Knowledge Quotes - Page 80

Knowledge is a collective enterprise. Without it understanding is impossible. Ignorance is too often a murderous vulnerability.

Sciences usually advances by a succession of small steps, through a fog in which even the most keen-sighted explorer can seldom see more than a few paces ahead. Occasionally the fog lifts, an eminence is gained, and a wider stretch of territory can be surveyed-sometimes with startling results. A whole science may then seem to undergo a kaleidoscopic rearrangement, fragments of knowledge sometimes being found to fit together in a hitherto unsuspected manner. Sometimes the shock of readjustment may spread to other sciences; sometimes it may divert the whole current of human thought.

All knowledge attains its ethical value and its human significance only by the human sense with which it is employed. Only a good man can be a great physician.

Knowledge is to be acquired only by a corresponding experience. How can we know what we are told merely? Each man can interpret another's experience only by his own.

It is important to gain knowledge, yes, but any advantage we will have in the eternal life to come will be a knowledge, I am sure, of those saving principles upon which our eternal life will depend.

Do what's in front of you as well as possible. Keep going until you realize what you're best at.

It is an act of courage to acknowledge our own uncertainty and sit with it for a while.

The knowledge of Natural-History, being Observation of Matters of Fact, is more certain than most others, and in my slender Opinion, less subject to Mistakes than Reasonings, Hypotheses, and Deductions are; ... These are things we are sure of, so far as our Senses are not fallible; and which, in probability, have been ever since the Creation, and will remain to the End of the World, in the same Condition we now find them.

The psychologists and the metaphysicians wrangle endlessly over the nature of the thinking process in man, but no matter how violently they differ otherwise they all agree that it has little to do with logic and is not much conditioned by overt facts.

One of the deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which will suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it. There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance.

You generally hear that what a man doesn't know doesn't hurt him, but in business what a man doesn't know does hurt.

When all beliefs are challenged together, the just and necessary ones have a chance to step forward and re-establish themselves alone.

Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.

To judge wisely, we must know how things appear to the unwise.

The knowledge of God, the belief in God, is what I call an a-rational process. It's not rational - it doesn't proceed by scientific investigation - but it's not irrational because it doesn't contradict my reasoning process. It goes beyond it.

Their vain presumption of knowing all can take beginning solely from their never having known anything; for if one has but once experienced the perfect knowledge of one thing, and truly tasted what it is to know, he shall perceive that of infinite other conclusions he understands not so much as one.

Both the physicist and the mystic want to communicate their knowledge, and when they do so with words their statements are paradoxical and full of logical contradictions.

For the purpose of knowledge we must know how to make use of the inward current which draws us towards a thing, and also of the current which after a time draws us away from it.

The unselective knowledge drive resembles the indiscriminate sexual drive--signs of vulgarity!

What are man's truths ultimately? Merely his irrefutable errors.

Error has made man so deep, sensitive, and inventive that he has put forth such blossoms as religions and arts. Pure knowledge could not have been capable of it.

Acknowledge your will and speak to us all, "This alone is what I will to be!" Hang your own penal code up above you: we want to be its enforcers!

Occupy yourself with what's in your life now. Address those situations and subjects as fully as possible with your best efforts. That is what produces happiness and clarity and knowledge and power.

Distinctly different as a child, as an adolescent, in his prime and in his old age, man considers himself as one, not because he acts, but because he knows.

Science sans conscience n' est que le ruine de l'âme. Knowledge without conscience is but the ruine of the soule.