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.
He that voluntarily continues ignorant is guilty of all the crimes which ignorance produces.
To be ignorant of one's own ignorance is to be in an unprogressive, uninspired state of existence.
Ignorant men
Don't know what good they hold in their hands until
They've flung it away.
The days of deadly ignorance will end, and they will end soon.
If you know anything better than this candidly impart it; if not, use this with me.
And seeing ignorance is the curse of God,
Knowledge the wing wherewith we fly to heaven.
One only begins to comprehend when one begins to stop trying to know.
Morals and criticism are not so properly objects of the understanding as of taste and sentiment.
One understands only in proportion to becoming himself that which he understands.