James Gray Quotes

We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are.

Always, through my whole life, I've had a thirst for knowledge.

Teach thy tongue to say 'I do not know', and thou shalt progress.

What I've come to know is that in life, it's not always the questions we ask, but rather our ability to hear the answers that truly enriches our understanding. Never, never stop learning.

I have always been a learner because I knew nothing.

Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn.

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

Indeed, the most important product of knowledge is ignorance.

The idea of finding things out, I hope that will stay with me until I drop.

Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance.

Learning never exhausts the mind.

I'm constantly learning, and that is the greatest gift of life in my opinion - to always be learning and growing.

He that knew all that learning ever writ, Knew only this - that he knew nothing yet.

The first step towards knowledge is to know that we are ignorant.

Knowledge is the eye of desire and can become the pilot of the soul.

I just want to keep learning.

How much a dunce that has been sent to roam, excels a dunce that has been kept at home.

Once you start asking questions, innocence is gone.

Read a lot, live your life, and listen and watch, so that your mind fills up with millions of images.

The only things worth learning are the things you learn after you know it all.

Learn from me, if not by my precepts, then by my example, how dangerous is the pursuit of knowledge and how much happier is that man who believes his native town to be the world than he who aspires to be greater than his nature will allow.

Sixty years ago I knew everything. Now I know nothing. Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

To me the offer of certainty, the offer of complete security, the offer of an impermeable faith that can’t give way, is an offer of something not worth having. I want to live my life taking the risk all the time that I don’t know anything like enough yet. That I haven’t understood enough. That I can’t know enough. That I’m always hungrily operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom… Those who tell you that you can only live by accepting an absolute authority: don’t think of that as a gift. Think of it as a poison chalice. Push it aside, however tempting it is. Take the risk of thinking for yourself. Much more happiness, truth, beauty, and wisdom will come to you that way.

I'll never know everything. My life would be a lot worse if there was nothing I knew the answers about - and if there was nothing I didn't know the answers about.

A man learns all his life and dies the day he thinks that he has learnt everything.