Karl Pilkington Quotes

The things that you know more about than you want to know are very useful.

Like many a better one before me, I have gone down under the force of numbers, under the books and books and books that keep coming out and coming out and coming out, shoals of them, spates of them, flash floods of them, too blame many books, and no sign of an end.

You think you want to know something, and then once you do, all you can think about is erasing it from your mind.

How much there is in books that one does not want to know, that it would be a mere weariness and burden to the spirit to know.

To read too many books is harmful.

An obsessive attention to the news, I've realized, only serves to paint a picture of the world as a throbbing blob of dysfunction, most news falling somewhere on a scale from disappointing to calamitous.

Part of what confuses people in times of upheaval is that you're getting so many different points of view and directions and so and so, how to do this and do that. And a lot of it is written in a language that honestly most people cannot understand.

It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.

There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers— conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress.

I must be honest. I can only read so many paragraphs of a New York Times story before I puke.

I'm so full of useless information; I'm the kind of person that collects useless information. I like to know everything!

I feel like I can't fully understand what's happening now until I really understand what's happened before. But you do get sort of bogged down a little bit when you're trying to study so many years' worth of music. It can be a little bit overwhelming.

The necessity of knowing a little about a great many things is the most grievous burden of our day. It deprives us of leisure on the one hand, and of scholarship on the other.

Everyone knows everything about all of us. That's too much knowledge!

A surfeit of information often hides an untruth,” he said, with annoying clarity.

When I know too much I get bored too fast.

Some years ago John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in an essay on his efforts at writing a history of economics: 'As one approaches the present, one is filled with a sense of hopelessness; in a year and possibly even a month, there is now more economic comment in the supposedly serious literature than survives from the whole of the thousand years commonly denominated as the Middle Ages ... anyone who claims to be familiar with it all is a confessing liar.' I believe that all physicists would subscribe to the same sentiments regarding their own professional literature. I do at any rate.

Under our present enormous accumulation of books, I do affirm that a most miserable distraction of choice must be very generally incident to the times; that the symptoms of it are in fact very prevalent, and that one of the chief symptoms is an enormous 'gluttonism' for books.

She drowned in words that could not teach her how to swim.

The more you know the less the better.

But with the library, it's like catnip, I suppose: you begin to run in circles because there's so much to look at and read.

I'm over-educated in the things I shouldn't have known at all.

We know too much for one man to know too much.

It is fatal to know too much at the outcome: boredom comes as quickly to the traveler who knows his route as to the novelist who is over certain of his plot.

Finding intelligent life would encourage people and also of course the opportunity of learning a tremendous amount, but this is a danger. We might be so overwhelmed with knowledge and information, that we might be depressed or even become suicidal - because what's the point if they're thousands of years ahead of us? Why should we bother? - or become the ultimate couch potatoes.