Ephemeral Knowledge Quotes

What good is knowledge if it just floats in the air? It goes from computer to computer. It changes and grows every second of every day. But nobody actually knows anything.

Many theories of the ancient world seem terribly childish today, a hodge-podge of fables and false comparisons.But our theories will seem childish five-hundred years from now.Every theory is based on some analogy, and sooner or later the theory fails because the analogy turns out to be false. A theory in its day helps to solve the problems of the day.

I think it's wrong that so many people pass on from this existence, and take all their knowledge with them.

The newspapers are the cemeteries of ideas.

Writings scatter to the winds blank checks in an insane charge. And were they not such flying leaves, there would be no purloined letters.

No one knows anything, really. It's all rented, or borrowed.

History can be formed from permanent monuments and records; but lives can only be written from personal knowledge, which is growing every day less, and in a short time is lost forever.

William James describes a man who got the experience from laughing-gas; whenever he was under its influence, he knew the secret of the universe, but when he came to, he had forgotten it. At last, with immense effort, he wrote down the secret before the vision had faded. When completely recovered, he rushed to see what he had written. It was 'A smell of petroleum prevails throughout'.

No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library; for who can see the wall crowded on every side by mighty volumes, the works of laborious meditations and accurate inquiry, now scarcely known but by the catalogue.

Nothing wise was ever printed upon an apron.

Falsehoods which we spurn to-day Were the truths of long ago.

All knowledge which ends in words will die as quickly as it came to life, with the exception of the written word: which is its mechanical part.

There was once a Hindu sage, who sat down on the banks of the Ganges and thought for seventy years about the millennium. Just as he arrived at the solution and was putting it into verse, a mosquito stung him and he forgot it again at once.

The nature of human beings never changes; it is immutable. The present generation of children and the present generation of young adults from the age of thirteen to eighteen is, therefore, no different from that of their great-great-grandparents. Political fads come and go; theories rise and fall; the scientific 'truth' of today becomes the discarded error of tomorrow.

Every period of time is a sphinx that throws itself into the abyss as soon as its riddle has been solved.

Throughout history, knowledge rises and falls, ebbs and flows. What once was known is forgotten again, lost in time, sometimes for centuries, only to be rediscovered ages later.

Her mind was an hotel where facts came and went like transient lodgers, without leaving their address behind, and frequently without paying for their board.

The mind Is so hospitable, taking in everything Like boarders, and you don't see until It's all over how little there was to learn Once the stench of knowledge has dissipated.

True religion is slow in growth, and, when once planted, is difficult of dislodgement; but its intellectual counterfeit has no root in itself: it springs up suddenly, it suddenly withers.

The philosophies of one age have become the absurdities of the next, and the foolishness of yesterday has become the wisdom of tomorrow.

In an ideal world people would know the words just for the show and then forget them right after.