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This post is a collection of quotes about knowledge. There are 60 quotes divided into 9 sections:
A. Meditation leads to higher understanding (7)
B. Systematic analysis organizes our thinking (6)
This post is a collection of quotes about knowledge. There are 60 quotes divided into 9 sections:
A. Meditation leads to higher understanding (7)
B. Systematic analysis organizes our thinking (6)
C. Distraction is the enemy of knowledge (4)
D. Knowledge is a collection of puzzle pieces (7)
E. Language is a representation of knowledge (9)
F. Reality is the perfect model (5)
G. There are a few absolute facts and everything else is uncertain (6)
H. Be skeptical of commonly held beliefs (4)
I. The mainstream is often wrong (8)
J. Innovation is fun (4)
Rembrandt (1606-1669, artist)
Edward Titchener (1867-1934, psychologist)
16. "Knowledge is the product of leisure. The members of a very primitive society have no time to amass knowledge; their days are fully occupied with the provision of the bare necessities of life." (An Outline of Psychology, 1916)
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900, philosopher)
29. "We have seen how it is originally language which works on the construction of concepts, a labor taken over in later ages by science." (On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense, 1873)
Pierre Duhem (1861-1916, physicist)
30. "A symbol is not properly speaking, either true or false; it is rather something more or less well selected to stand for the reality it represents, and pictures that reality in a more or less precise, or a more or less detailed manner." (The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, 1906)
W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963, sociologist)
31. "When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books. You will be reading meanings." (Brainy Quote)
Rachel Carson (1907-1964, biologist)
32. "If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry." (National Book Award for Nonfiction speech, 1952)
John von Neumann (1903-1957, mathematician)
36. "Truth.. is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations." (Quoted in The Works of the Mind by R. B. Heywood)
Simon Schama (1945-now, historian)
37. "Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct an ideal world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation." (Dead Certainties, 1991)
George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831, philosopher)
38. "The enquiry into the essential destiny of Reason as far as it is considered in reference to the World is identical with the question, what is the ultimate design of the World?" (Lectures on the Philosophy of History, 1832)
Rene Descartes (1596-1650, mathematician)
39. "I think, therefore I am." (Le Discours de la Méthode, 1637)
David Hume (1711-1776)
40. "In our reasonings concerning matter of fact, there are all imaginable degrees of assurance, from the highest certainty to the lowest species of moral evidence... A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence." (An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 1748)
Max Planck (1858-1947, physicist)
51. "New scientific ideas never spring from a communal body, however organized, but rather from the head of an individually inspired researcher who struggles with his problems in lonely thought and united all his thought on one single point which is his whole world for the moment." (Address on the 25th anniversary of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gesellschaft, 1936)
Alexander Fleming (1881-1955, biologist)
52. "It is the lone worker who makes the first advance in a subject: the details may be worked out by a team, but the prime idea is due to the enterprise, thought and perception of an individual." (Wikiquote)
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519, inventor)
53. "Though I may not, like them, be able to quote other authors, I shall rely on that which is much greater and more worthy - on experience, the mistress of their Masters. They go about puffed up and pompous, dressed and decorated with [the fruits], not of their own labours, but of those of others. And they will not allow me my own. They will scorn me as an inventor." (Quoted by The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci by Rudolf Flesch)
Bruno Latour (1947-now, philosopher)
54. "If one looks at the works of Newton to Einstein, they were never scientists in the way modernity understands the term." (Brainy Quote)
Marie Currie (1867-1934, physicist)
60. "I am among those who think that science has great beauty. A scientist in their laboratory is not only a technician: they are also a child placed before natural phenomena which impress them like a fairy tale." (Madame Curie: A Biography)
E. Language is a representation of knowledge (9)
F. Reality is the perfect model (5)
G. There are a few absolute facts and everything else is uncertain (6)
H. Be skeptical of commonly held beliefs (4)
I. The mainstream is often wrong (8)
J. Innovation is fun (4)
A. Meditation leads to higher understanding
Rembrandt (1606-1669, artist)
1. "Try to put well in practice what you already know; and in so doing, you will in good time discover the hidden things which you now inquire about. Practice what you know, and it will help to make clear what now you do not know." (Quoted in A Dictionary of Thoughts by Tyron Edwards)
Isaac Newton (1642-1726, physicist)
2. "I keep the subject constantly before me, and wait until the first dawnings open slowly, by little and little, into a full and clear light." (Quoted in Biographia Britannica)
Albert Einstein (1879-1955, physicist)
3. "There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them." (On the Method of Theoretical Physics, 1933)
Isaac Newton (1642-1726, physicist)
2. "I keep the subject constantly before me, and wait until the first dawnings open slowly, by little and little, into a full and clear light." (Quoted in Biographia Britannica)
Albert Einstein (1879-1955, physicist)
3. "There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them." (On the Method of Theoretical Physics, 1933)
George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707-1788, philosopher)
4. "Genius is nothing else than a great aptitude for patience." (La visite a Buffon, ou Voyage a Montbard)
Anthony van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1732, biologist)
5. "A man has always to be busy with his thoughts if anything is to be accomplished." (Brainy Quote)
John Locke (1632-1704, philosopher)
6. "We are the ruminating kind, and it is not enough to cram ourselves with a great load of collections; unless we chew them over again, they will not give us strength and nourishment." (Hand Book: Caution and Counsels)
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804, philosopher)
7. "Reason... requires trial, practice, and instruction in order gradually to progress from one level of insight to another." (Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View, 1784)
B. Systematic analysis organizes our thinking
Hesiod (around 700 BC, poet)
8. "It is best to do things systematically, since we are only human and disorder is our worst enemy." (AZQuotes.com)
Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406)
9. "Eventually, Aristotle appeared among the Greeks. He improved the methods of logic and systematized its problems and details. He assigned to logic its proper place as the first philosophical discipline and the introduction to philosophy." (1377, Muqaddimah)
Gregory Bateson (1904-1980, anthropologist)
10. "As I see it, the advances in scientific thought come from a combination of loose and strict thinking, and this combination is the most precious tool of science." (Culture Contact and Schismogensis, 1935)
Gregory Bateson (1904-1980, anthropologist)
10. "As I see it, the advances in scientific thought come from a combination of loose and strict thinking, and this combination is the most precious tool of science." (Culture Contact and Schismogensis, 1935)
Thomas Edison (1847-1931, inventor)
11. "I speak without exaggeration when I say that I have constructed 3,000 different theories in connection with the electric light, each one of them reasonable and apparently likely to be true." (Talks with Edison)
Ernst Mayr (1904-2005, biologist)
12. "Biological classifications have two major objectives: to serve as a basis of biological generalizations in all sort of comparative studies and to serve as key information storage system." (Quoted in Ontological foundations in knowledge organization)
Ernst Mayr (1904-2005, biologist)
12. "Biological classifications have two major objectives: to serve as a basis of biological generalizations in all sort of comparative studies and to serve as key information storage system." (Quoted in Ontological foundations in knowledge organization)
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895, biologist)
13. "The method of scientific investigation is nothing but the expression of the necessary mode of working of the human mind." (Our Knowledge of the Causes of the Phenomena of Organic Nature, 1863)
C. Distraction is the enemy of knowledge
Charles Beard (1874-1948, historian)
14. "When it is dark enough, you can see the stars." (Brainy Quote)
Paul Dirac (1902-1994, physicist)
15. "The interpretation of quantum mechanics has been dealt with by many authors, and I do not want to discuss it here. I want to deal with more fundamental things." (The inadequacies of quantum field theory)
14. "When it is dark enough, you can see the stars." (Brainy Quote)
Paul Dirac (1902-1994, physicist)
15. "The interpretation of quantum mechanics has been dealt with by many authors, and I do not want to discuss it here. I want to deal with more fundamental things." (The inadequacies of quantum field theory)
Edward Titchener (1867-1934, psychologist)
16. "Knowledge is the product of leisure. The members of a very primitive society have no time to amass knowledge; their days are fully occupied with the provision of the bare necessities of life." (An Outline of Psychology, 1916)
Henry David Thoreau (181701862, philosopher)
17. "I find it so difficult to dispose of the few facts which to me are significant, that I hesitate to burden my attention with those with are insignificant, which only a divine mind could illustrate." (Life with Principles, 1863)
D. Knowledge is a collection of puzzle pieces
Rene Descartes (1596-1650, philosopher)
18. "Each problem that I solved became a rule, which served afterwards to solve other problems." (Discourse on Method, 1637)
Linus Pauling (1901-1976, chemist)
19. "Facts are the air of scientists. Without them you can never fly." (Brainy Quote)
Linus Pauling (1901-1976, chemist)
19. "Facts are the air of scientists. Without them you can never fly." (Brainy Quote)
Monsignor Georges Lemaitre (1849-1934, astronomer)
20. "Scientific progress is the discovery of a more and more comprehensive simplicity... The previous successes give us confidence in the future of science: we become more and more conscious of the fact that the universe is cognizable." (Today in Science History)
Louis de Broglie (1892-1987, physicist)
21. "Two seemingly incompatible conceptions can each represent an aspect of the truth... They may serve in turn to represent the facts without ever entering into direct conflict." (Dialectica Volume 2, 1948)
Edward Teller (1908-2003, physicist)
22. "We must learn to live with contradictions, because they lead to deeper and more effective understanding." (Science and Morality, 1998)
Talcott Parsons (1902-1979, philosopher)
23. "Special emphasis should be laid on this intimate interrelation of general statements about empirical fact with the logical elements and structure of theoretical systems." (Brainy Quote)
Friedrich Wohler (1800-1882, chemist)
24. "Organic chemistry just now is enough to drive one mad. It gives me the impression of a primeval forest full of the most remarkable things, a monstrous and boundless thicket, with no way of escape, into which one may well dread to enter." (Today in Science History)
Louis de Broglie (1892-1987, physicist)
21. "Two seemingly incompatible conceptions can each represent an aspect of the truth... They may serve in turn to represent the facts without ever entering into direct conflict." (Dialectica Volume 2, 1948)
Edward Teller (1908-2003, physicist)
22. "We must learn to live with contradictions, because they lead to deeper and more effective understanding." (Science and Morality, 1998)
Talcott Parsons (1902-1979, philosopher)
23. "Special emphasis should be laid on this intimate interrelation of general statements about empirical fact with the logical elements and structure of theoretical systems." (Brainy Quote)
Friedrich Wohler (1800-1882, chemist)
24. "Organic chemistry just now is enough to drive one mad. It gives me the impression of a primeval forest full of the most remarkable things, a monstrous and boundless thicket, with no way of escape, into which one may well dread to enter." (Today in Science History)
E. Language is a representation of knowledge
Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1911, linguist)
25. "Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula." (Cours de linguistique generale)
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951, philosopher)
26. "Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries." (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1922)
Ernest Rutherford (1871-1944, physicist)
27. "An alleged scientific discovery has no merit unless it can be explained to a barmaid." (Quoted in Einstein: The Man and His Achievement )
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679, philosopher)
25. "Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula." (Cours de linguistique generale)
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951, philosopher)
26. "Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries." (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1922)
Ernest Rutherford (1871-1944, physicist)
27. "An alleged scientific discovery has no merit unless it can be explained to a barmaid." (Quoted in Einstein: The Man and His Achievement )
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679, philosopher)
28. "Understanding being nothing else, but conception caused by speech." (The Leviathan, 1651)
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900, philosopher)
29. "We have seen how it is originally language which works on the construction of concepts, a labor taken over in later ages by science." (On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense, 1873)
Pierre Duhem (1861-1916, physicist)
30. "A symbol is not properly speaking, either true or false; it is rather something more or less well selected to stand for the reality it represents, and pictures that reality in a more or less precise, or a more or less detailed manner." (The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, 1906)
W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963, sociologist)
31. "When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books. You will be reading meanings." (Brainy Quote)
Rachel Carson (1907-1964, biologist)
32. "If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry." (National Book Award for Nonfiction speech, 1952)
Herbert Spencer (1820-1903, sociologist)
33. "How often misused words generate misleading thoughts." (Brainy Quote)
F. Reality is the perfect model
Albertus Magnus (1200-1280, philosopher)
34. "Nature must be the foundation and model of science; thus Art works according to Nature in everything it can. Therefore, it is necessary that the Artist follows Nature and operates according to her." (De Vegetabilibus)
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519, inventor)
35. "Human subtlety... will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does nature, because in her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous." (Quoted by The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci by Rudolf Flesch)
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519, inventor)
35. "Human subtlety... will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does nature, because in her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous." (Quoted by The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci by Rudolf Flesch)
John von Neumann (1903-1957, mathematician)
36. "Truth.. is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations." (Quoted in The Works of the Mind by R. B. Heywood)
Simon Schama (1945-now, historian)
37. "Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct an ideal world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation." (Dead Certainties, 1991)
George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831, philosopher)
38. "The enquiry into the essential destiny of Reason as far as it is considered in reference to the World is identical with the question, what is the ultimate design of the World?" (Lectures on the Philosophy of History, 1832)
G. There are a few absolute facts and everything else is uncertain
Rene Descartes (1596-1650, mathematician)
39. "I think, therefore I am." (Le Discours de la Méthode, 1637)
David Hume (1711-1776)
40. "In our reasonings concerning matter of fact, there are all imaginable degrees of assurance, from the highest certainty to the lowest species of moral evidence... A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence." (An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 1748)
Antoine Lavoisier (1743- 1794, chemist)
41. "The art of concluding from experience and observation consists in evaluating probabilities, in estimating if they are high or numerous enough to constitute proof." (Rapport des commissaires charges par le roi de l'exemen du magnetism animal, 1784)
Christian Huygens (1629-1695, mathematician)
42. "There are many degrees of Probable, some nearer Truth than others, in the determining of which lies the chief exercise of our Judgement." (Cosmotheoros, 1695)
Voltaire (1694-1778, writer)
43. "Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one." (Letter to Frederick William, 1770)
Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827, mathematician)
44. "Life's most important questions are, for the most part, nothing but probability problems." (Wikiquote)
H. Be skeptical of commonly held beliefs
Ibn al-Haytham (965-1040 CE, philosopher)
45. "...if learning the truth is the goal, one is to make themselves an enemy of all that they read, and applying their mind to the core and margins of its content, attack it from every side." (Quoted in Bridging Cultures Bookshelf: Muslim Journeys)
Montesquieu (1689-1746)
46. "Nothing is a greater obstacle to our progress in knowledge, than a bad performance of a celebrated author; because, before we instruct we must begin with undeceiving." (The Spirit of the Laws, 1748)
Denis Diderot (1713-1790, writer)
47. "In order to shake a hypothesis, it is sometimes not necessary to do anything more than push it as far as it will go." (On the Interpretation of Nature, 1753)
Karl Popper (1902-1994, philosopher)
48. "Science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths." (Conjectures and Refutations, 1963)
Karl Popper (1902-1994, philosopher)
48. "Science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths." (Conjectures and Refutations, 1963)
I. The mainstream is often wrong
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860, philosopher)
49. "Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see." (1819, The World as Will and Representation)
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791, musician)
50. "I pay no attention whatever to anybody's praise or blame. I simply follow my own feelings." (Brainy Quote)
Max Planck (1858-1947, physicist)
51. "New scientific ideas never spring from a communal body, however organized, but rather from the head of an individually inspired researcher who struggles with his problems in lonely thought and united all his thought on one single point which is his whole world for the moment." (Address on the 25th anniversary of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gesellschaft, 1936)
Alexander Fleming (1881-1955, biologist)
52. "It is the lone worker who makes the first advance in a subject: the details may be worked out by a team, but the prime idea is due to the enterprise, thought and perception of an individual." (Wikiquote)
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519, inventor)
53. "Though I may not, like them, be able to quote other authors, I shall rely on that which is much greater and more worthy - on experience, the mistress of their Masters. They go about puffed up and pompous, dressed and decorated with [the fruits], not of their own labours, but of those of others. And they will not allow me my own. They will scorn me as an inventor." (Quoted by The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci by Rudolf Flesch)
Bruno Latour (1947-now, philosopher)
54. "If one looks at the works of Newton to Einstein, they were never scientists in the way modernity understands the term." (Brainy Quote)
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (18112-1881, writer)
55. "Oh, how hard it is to be the only one who knows the truth! But they won't understand that. No, they won't understand it." (The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, 1877)
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873, philosopher)
56. "Persons of genius, it is true, are, and always like to be, a small minority; but in order to have them, it is necessary to preserve the soil in which they grow. Genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom." (On Liberty, 1859)
J. Innovation is fun
Isaac Newton (1642-1727, physicist)
57. "I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." (Quoted in Memoirs of the Life, Writings and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton)
Nikola Tesla (1856-1943, physicist)
58. "I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success... Such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything." (Quoted in Marconi and Tesla: Pioneers of Radio Communication)
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939, psychologist)
59. "I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador - an adventurer, if you want it translated with - all the curiosity, daring and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort." (Letter to Wilhelm Fliess, 1900)
Nikola Tesla (1856-1943, physicist)
58. "I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success... Such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything." (Quoted in Marconi and Tesla: Pioneers of Radio Communication)
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939, psychologist)
59. "I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador - an adventurer, if you want it translated with - all the curiosity, daring and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort." (Letter to Wilhelm Fliess, 1900)
Marie Currie (1867-1934, physicist)
60. "I am among those who think that science has great beauty. A scientist in their laboratory is not only a technician: they are also a child placed before natural phenomena which impress them like a fairy tale." (Madame Curie: A Biography)
