Quotes Tagged "knowledge"

If all of human knowledge is like a library that we can borrow from or add to, then when men don't put these kinds of stories [(their abuse from others)] on the shelves, nobody can borrow them--we all miss out.

In fact, if one reads attentively what Sri Aurobindo has written, all that he has written, one would have the answer to every question.

Don't find your certificate in the worth, find your worth in the certificate

Not everyone who understands, understands.

The second fundamental misconception in inductivism is that scientific theories predict that ‘the future will resemble the past’, and that ‘the unseen resembles the seen’ and so on. (Or that it ‘probably’ will.) But in reality the future is unlike the past, the unseen very different from the seen. Science often predicts – and brings about – phenomena spectacularly different from anything that has been experienced before. For millennia people dreamed about flying, but they experienced only falling. Then they discovered good explanatory theories about flying, and then they flew – in that order. Before 1945, no human being had ever observed a nuclear-fission (atomic-bomb) explosion; there may never have been one in the history of the universe. Yet the first such explosion, and the conditions under which it would occur, had been accurately predicted – but not from the assumption that the future would be like the past. Even sunrise – that favourite example of inductivists – is not always observed every twenty-four hours: when viewed from orbit it may happen every ninety minutes, or not at all. And that was known from theory long before anyone had ever orbited the Earth.

Copy your fathers, your ancestors, See, their words endure in books, Open, read them, copy their knowledge, He who is taught becomes skilled. Don’t be evil, kindness is good..

I am knowing to him who lacks knowledge, One who teaches a man what is useful to him. I am a straight one in the king’s house, Who knows what to say in every office. I am a listener who listens to the truth, Who ponders it in the heart. I am one pleasant to his lord’s house, Who is remembered for his good qualities. I am kindly in the offices, One who is calm and does not roar. I am kindly, not short-tempered, One who does not attack a man for a remark. I am accurate like the scales. Straight and true like Thoth. I am firm-footed, well-disposed, Loyal to him who advanced him. I am a knower who taught himself knowledge, An advisor whose advice is sought. I am a speaker in the hall of justice, Skilled in speech in anxious situations.

Science involves the quest for knowledge. Any such quest, by necessity, involves some commitment to epistemology. The epistemology of irrationalism is fatal to all science because it makes knowledge of anything impossible. If a truth’s contrary can also be true, no truth about anything can possibly be known.

It pleases the heart to ignore it. You have done what pleases their hearts. You have sustained people among them. Yet they cover their faces in fear of tomorrow. There was an old man who was about to die, while his son was a child without knowledge.

No sleeper whom you have wakened, None downcast whom you have roused, None whose shut mouth you have opened, None ignorant whom you gave knowledge. None foolish whom you have taught.

I don't know you. I can't know you. You don't even know yourself, see? And me, do you know me? No. Even less. You know what I tell you, and I tell you the truth, but maybe not all. And you read my feelings, my surface feelings—the pain of a stubbed toe, a quick flash of annoyance, the pleasure I get when you're in me. Does that mean you know me? What of my levels, and levels? What about the things I don't even know myself? Do you know them? How, Robb, how?

If you have the kind of intelligence and instinct that will point you in the right direction, playing the rebel will not be dangerous. But if you are mediocre ... you are better off learning from your predecessor's knowledge and experience, which are based on something real.

Do not seek so anxiously to be developed, to subject yourself to many influences to be played on; it is all dissipation. Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly lights.

As we all know, there is a kind of lazy pleasure in useless and out-of-the-way erudition.

Gnosticism, a highly intellectual second-century movement (the word ‘gnostic’ comes from the Greek word for ‘knowledge’) that was later declared heretical, didn’t help. Heretics were intellectual therefore intellectuals were, if not heretical, then certainly suspect. So ran the syllogism. Intellectual simplicity or, to put a less flattering name on it, ignorance was widely celebrated. The biography of St Antony records with approval that he ‘refused to learn to read and write or to join in the silly games of the other little children’. Education and silly games are here bracketed together, and both are put in opposition to holiness. Instead of this, we learn, Antony ‘burned with the desire for God’. That this wasn’t quite true – Antony’s letters reveal a much more careful thinker than this implies – didn’t much matter: it appealed to a powerful ideal. No need to read: give up both books and bread and you will win God’s favour. Even intellectuals were susceptible to this pretty picture: it was hearing about how the simple, unlettered Antony had inspired so many to turn to Christ that led Augustine to start striking himself on the head, tearing his hair and asking, ‘What is wrong with us?’ Ignorance was power.

You no longer know what you feel when you can say what you feel.

Nothing is granted, nothing is given. Like Adam and Eve we have o discover everything for ourselves.

My mind, it was certain, was a well-oiled mechanism which worked swiftly and seminoiselessly. I often competed with radio contestants on quiz programs and usually won hands down in my living room. Oh, my mental machine could have excited anyone. I meant anyone interested in a person who had memorized the Presidents of the United States in chronological order, the capitals of the world, the minerals of the earth and the generic names of various species. There weren't too many callers for those qualifications and I had to admit that I was greatly lacking in the popular attractions of physical beauty and womanly wiles.

I am a dangerous person to the corporate world because I have far too much knowledge of their frauds and corruption.

The tens of thousands of books, the remnants of the greatest library in the world, were all lost, never to reappear. Perhaps they were burned. As the modern scholar, Luciano Canfora, observed: ‘the burning of books was part of the advent and imposition of Christianity’. A war against pagan temples was also a war against the books that had all too often been stored inside them for safekeeping – a concept that from now on could only be recalled with irony. If they were burned then this was a significant moment in what Canfora has called ‘the melancholy experiences of the war waged by Christianity against the old culture and its sanctuaries: which meant, against the libraries’. Over a thousand years later, Edward Gibbon raged at the waste: ‘The appearance of the empty shelves excited the regret and indignation of every spectator, whose mind was not wholly darkened with religious prejudice.