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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:

Beware you be not swallowed up in books! An ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge.

John Wesley

The joke is not on Modi. The joke is on the "educated" elite/middle class supporters of Modi who have made idiocy and ignorance fashionable.

Nissim Mannathukkaren

There are circumstances under which the anomalous should be courted. Ignorance is one of them.

Roger Zelazny Today We Choose Faces (1973)

Should be is not is. Ignorance sees to that.

Esther Friesner Sphynxes Wild (1989)

The only knowledge that can truly orient action is knowledge that frees itself from mere human interests and is based in Ideas—in other words knowledge that has taken a theoretical attitude.

Jürgen Habermas

An artist needs knowledge and the power of observation only so that he can tell from what he is abstaining, and to be sure that his abstention will not appear artificial or false.

Andrei Tarkovsky

What has worked so well in the acquisition of knowledge and in the production of commodities may work just as well in the distribution of those commodities.

Herbert N. Casson Ads and Sales (1911)

No one can become a true and accomplished Sufi without first gaining mastery of the Shariah sciences; indeed venturing on the Sufi path without Shariah knowledge involves many pitfalls.

Meher Ali Shah The Sayings and Teachings of the Great Mystics of Islam (2002)

Excess of knowledge does not make one great scholar, rather savant is that, who acting on his knowledge adheres to Sunnah may amount of his knowledge be little.

Ibrahim Khawas The Sayings and Teachings of the Great Mystics of Islam (2004)

The entire world is worthless excepting five things: to eat for survival, to take water in order to slake thirst, clothes to cover body, house to dwell in, knowledge just to act upon.

Sari al-Saqati

Fear of the unknown causes tension. Knowledge helps eliminate it. Be prepared.

Lloyd (Bud) Winter Relax and Win (1981)

I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.

John F. Kennedy

All will be redeemed in God's fullness of time, all, not just the small portion of the population who have been given the grace to know and accept Christ. All the strayed and stolen sheep. All the little lost ones.

Madeleine L'Engle A Stone for a Pillow (1986)

Faith is that which dispels desire,
Devotion is that which generates knowledge.
And Vedas say that knowledge is that which fashions freedom.

Tulsidas

Ignorance is a low-energy state. It takes constant vigilance and work to climb out of it.

Steven Novella

The authority of superior knowledge was different in kind from the authority of assumed power. Still, he felt a little awkward assuming it.

Michael Swanwick Bones of the Earth (2002)

You know that you are a human being, and I know that I am the Avatar. It is my whole life!

Meher Baba Lord Meher (1986)

A major task in organizing is to determine, first, where the knowledge is located that can provide the various kinds of factual premises that decisions require.

Herbert A. Simon

The fact is that those who are enslaved to their sects are not merely devoid of all sound knowledge, but they will not even stop to learn!

Galen

Since human knowledge is not perfect, a more knowledgeable person is not always right.

Raheel Farooq Why I Am a Muslim: And a Christian and a Jew (2020)

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