Tobias Smollett Quotes

I do not approve the maxim which desires a man to know a little of everything. Superficial knowledge, knowledge without principles, is almost always useless and sometimes harmful knowledge.

I have this assemblage of small facts, which looks like intelligence but no real depth of knowledge about anything. That's why I'm an actor.

The internet has spawned people for whom knowingness is more important than knowledge. It equips you with the illusion of offering knowledge instantly - and quite easily - so you can read a few articles on a few subjects and feel well informed but not actually know any of those subjects in any depth.

A mere index hunter, who held the eel of science by the tail.

A little knowledge can go a long way.

I think that we live in a moment in time where people have a lot of information about a lot of people kind of instantly, but it's all sort of surface information and it doesn't really mean anything.

The most important thing I learned as a foreign correspondent in about 80 countries is that it takes a very shallow knowledge of history to think that there are solutions to most problems.

If you go and talk to most people, they mean well but they don't have much of a breadth on education, of knowledge of understanding what the real issues are and therefore they listen to pundits on television who tell them what they are supposed to think and they keep repeating that until pretty soon they say, 'Oh, well that must be true.'

I always worry that I'm a dilettante: I know something about lots of things but don't have exhaustive knowledge of much.

I don't know what's the matter with people: they don't learn by understanding; they learn by some other way - by rote, or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!

I think we often live at a surface level, and that ends up with us in a lot of difficulty because we just function on assumptions and secondhand knowledge.

Knowledge is one of the wondrous gifts of God. It is incumbent upon everyone to acquire it.

The increasing technicality of the terminology employed is also a serious difficulty. It has become necessary to learn an extensive vocabulary before a book in even a limited department of science can be consulted with much profit. This change, of course, has its advantages for the initiated, in securing precision and concisement of statement; but it tends to narrow the field in which an investigator can labor, and it cannot fail to become, in the future, a serious impediment …

You can swim all day in the Sea of Knowledge and not get wet.

A smattering of everything, and a knowledge of nothing.

The abuse of books kills science. Believing that we know what we have read, we believe that we can dispense with learning it.

When I came of age I did not know much. Still somehow, I could read, write, and cipher to the Rule of Three.... The little advanceI now have upon this store of education, I have picked up from time to time under the pressure of necessity.

Love not the flower they pluck and know it not, And all their botany is Latin names.

You didn't understand or care to know, you get your education from your lovers.

Cynics know the answers without having penetrated deeply enough to know the questions. When challenged by mysterious truths, they marshall 'facts.

Reading and writing, arithmetic and grammar do not constitute education, any more than a knife, fork and spoon constitute a dinner.

Don't know much about history Don't know much biology.

You can't be deep without a surface

Don't know much about history, don't know much biology, don't know much about a science book, don't know much about the French I took.