Thoreau

The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secrets of things.

Henry David Thoreau

Some creatures are made to see in the dark.

Henry David Thoreau

History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning ofthings, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,--when did burdock and plantain sprout first?

Henry David Thoreau

The researcher is more memorable than the researched.

Henry David Thoreau

Give me a sentence which no intelligence can understand. There must be a kind of life and palpitation to it, and under its words akind of blood must circulate forever.

Henry David Thoreau

It is true, we are such poor navigators that our thoughts, for the most part, stand off and on upon a harborless coast, are conversant only with the bights of the bays of poesy, or steer for the public ports of entry, and go into the dry docks of science, where they merely refit for this world, and no natural currents concur to individualize them.

Henry David Thoreau

All perception of truth is the detection of an analogy.

Henry David Thoreau

Much is said about the progress of science in these centuries. I should say that the useful results of science had accumulated, but that there had been no accumulation of knowledge, strictly speaking, for posteriry; for knowledge is to be aquired only by corresponding experience. How can be know what we are told merely? Each man can interpret another's experience only by his own.

Henry David Thoreau

Even the facts of science may dust the mind by their dryness, unless they are ... rendered fertile by the dews of fresh and living truth. Knowledge does not come to us by details, but in flashes of light from heaven.

Henry David Thoreau

The knowledge of an unlearned man is living and luxuriant like a forest, but covered with mosses and lichens and for the most part inaccessible and going to waste; the knowledge of the man of science is like timber collected in yards for public works, which still supports a green sprout here and there, but even this is liable to dry rot.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

I do not know is a phrase which becomes us.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The one thing we do not know is the limit of the knowable.

Jean Rostand

It is sometimes important for science to know how to forget the things she is surest of.

Jean de La Fontaine

He knoweth the universe, and himself he knoweth not.

Jean Kerr

I will read anything rather than work.

James A. Baldwin

The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.

Christopher Lasch

Knowledge is what we get when an observer, preferably a scientifically trained observer, provides us with a copy of reality that we can all recognize.

Gaston Bachelard

In scientific thought, the concept functions all the better for being cut off from all background images. In its full exercise, the scientific concept is free from all the delays of its genetic evolution, an evolution which is consequently explained by simple psychology. The virility of knowledge increases with each conquest of the constructive abstraction.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Wisdom sets bounds even to knowledge.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Knowing things halfway is a greater success than knowing things completely: it takes things to be simpler than they really are andso makes its opinions more easily understandable and persuasive.

Jennifer Stone

a time has come in our history when what is known has little connection with what is done.