John Steinbeck Quotes

I know nothing, because I know too much, and understand not nearly enough and never will.

An answer is invariably the parent of a whole family of new questions.

Before I came here I was confused about this subject. Having listened to your lecture I am still confused. But on a higher level.

It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not possession but the act of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment.

Indeed, the most important product of knowledge is ignorance.

If we would have new knowledge, we must get a whole world of new questions.

Science is about filling in the details.

Pursue science because it is knowledge, because it broadens our horizons. There is so much more to be discovered.

I have been a strong proponent of helping people understand that during the last decade or so, as it lies at the very bottom of how we know anything. Let me give a couple examples to get that point across.

The more one knows, the more one simplifies.

It gave a tremendous level of self-confidence, that through exploration and learning one could understand seemingly very complex things in one's environment.

Whenever we proceed from the known to the unkown we may hope to understand, but we may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word 'understanding'

There is so much more to understand.

We read to understand, or to begin to understand. We cannot do but to read. Reading almost as much as breathing, is our essential function.

Everything you've learned in school as "obvious" becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe.

The greater our level of understanding, the harder the tests become.

The mind, in discovering truths, acts in the same manner as it acts through the eye in discovering objects; when once any object has been seen, it is impossible to put the mind back to the same condition it was in before it saw it.

It’s ever been the way of the man of science or philosophy. Most folks stay in the dark and then complain they can’t see nothing.” – Snipes (185)

We live in this world like a child who enters a room where a clever person is speaking. The child did not hear the beginning of the speech, and he leaves before the end; and there are certain things which he hears but does not understand

Any knowledge that doesn't lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life.

Without words to objectify and categorize our sensations and place them in relation to one another, we cannot evolve a tradition of what is real in the world.

The greater the step forward in knowledge, the greater is the one taken backward in search of wisdom.

Anything that gives us new knowledge gives us an opportunity to be more rational.

The more I read, the more I realise what I don't know.

Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.