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Knowledge Quotes

Francis Bacon, Shakespeare, John Locke, Samuel Johnson and Einstein are all near the top, which gives the page its character: mostly people who thought about how we know things, rather than about how to feel clever. Johnson gives the most useful single line, in Boswell’s Life (1791): “Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.” Wittgenstein, in On Certainty (1969), says that knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.

A lot of the quotes people look for here are flagged. “As for me, all I know is that I know nothing” is credited to Socrates; see the note on the Wisdom page. “Contempt prior to investigation” is credited to Einstein, and a line about putting the Lord at every turn in the refuge of a miracle is credited to Galileo.

Random quote on Knowledge

Most quoted on knowledge:

It is better to be unborn than untaught: for ignorance is the root of misfortune.

Plato

Know not what you know, and see not what you see.

Plautus

The one who thinks he knows something does not yet know as he ought to know.

Paul of Tarsus

Knowledge of physical science will not console me for ignorance of morality in time of affliction, but knowledge of morality will always console me for ignorance of physical science.

Blaise Pascal

In vain sedate reflections we would make
When half our knowledge we must snatch, not take.

Alexander Pope

Logic and sermons never convince,
The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.
(Only what proves itself to every man and woman is so,
Only what nobody denies is so.)

Walt Whitman Song of Myself (1855)

O the depth of God’s riches and wisdom and knowledge! How unsearchable his judgments [are] and past tracing out his ways [are]! For “who has come to know Jehovah’s mind, or who has become his counselor?”

Paul of Tarsus

As revelation is the great strengthener of reason, the march of mind which leaves the Bible in the rear, is an advance, like that of our first parents in Paradise, towards knowledge, but, at the same time, towards death.

Henry Melvill Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

Knowledge comes only to those who despise happiness.

Georg Trakl

Nothing is worse than active ignorance.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I am not ashamed to confess that I am ignorant of what I do not know.

Cicero

The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge.

David

'Tain't a knowin' kind of cattle
Thet is ketched with mouldy corn.

James Russell Lowell

Ignorance is a kind of insanity in the human animal. People who delight in torturing defenseless children or tiny creatures are in reality insane. The terrible thing is that people who are madmen in private may wear a totally bland and innocent expression in public.

Akira Kurosawa Something Like an Autobiography (1981)

So long as the mother, Ignorance, lives, it is not safe for Science, the offspring, to divulge the hidden causes of things.

Johannes Kepler

Knowledge and truth may be in us without judgment, and judgment also without them; but the confession of ignorance is one of the finest and surest testimonies of judgment that I know.

Michel de Montaigne

Blind and naked Ignorance
Delivers brawling judgments, unashamed,
On all things all day long.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Thales was asked what was very difficult; he said: "To know one's self."

Diogenes Laërtius

Knowledge comes through likeness. And so because the soul may know everything, it is never at rest until it comes to the original idea, in which all things are one. And there it comes to rest in God.

Meister Eckhart

For knowledge, too, is itself a power.

Francis Bacon

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