Unused Knowledge Quotes

A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition.

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

Everywhere we are told that our human resources are all to be used, that our civilization itself means the uses of everything it has - the inventions, the histories, every scrap of fact. But there is one kind of knowledge - infinitely precious, time-resistant more than monuments, here to be passed between the generations in any way it may be: never to be used. And that is poetry.

Information can tell us everything. It has all the answers. But they are answers to questions we have not asked, and which doubtless don't even arise.

Nothing is more impotent than an unread library.

He who learns and learns and yet does not know what he knows, is one who plows and plows yet never sows.

I almost get annoyed at the fact that I'm not going to use all that I got.

He, who learns and makes no use of his learning, is a beast of burden, with a load of books.

The only way we could remember would be by constant re-reading, for knowledge unused tends to drop out of mind. Knowledge used does not need to be remembered; practice forms habits and habits make memory unnecessary. The rule is nothing; the application is everything.

Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

He who learns, and makes no use of his learning, is a beast of burden with a load of books. Does the ass comprehend whether he carries on his back a library or a bundle of faggots?

Idleness of the mind is much worse than that of the body: wit, without employment, is a disease - the rust of the soul, a plague, a hell itself.

This is unbearable ... God. These books she'll never read. Her Life's Library.

For intellect is a mansion where waste is without drain.

We live in a world of unused and misapplied knowledge and skill.

History not used is nothing, for all intellectual life is action, like practical life, and if you don't use the stuff well, it might as well be dead.

Speakers have been showering us with pearls of wisdom for centuries, and if all of their valuable advice were laid end to end, it would still be just as good as new. Very little of it has ever been used.

If you spend all your time reading books that you only pretend to understand, year after year, there isn't much room for anything else.

For the mind and the imagination, bookstores aren't enough, college courses aren't enough, the Internet isn't enough. Those resources are all governed by the tastes and needs of the moment. Only libraries take the long view, quietly shelving the unused with the used, knowing that one of these days the two categories will be reversed by a student's discovery of those hitherto undisturbed volumes whose contents will unsettle the learned world.

My childhood taught me nothing... zero.

Consider what it is like to go into a new classroom and to see before you suddenly, and in a way you cannot avoid recognizing, the dreadful consequences of a year's wastage of so many lives.

The bookstore was a parking lot for used graveyards. Thousands of graveyards were parked in rows like cars. Most of the books were out of print, and no one wanted to read them any more and the people who had read the books had died or forgotten about them, but through the organic process of music the books had become virgins again.

Many men are stored full of unused knowledge. Like loaded guns that are never fired off, or military magazines in times of peace, they are stuffed with useless ammunition.

Corliss wondered what happens to a book that sits unread on a library shelf for thirty years. Can a book rightfully be called a book if it never gets read? If a tree falls in a forest and gets pulped to make paper for a book that never gets read, but there's nobody there to read it, does it make a sound?

Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled 'file and forget.'