Knowledge Burden Quotes

I'm over-educated in the things I shouldn't have known at all.

Knowledge is a terrible burden. It may help you, but it might also destroy you.

Like many a better one before me, I have gone down under the force of numbers, under the books and books and books that keep coming out and coming out and coming out, shoals of them, spates of them, flash floods of them, too blame many books, and no sign of an end.

How dreadful knowledge of the truth can be when there's no help in the truth.

Everyone knows everything about all of us. That's too much knowledge!

You think you want to know something, and then once you do, all you can think about is erasing it from your mind.

The things that you know more about than you want to know are very useful.

The books and magazines streamed in. He could buy them all, they piled up around him and even while he read, the number of those still to be read disturbed him. … they stood in rows, weighing down his life like a possession which he did not succeed in subordinating to his personality.

The necessity of knowing a little about a great many things is the most grievous burden of our day. It deprives us of leisure on the one hand, and of scholarship on the other.

Knowledge is almost annoying.

There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers— conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress.

The more you know the less the better.

Some years ago John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in an essay on his efforts at writing a history of economics: 'As one approaches the present, one is filled with a sense of hopelessness; in a year and possibly even a month, there is now more economic comment in the supposedly serious literature than survives from the whole of the thousand years commonly denominated as the Middle Ages ... anyone who claims to be familiar with it all is a confessing liar.' I believe that all physicists would subscribe to the same sentiments regarding their own professional literature. I do at any rate.

History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that's when empires start to decline.

We all would love sometimes to be free from our own knowledge. It is even the most difficult to unlearn - as the most important problems are.

The privileges of knowledge have to be bought at the cost of the consolations of ignorance.

We all suffer under a curse, the curse that we know more than we can endure, and there is nothing, absolutely nothing we can do about the force and the lure of this knowledge.

Knowledge is dangerous. Once you know something, you can't get rid of it. You have to carry it. Always.

Once you know some things, you can't unknow them. It's a burden that can never be given away.

The past has too much knowledge embedded in it, and therefore it's best to forget it and start anew.

Finding intelligent life would encourage people and also of course the opportunity of learning a tremendous amount, but this is a danger. We might be so overwhelmed with knowledge and information, that we might be depressed or even become suicidal - because what's the point if they're thousands of years ahead of us? Why should we bother? - or become the ultimate couch potatoes.

How much there is in books that one does not want to know, that it would be a mere weariness and burden to the spirit to know.

Kids all want to look cool, as if knowledge is a great burden, but they're always looking around. They remember.

So in sum, what are we? We are the creatures that know and know too much. That leaves us with such a burden again we have a choice, to laugh or cry. No other animal does either. We do, depending on the season and the need.

Knowledge is death in my experience. The more I know about film, the harder it is to create freely.