Quotes about knowledge

There's the learning, O Partner: that you're cursed when you realize true things, because then you can't act with the full confidence of dumbness anymore.

"Ignorance is not a tragedy," said Anton, "merely an opportunity. But to know and refuse to know what you know, that is foolishness."

The relevant equation is: Knowledge = power = energy = matter = mass; a good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read. (p. 3)

A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.

I said I liked being half-educated; you were so much more surprised at everything when you were ignorant.

Ah, how little knowledge does a man acquire in his life. He gathereth it like water, but like water it runneth through his fingers, and yet, if his hands be but wet as though with dew, behold a generation of fools call out, "See, he is a wise man!"

It is easier to destroy knowledge, Ignosi, than to gather it.

In this marginal land accurate information was at a premium; to know the land was to prosper, not to know it meant starvation, and experts were a lot more valuable than bosses.

“You know, in principle, why our world is as it is. Isn’t that sufficient? Is it really necessary for you to understand every detail?”

But if I don’t understand, Morrow thought sourly, then you can control me. Arbitrarily. And that’s what I find hard to accept.

Understanding is the key to turning anything from a threat into an opportunity.

"After you know about biology, you don't have to be used by it."

The number one problem in academia today is not ignorant students but ignorant professors, who have substituted narrow “expertise” and “theoretical sophistication” (a preposterous term) for breadth and depth of learning in the world history of art and thought. … Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Overconcentration on any one point is a distortion. This is one of the primary reasons for the dullness and ineptitude of so much twentieth-criticism, as compared to nineteenth-century belles-lettres.