Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

The wise man reads both books and life itself.

Moo may represent an idea, but only the cow knows.

Knowledge is ancient error reflecting on its youth.

Knowledge goes hand and hand with truth.

The facts don't always reveal the truth, but the truth always reveals the facts.

Books are like truth serum-- if you don't read, you can't figure out what's real.

Sometimes a tree tells you more than can be read in books.

You may read any quantity of books, and you may almost as ignorant as you were at starting, if you don't have, at the back of yourminds, the change for words in definite images which can only be acquired through the operation of your observing faculties on the phenomena of nature.

Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't.

Books have to be read it is the only way of discovering what they contain.

What one knows best is ... what one has learned not from books but as a result of books, through the reflections to which they have given rise.

Men of the world who value the Way all turn to books. But books are nothing more than words. Words have value; what is of value in words is meaning. Meaning has something it is pursuing, but the thing that it is pursuing cannot be put into words and handed down. The world values words and hands down books but, though the world values them, I do not think them worth valuing. What the world takes to be values is not real value.

To Truth's house there is a single door, which is experience.

The art of reading is in great part that of acquiring a better understanding of life from one's encounter with it in a book.

What men have seen they know. . . .

Science is but an image of the truth.

Were one merely to seek information, one should inquire of the man who hates, but if one wishes to know what truly is, one better ask the one who loves.

A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true, for if the things be false, the apprehension of them is not understanding.

There are many truths of which the full meaning cannot be realized until personal experience has brought it home.

It is no good to try to stop knowledge from going forward. Ignorance is never better than knowledge.

Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.

News reports don't change the world. Only facts change it, and those have already happened when we get the news.

The wise are above books.

Experience is what really happens to you in the long run; the truth that finally overtakes you.

I like the facts. I find them interesting.