Motivational Quotes

Knowledge

Know thyself. A maxim as pernicious as it is ugly. Whoever studies himself arrest his own development. A caterpillar who seeks to know himself would never become a butterfly.

- Gide, Andre

Best Quotes about Knowledge

I find that a great part of the information I have, was acquired by looking up something and finding something else on the way.

Adams, Franklin P.

The long unmeasured pulse of time moves everything. There is nothing hidden that it cannot bring to light, nothing once known that may not become unknown.

Sophocles

To grow wiser means to learn to know better and better the faults to which this instrument with which we feel and judge can be subject.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

Knowledge is power.

Sir Francis Bacon

Inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that is where I renew my springs that never dry up.

Buck, Pearl S.

The knowledge of an unlearned man is living and luxuriant like a forest, but covered with mosses and lichens and for the most part inaccessible and going to waste; the knowledge of the man of science is like timber collected in yards for public works, which still supports a green sprout here and there, but even this is liable to dry rot.

Thoreau, Henry David

A wise man, when asked how he had learned so much about everything, replied: By never being ashamed or afraid to ask questions about anything of which I was ignorant.

Knowledge is the best eraser in the world for disharmony, distrust, despair, and the endless physical deficiencies of man.

Battista, Orlando A.

If you have knowledge, let others light their candles at it.

Margaret Fuller

10.

No matter what happens, there's always somebody who knew it would.

Starr, Lonny

11.

Of a truth, Knowledge is power, but it is a power reined by scruple, having a conscience of what must be and what may be; whereas Ignorance is a blind giant who, let him but wax unbound, would make it a sport to seize the pillars that hold up the long-wrought fabric of human good, and turn all the places of joy as dark as a buried Babylon.

Eliot, George

12.

Knowledge fills a large brain; it merely inflates a small one.

13.

The trouble with most folks ain't so much their ignorance as knowing so many things that ain't so.

Billings, Josh

14.

He who knows others is clever; He who knows himself has discernment.

Lao-Tzu

15.

It is impossible to begin to learn that which one thinks one already knows.

Epictetus

16.

There are three things extremely hard: steel, a diamond, and to know one's self.

Franklin, Benjamin

17.

Knowledge is what we get when an observer, preferably a scientifically trained observer, provides us with a copy of reality that we can all recognize.

Lasch, Christopher

18.

When you cease to strive to understand, then you will know without understanding.

Proverb, Chinese

19.

It seems to me that man is made to act rather than to know: the principles of things escape our most persevering researches.

Frederick The Great, (Frederick II)

20.

The less you know, the more you think you know, because you don't know you don't know.

Stevens, Ray

21.

To know yourself, see how others do, to know others look into your own heart.

Smiles, Sydney

22.

Many of us don't have to turn out the lights to be in the dark.

23.

We are in fact convinced that if we are ever to have pure knowledge of anything, we must get rid of the body and contemplate things by themselves with the soul by itself. It seems, to judge from the argument, that the wisdom which we desire and upon which we profess to have set our hearts will be attainable only when we are dead and not in our lifetime.

Socrates

24.

Better indeed is knowledge than mechanical practice. Better than knowledge is meditation. But better still is surrender of attachment to results, because there follows immediate peace.

Bhagavad Gita

25.

To know is to know that you know nothing. That is the meaning of true knowledge.

Confucius

26.

And you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free. [John 8:32]

Bible

27.

It is, I fear, but a vain show of fulfilling the heathen precept, Know thyself, and too often leads to a self-estimate which will subsist in the absence of that fruit by which alone the quality of the tree is made evident.

Eliot, George

28.

Our treasure lies in the beehive of our knowledge. We are perpetually on the way thither, being by nature winged insects and honey gatherers of the mind.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

29.

As the biggest library if it is in disorder is not as useful as a small but well-arranged one, so you may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value to you than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

30.

Never by reflection, but only by doing is self-knowledge possible to one.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

31.

A man can only attain knowledge with the help of those who possess it. This must be understood from the very beginning. One must learn from him who knows.

Gurdjieff, George

32.

The tree of knowledge is not the tree of life! And yet can we cast out of our spirits all the good or evil poured into them by so many learned generations? Ignorance cannot be learned.

Nerval, Gerard De

33.

He knows the universe and does not know himself.

La Fontaine, Jean De

34.

Knowledge and human power are synonymous.

Bacon, Francis

35.

The self-explorer, whether he wants to or not, becomes the explorer of everything else. He learns to see himself, but suddenly, provided he was honest, all the rest appears, and it is as rich as he was, and, as a final crowning, richer.

Canetti, Elias

36.

True scholarship consists in knowing not what things exist, but what they mean; it is not memory but judgment.

Lowell, James Russell

37.

An humble knowledge of thyself is a surer way to God than a deep search after learning.

Kempis, Thomas

38.

Convinced myself, I seek not to convince.

Edgar Allan Poe

39.

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.

Bertrand Russell

40.

When one is a stranger to oneself then one is estranged from others too.

Lindbergh, Anne Morrow

41.

Own more than thou showest, speak less than thou knowest.

Shakespeare, William

42.

To know oneself, one should assert oneself. Psychology is action, not thinking about oneself. We continue to shape our personality all our life. If we knew ourselves perfectly, we should die.

Camus, Albert

43.

There's a theory, one I find persuasive, that the quest for knowledge is, at bottom, the search for the answer to the question: Where was I before I was born. In the beginning was what? Perhaps, in the beginning, there was a curious room, a room like this one, crammed with wonders; and now the room and all it contains are forbidden you, although it was made just for you, had been prepared for you since time began, and you will spend all your life trying to remember it.

Carter, Angela

44.

Knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be.

Einstein, Albert

45.

If you want to know the taste of a pear, you must change the pear by eating it yourself. If you want to know the theory and methods of revolution, you must take part in revolution. All genuine knowledge originates in direct experience.

Zedong, Mao

46.

The greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorance unfolds.

Kennedy, John F.

47.

Since we can't know what knowledge will be most needed in the future, it is senseless to try to teach it in advance. Instead, we should try to turn out people who love learning so much and learn so well that they will be able to learn whatever needs to be learned.

Holt, John

48.

We have no organ at all for knowledge, for truth: we know (or believe or imagine) precisely as much as may be useful in the interest of the human herd, the species: and even what is here called usefulness is in the end only a belief, something imagined and perhaps precisely that most fatal piece of stupidity by which we shall one day perish.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

49.

He knows so little and knows it so fluently.

Glasgow, Ellen

50.

I see men ordinarily more eager to discover a reason for things than to find out whether the things are so.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De