Old Knowledge Quotes

But do not despise the lore that has come down from distant years; for oft it may chance that old wives keep in memory word of things that once were needful for the wise to know.

Old sciences are unraveled like old stockings, by beginning at the foot.

As the Roman Empire came to its close, all the old gods of the pagan world were seen as demons by the Christians who rose. It was useless to tell them as the centuries passed that their Christ was but another God of the Wood, dying and rising, as Dionysus or Osiris had done before him, and that the Virgin Mary was in fact the Good Mother again enshrined. Theirs was a new age of belief and conviction, and in it we became devils, detached from what they believed, as old knowledge was forgotten or misunderstood.

Acquire new knowledge whilst thinking over the old, and you may become a teacher of others.

If a man keeps cherishing his old knowledge so as continually to be acquiring new, he may be a teacher of others.

Mixing one's wines may be a mistake, but old and new wisdom mix admirably.

Who keeps the old akindle and adds new knowledge is fitted to be a teacher.

To open up the new, to look back on the old may bring forth like discoveries in the practice of art.

The great sickness and the grievous evil consist in this: that all the things that man finds written in books, he presumes to think of as true-and all the more so if the books are old.

In truth man is made rather to eat ices than to pore over old texts.

Five minutes in an old book quickly reveals that most of what is being sold today as new insights into human behavior is merely the rediscovery of knowledge we have had for centuries.

All wisdom is not new wisdom.

Half of my library are old books because I like seeing how people thought about their world at their time. So that I don't get bigheaded about something we just discovered and I can be humble about where we might go next. Because you can see who got stuff right and most of the people who got stuff wrong.

None are so eager to gain new experience as those who don't know how to make use of the old ones.

There is nothing new under the sun but there are lots of old things we don't know.

The medieval university looked backwards; it professed to be a storehouse of old knowledge. The modern university looks forward, and is a factory of new knowledge.