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:

The frontiers of knowledge in the various fields of our subject are expanding at such a rate that, work as hard as one can, one finds oneself further and further away from an understanding of the whole.

James Meade

Ignorance, like a virus, can spread from one institution or claim to another: if people distrust politicians or scientists or whatever in one regard, they may and will distrust them in another. (2020)

Jack Eller

Ignorance is not bad faith. But persistence in ignorance is. (5. The Double Standard of Content)

Joanna Russ How to Suppress Women's Writing (1983)

“All my life,” I said, “knowledge has come to me for which I was not ready.”

Tanith Lee The Birthgrave (1975)

It is fortunate that each generation does not comprehend its own ignorance. We are thus enabled to call our ancestors barbarous.

Charles Dudley Warner