Information is just signs and numbers, while knowledge involves their meaning. What we want is knowledge, but what we get is information.
When you read the Bible, read for quality not quantity.
What happens is that your wretched memory remembers the words and forgets what's behind them.
What is meaningful cannot in fact be isolated…. We achieve understanding within a circular movement from particular facts to the whole that includes them and back again from the whole thus reached to the particular significant facts.
The quarrel of the sociologists with the historians is that the latter have learned so much about how to do it that they have forgotten what to do. They have become so skilled in finding facts that they have no use for the truths that would make the facts worth finding.
Whether or not a text really is a universe unto itself, it is safe to say that it can only ever be as rich as its most sensitive interpreter.
Keep your rivers flowing as they will, and you will continue to know the most important of all freedoms-the boundless scope of the human mind to contemplate wonders, and to begin to understand their meaning.
By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths.
As for the search for truth, I know from my own painful searching, with its many blind alleys, how hard it is to take a reliable step, be it ever so small, towards the understanding of that which is truly significant.
Even scientific knowledge, if there is anything to it, is not a random observation of random objects; for the critical objectivity of significant knowledge is attained as a practice only philosophically in inner action.
Without words to objectify and categorize our sensations and place them in relation to one another, we cannot evolve a tradition of what is real in the world.
