William Rounseville Alger Quotes

Information's pretty thin stuff unless mixed with experience.

Truth is the nursing mother of genius.

The more we see the more we must be able to imagine, and the more we imagine, the more we must think we see.

Wit does not take the place of knowledge.

To know is not to be wise. To know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom.

The words of genius have a wider meaning than the thought that prompted them.

Ignorance is not lack of intelligence, nor knowledge a proof of genius.

In the window, I fantasize... about providing grown-ups and children alike with the greatest gift of all: insight.

Imagination is a powerful force underlying all knowing

Where everyone else sees a straight line, you see a maze, and when I'm done talking to you, the maze starts to make more sense --Reply by Dove to Aly's silent inquiry

One must be an inventor to read well.

Insight must precede application.

Data isn't information. ... Information, unlike data, is useful. While there's a gulf between data and information, there's a wide ocean between information and knowledge. What turns the gears in our brains isn't information, but ideas, inventions, and inspiration. Knowledge-not information-implies understanding. And beyond knowledge lies what we should be seeking: wisdom.

All things are filled full of signs, and it is a wise man who can learn about one thing from another.

Genius knows where the questions are hidden.

Knowledge for its own sake was meaningless, its mere accumulation a waste of time. Knowledge must lead to understanding.

Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.

You can't discover light, by analyzing the dark.

To complicate things in new ways, that is really very easy; but to see things in new ways, that is difficult and that is why genius is so rare.

What I can't create I don't understand

We have to allow ourselves to see what there is to see, and we have to imagine.

Knowledge is the acquiring of facts, understanding is the interpreting of facts, wisdom the application.

Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence.

The writer is the midwife of understanding.

Literature, it seems to me, is wisdom.