Knowledge Quotes

Science is best defined as a careful, disciplined, logical search for knowledge about any and all aspects of the universe, obtained by examination of the best available evidence and always subject to correction and improvement upon discovery of better evidence. What's left is magic. And it doesn't work.

If you can’t explain something simply, you don’t understand it.

Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of our enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial stupidity.

There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

For years, we've been bludgeoned with the cliche "information is power." But information isn't power. After all, who's got the most information in your neighborhood? Librarians. And they're famous for having no power at all. And who has the most power in your community? Politicians. And they're notorious for being ill-informed.

Yet still, there are those special secret moments in our lives, when we smile unexpectedly-when all our forces are resolved. A woman can often see these moments in us, better than a man, better than we ourselves, even. When we know these moments, when we smile, when we are not on guard at all-these are the moments when our most important forces show themselves; whatever it is you are doing at such a moment, hold on to it, repeat it-for that certain smile is the best knowledge that we ever have of what our hidden forces are, and where they lie, and how they can be loosed.

You might just as well read the Bible to a herd of buffaloes as to those fellows ... but they have a supreme respect for the logic ... embodied in Sharp's rifles .

I knew about the music. I got that part but I wanted to know the business, I wanted to know about royalties, how people got paid, producers and stuff like that so I read all those books like twice.

No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.

To learn something but not to do is really not to learn. To know something but not to do is really not to know.

The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. Even those of the intelligent who believe that they have a nostrum are too individualistic to combine with other intelligent men from whom they differ on minor points.

In a man devoted to knowledge, pity seems almost ridiculous, like delicate hands on a cyclops.

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.

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.

The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.

Words build bridges into unexplored regions.

Am I aging? The pros and the cons? Well, you know a lot more, at least until the time you start forgetting it all. Actually, aging can be a fun process, to some degree.

No matter how smart or well-educated you are, you can be deceived.

Our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.

You ain't learning nothing when you're talking.

If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

Those that know, do. Those that understand, teach.

Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.

Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.