Quotes about knowledge

“I do not like the thought of compulsion.”

He shook his head at me. “Not compulsion, Jinian. Information, more like. It is as though I had been given a map which showed both the good roads and the swamps. Is it compulsion to avoid the swamps if one knows they are there?”

This is the problem with too much Schooling. One learns to manipulate the labels in a way that the Gamesmistresses approve, and one doesn’t realize that things do not always act in accordance with the labels in the real world. One doesn’t realize that the labels, come to that, are often wrong.

We had what we thought was the answer and we troubled to look no further.

“He is a Seer,” Mavin said sullenly, aware of her lack of logic.

“Poof. Seers. Sometimes they know everything about something no one cares about. Often they know nothing about something important.”

“Wisdom,” growled the Agirul. “Painful, isn’t it? We assume so much and resist learning to the contrary.”

Recognition is famously a passage from ignorance to knowledge.

Your young white, who gathers his learning from books and can measure what he knows by the page, may conceit that his knowledge, like his legs, outruns that of his fathers', but, where experience is the master, the scholar is made to know the value of years, and respects them accordingly.

“Don’t you know everything?”

God smiled. “No, I outgrew that trick long ago. You can’t imagine how boring it was.”

I realize I don’t know very much. None of us knows very much. But we can all learn more. Then we can teach one another. We can stop denying reality or hoping it will go away by magic.

The desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it.

Shall we be destined to the days of eternity, on holy-days, as well as working-days, to be showing the relics of learning, as monks do the relics of their saints — without working one — one single miracle with them?

I am convinced, Yorick, continued my father, half reading and half discoursing, that there is a Northwest Passage to the intellectual world; and that the soul of man has shorter ways of going to work, in furnishing itself with knowledge and instruction, than we generally take with it.