Productiveness is your acceptance of morality, your recognition of the fact that you choose to live-that productive work is the process by which man's consciousness controls his existence, a constant process of acquiring knowledge and shaping matter to fit one's purpose, of translating an idea into physical form, of remaking the earth in the image of one's values-that all work is creative work if done by a thinking mind.
If you want knowledge, you must toil for it; if food, you must toil for it; and if pleasure, you must toil for it: toil is the law.
Learning is the knowledge of that which none but the learned know.
There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.
'Know,' says a wise writer, the historian of kings, 'Know the men that are to be trusted'; but how is this to be? The possession of knowledge involves both time and opportunities. Neither of these are 'handservants at command.'
I find that I can have no enjoyment in the world but the continual drinking of knowledge. I find there is no worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good for the world.
The desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it.
Knowledge is the key to making a difference.
Understanding is simple. Knowing is complicated.
Knowledge is observation and is given to those who would look.
A man can only attain knowledge with the help of those who possess it. This must be understood from the very beginning. One must learn from him who knows.
No thief, however skillful, can rob one of knowledge, and that is why knowledge is the best and safest treasure to acquire.
A man goes to knowledge as he goes to war, wide awake, with fear, with respect, and with absolute assurance.
Learning is not child's play; we cannot learn without pain.
I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.
The knowledge and experience which produce wisdom can only become a man's individual possession and property by his own free action; and it is as futile to expect these without laborious, painstaking effort, as it is to hope to gather a harvest where the seed has not been sown.
The more knowledge, the clearer what the doubts are.
Knowledge come from looking around; wisdom comes from looking up.
All wish to be learned, but no one is willing to pay the price.
It is a nuisance that knowledge can only be acquired by hard work.
Wisdom is a dreadful thing when it brings no knowledge to its possessor.
The charm of knowledge would be small indeed, were it not that there is so much shame to be overcome on the way to it.
Buying a book is not about obtaining a possession, but about securing a portal.
In completing one discovery we never fail to get an imperfect knowledge of others.
Study detains the mind by the perpetual occurrence of something new, which may gratefully strike the imagination.
