Electrical science has revealed to us the true nature of light, has provided us with innumerable appliances and instruments of precision, and has thereby vastly added to the exactness of our knowledge.

How do you know what it’s like to be stupid if you’ve never been smart?

All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own.

Our ambition should be to rule ourselves, the true kingdom for each one of us; and true progress is to know more, and be more, and to do more.

There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.

An ignorant person is one who doesn’t know what you have just found out.

For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.

Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing.

The less you know, the more you believe.

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead.

To attain any assured knowledge about the soul is one of the most difficult things in the world.

If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water.

I am in the world feeling my way to light ‚amid the encircling gloom.‘

When I write, I write about my surroundings. Sometimes it’s light, and sometimes it gets very dark.

Much learning does not teach understanding.

Entire ignorance is not so terrible or extreme an evil, and is far from being the greatest of all; too much cleverness and too much learning, accompanied with ill bringing-up, are far more fatal.

It is only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know.

He who possesses art and science has religion; he who does not possess them, needs religion.

My preparation is about precision. It is a science.

People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little.

Facts are stubborn things.

When I was about thirteen, the library was going to get ‚Calculus for the Practical Man.‘ By this time I knew, from reading the encyclopedia, that calculus was an important and interesting subject, and I ought to learn it.

It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they were found because it was possible to find them.

The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything.

Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.

Beyond a doubt truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness.

The desire of excessive power caused the angels to fall; the desire of knowledge caused men to fall.

Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned.

Who is the wisest man? He who neither knows or wishes for anything else than what happens.

Genius without education is like silver in the mine.

The mind unlearns with difficulty what it has long learned.

Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.

Too much of what is called ‚education‘ is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.

The wise man should restrain his senses like the crane and accomplish his purpose with due knowledge of his place, time and ability.

All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.

People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.

The learning and knowledge that we have, is, at the most, but little compared with that of which we are ignorant.

The word ‚belief‘ is a difficult thing for me. I don’t believe. I must have a reason for a certain hypothesis. Either I know a thing, and then I know it – I don’t need to believe it.

Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.

I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding; they learn by some other way – by rote, or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!

Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.

They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it’s not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance.

Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.

We dance round in a ring and suppose, but the secret sits in the middle and knows.

The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.

Let’s not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.

Instruments sound interesting, not because of their sound, but because of the relationship a player has with them. Instrumentalists build a rapport with their instruments, which is what you like and respond to.

The truth of things is the chief nutriment of superior intellects.

The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.

Vanity of science. Knowledge of physical science will not console me for ignorance of morality in time of affliction, but knowledge of morality will always console me for ignorance of physical science.

Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.

Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.

I kind of thought that stand-up comedy would suffer from the Internet because people seem to know more about the craft of stand-up than ever before. I thought it would seem trite. Kind of like if you know more about magicians, you wouldn’t love them.

To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it.

Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.

The difficulty is to try and teach the multitude that something can be true and untrue at the same time.

I cannot discover that anyone knows enough to say definitely what is and what is not possible.

Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere.