Nicolas Chamfort Quotes

The world of learning is so broad, and the human soul is so limited in power!

While one man can discover a certain thing by himself, another is never able to understand it, even if taught by means of all possible expressions and metaphors, and during a long period; his mind can in no way grasp it, his capacity is insufficient for it.

The human mind has no frontiers, it extends proportionately as the universe displays itself; man, then, can and must attempt all, and he needs only time in order to know all

I think the problem we have as apes is we're asking far bigger questions than we could possibly process.

A man is a great bundle of tools. He is born into this life without the knowledge of how to use them. Education is the process of learning their use.

There's no limit to how much you'll know, depending how far beyond zebra you go.

No human mind can comprehend all the knowledge which guides the actions of society.

For each of us there is a set limit to our intellectual powers which we cannot pass.

Do not crowd the understanding; it can comprehend so much and no more. A pint pot will not contain the measure of a quart.

What does reason know? Reason only knows what it has succeeded in learning.

I would not be able to retain all the information, all the medical jargon these doctors do. I'm not really intelligent enough is what I'm saying.

The man who seeks to educate himself must first read and then travel in order to correct what he has learned.

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

If culture did not filter, it would be inane - as inane as the formless, boundless Internet is on its own. And if we all possessed the boundless knowledge of the Web, we would be idiots! Culture is an instrument for making a hierarchical system of intellectual labor.

All that mankind has ever learned is nothing more than a single grain of sand on a beach that reaches to infinity.

How ignorant we are! How ignorant everyone is! We can cut across only a small area of the appallingly expanding fields of knowledge. No human being can know more than a tiny fraction of the whole. It must have been satisfactory in ancient times when one's own land seemed to be the universe; when research studies, pamphlets, books did not issue in endless flow; when laboratories and scientists were not so rapidly pushing back frontiers of knowledge that the process of unlearning the old left you gasping for breath.

We spend the early years feeding our brains with information and the latter half trying not to think about it all.

It' easy to find information on Google guru but that's not equal to gaining knowledge.

There is, perhaps, one universal truth about all forms of human cognition: the ability to deal with knowledge is hugely exceeded by the potential knowledge contained in man's environment. To cope with this diversity, man's perception, his memory, and his thought processes early become governed by strategies for protecting his limited capacities from the confusion of overloading. We tend to perceive things schematically, for example, rather than in detail, or we represent a class of diverse things by some sort of averaged "typical instance.

Man cannot always think of matter, however pleasurable it may be.

Knowledge, unlike information, is a human characteristic; there can be information no one knows, but there can't be knowledge no one knows.

The very might of the human intellect reveals its limits.

We know very little, and yet it is astonishing that we know so much, and still more astonishing that so little knowledge can give us so much power.

Knowledge, which is power, knows no limits, either in its enslavement of creation or in its deference to worldly masters.

We have not strength enough to follow our reason so far as it would carry us.