Famous Quotes & Sayings

Horace Mann

Knowledge is but an instrument, which the profligate and the flagitious may use as well as the brave and the just.

Horace Mann

If there is anything for which I would go back to childhood, and live this weary life over again, it is for the burning, exalting, transporting thrill and ecstasy with which the young faculties hold their earliest communion with knowledge.

Horace Mann

Every addition to true knowledge is an addition to human power.

Philippe Petit

I am a thief of knowledge, and in a survival way, I had to solve all the problems around me.

Harold Pinter

How can the unknown merit reverence? In other words how can you revere that of which you are ignorant? At the same time, it would be ridiculous to propose that what we know merits reverence. What we know merits any one of a number of things, but it stands to reason reverence isn't one of them. In other words, apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?

Jacques Barzun

Of true knowledge at any time, a good part is merely convenient, necessary indeed to the worker, but not to an understanding of his subject: One can judge a building without knowing where to buy the bricks; one can understand a violin sonata without knowing how to score for the instrument. The work may in fact be better understood without a knowledge of the details of its manufacture, of attention to these tends to distract from meaning and effect.

Isaac Asimov

Experimentation is the least arrogant method of gaining knowledge. The experimenter humbly asks a question of nature.

Isaac Asimov

To test a perfect theory with imperfect instruments did not impress the Greek philosophers as a valid way to gain knowledge.

Isaac Asimov

Scientific apparatus offers a window to knowledge, but as they grow more elaborate, scientists spend ever more time washing the windows.

Isaac Asimov

There's so much knowledge to be had that specialists cling to their specialties as a shield against having to know anything about anything else. They avoid being drowned.

Isaac Asimov

During the century after Newton, it was still possible for a man of unusual attainments to master all fields of scientific knowledge. But by 1800, this had become entirely impracticable.

Immanuel Kant

Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind... The understanding can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing. Only through their union can knowledge arise.

Immanuel Kant

All our knowledge begins with the senses,

Immanuel Kant

There is nothing higher than reason.

Immanuel Kant

We assume a common sense as the necessary condition of the universal communicability of our knowledge, which is presupposed in every logic and every principle of knowledge that is not one of skepticism.

Immanuel Kant

Enlightenment is the liberation of man from his self-caused state of minority... Supere aude! Dare to use your own understanding!is thus the motto of the Enlightenment.

Immanuel Kant

All human knowledge thus begins with intuitions, proceeds thence to concepts, and ends with ideas.

Neale Donald Walsch

The soul - your soul - knows all there is to know all the time. There's nothing hidden to it, nothing unknown. Yet knowing is not enough. The soul seeks to experience.

Marcel Proust

It is up to my spirit to find the truth. But how? Grave uncertainty, each time the spirit feels beyond its own comprehension; whenit, the explorer, is altogether to obscure land that it must search and where all its baggage is of no use. To search? That is not all: to create.

Marcel Proust

The tiny, initial clue ... by allowing us to imagine what we do not know, stimulates a desire for knowledge.

Joseph Addison

Knowledge is, indeed, that which, next to virtue, truly and essentially raises one man above another.

Joseph Addison

The utmost extent of man's knowledge, is to know that he knows nothing.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

It is not enough to have knowledge; one must apply it. It is not enough to have wishes; one must also accomplish it.

Ray Stevens

The less you know, the more you think you know, because you don't know you don't know.

The first step in a person's salvation is knowledge of their sin.

James Thurber

So much has already been written about everything that you can't find out anything about it.

James Mackintosh

Diffused knowledge immortalizes itself.

Novalis

The highest purpose of intellectual cultivation is to give a man a perfect knowledge and mastery of his own inner self.

Eric S. Raymond

Alchemists turned into chemists when they stopped keeping secrets.

Epictetus

If you would improve, submit to be considered wihout sense and foolish with respect to externals. Wish to be considered to know nothing; and if you shall seem to someone to be a person of importance, distrust yourself.

Hermann von Helmholtz

During the first half of the present century we had an Alexander von Humboldt, who was able to scan the scientific knowledge of his time in its details, and to bring it within one vast generalization. At the present juncture, it is obviously very doubtful whether this task could be accomplished in a similar way, even by a mind with gifts so peculiarly suited for the purpose as Humboldt's was, and if all his time and work were devoted to the purpose.

Hermann von Helmholtz

Isolated facts and experiments have in themselves no value, however great their number may be. They only become valuable in a theoretical or practical point of view when they make us acquainted with the law of a series of uniformly recurring phenomena, or, it may be, only give a negative result showing an incompleteness in our knowledge of such a law, till then held to be perfect.