52 Quotes About Knowledge

In a world where information is at our fingertips, the pursuit of knowledge remains an evergreen quest that fuels our curiosity, shapes our perspectives, and drives personal and collective growth. Whether it’s the wisdom of ancient philosophers or the insights of modern thinkers, quotes about knowledge have the power to inspire and enlighten us. In this blog post, we've curated a collection of the top 52 quotes about knowledge, each selected to provoke thought, spark curiosity, and encourage a deeper appreciation for the timeless quest to know and understand. Dive in and let these words of wisdom guide you on your own journey of discovery.

1. “I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn’t know.” - Mark Twain

2. “Philosophy ... is a science, and as such has no articles of faith; accordingly, in it nothing can be assumed as existing except what is either positively given empirically, or demonstrated through indubitable conclusions.” - Arthur Schopenhauer

3. “To acquire knowledge, one must study;but to acquire wisdom, one must observe.” - Marilyn Vos Savant

4. “What an author doesn't know could fill a book.” - Holly Black

5. “Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.” - John Locke

6. “Wenn [der Lehrer] wirklich weise ist, fordert er euch nicht auf, ins Haus seiner Weisheit einzutreten, sondern führt euch an die Schwelle eures eigenen Geistes.” - Khalil Gibran

7. “He felt a spasm of excitement because he knew instinctively who it was, or at least knew who it was he wanted it to be, and once you know what it is you want to be true, instinct is a very useful device for enabling you to know that it is.” - Douglas Adams

8. “The dead know everything but they don't give a damn.” - Joanne Harris

9. “Before he'd met Anna, he'd thought he'd known what love was, thought he'd understood about friendship, romance, all o fit, but he hadn't - not at all. Until he'd held Anna in his arms, until he'd let her see his soul, until he'd heard her cry gently when he made love to her for the first time, he'd known nothing.” - Gemma Malley

10. “You're a hopeless romantic," said Faber. "It would be funny if it were not serious. It's not books you need, it's some of the things that once were in books. The same things could be in the 'parlor families' today. The same infinite detail and awareness could be projected through the radios, and televisors, but are not. No,no it's not books at all you're looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. Books were only one type or receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us. Of course you couldn't know this, of course you still can't understand what I mean when i say all this. You are intuitively right, that's what counts.” - Ray Bradbury

11. “And even as each one of you stands alone in God's knowledge, so must each one of you be alone in his knowledge of God and in his understanding of the earth.” - Khalil Gibran

12. “Since we cannot know all there is to be known about anything, we ought to know a little about everything.” - Blaise Pascal

13. “Whoever has received knowledgeand eloquence in speech from Godshould not be silent or secretivebut demonstrate it willingly.When a great good is widely heard of,then, and only then, does it bloom,and when that good is praised by man,it has spread its blossoms.” - Marie de France

14. “Knowing is not simply a material act, since the object that is known always conceals something beyond the empirical datum. All our knowledge, even the most simple, is always a minor miracle, since it can never be fully explained by the material instruments that we apply to it. In every truth there is something more than we would have expected, in the love that we receive there is always an element that surprises us.” - Pope Benedict-XVI

15. “Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it. When we enquire into any subject, the first thing we have to do is to know what books have treated of it. This leads us to look at catalogues, and at the backs of books in libraries.” - Samuel Johnson

16. “Its a bit mad. Too bad, I mean, that getting to know each just for a fleeting second Must be replaced by unperfect knowledge of the featureless wholeLike some pocket history of the world, so generalAs to constitute a sob or wail” - John Ashbery

17. “If knowledge isn't self-knowledge it isn't doing much, mate. Is the universe expanding? Is it contracting? Is it standing on one leg and singing 'When Father Painted the Parlour'? Leave me out. I can expand my universe without you. 'She walks into beauty, like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies, and all that's best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes.” - Tom Stoppard

18. “Scoring well on tests is the sort of happy thing that gets the school district the greenbacks they crave. Understanding and appreciating the material are secondary.” - Libba Bray

19. “Don't be in a hurry to condemn because he doesn't do what you do or think as you think or as fast. There was a time when you didn't know what you know today.” - Malcolm X

20. “Knowledge is a tool, and like all tools, its impact is in the hands of the user.” - Dan Brown

21. “Learning isn't acquiring knowledge so much as it is trimming information that has already been acquired.” - Criss Jami

22. “WHO KNOWS WHAT EVIL LURKS IN THE HEART OF MEN?The Death of Rats looked up from the feast of the potato. SQUEAK, he said.Death waved a hand dismissively. WELL, YES, OBVIOUSLY ME, he said. I JUST WONDERED IF THERE WAS ANYONE ELSE.” - Terry Pratchett

23. “Anyone with half a mind could see that," said Tiffany.Miss Tick sighed. "Yes. But sometimes it's so hard to find half a mind when you need one.” - Terry Pratchett

24. “Her searches after knowledge were arbitrary and without context. It was as if she were shining a small flashlight of curiosity into the dark room of the world.” - Gloria Steinem

25. “Farms and food production should be, I submit, at least as important as who pierced their navel in Hollywood this week. Please tell me I'm not the only one who believes this. Please. As a culture, we think we're well educated, but I'm not sure that what we've learned necessarily helps us survive.” - Joel Salatin

26. “he who will not economize will have to agonize” - Confucius

27. “The world is perishing for lack of the knowledge of God and the Church is famishing for want of His Presence.” - A.W. Tozer

28. “Skepsis wirft Fragen auf, die zu Nachforschungen führen. Das ist sehr hilfreich, um neue Dinge zu entwickeln.” - Dalai Lama XIV

29. “Teile dein Wissen, so erlangst du Unsterblichkeit.” - Dalai Lama XIV

30. “Compromise, if not the spice of life, is its solidity. It is what makes nations great and marriages happy” - Phyllis McGinley

31. “From the mouths of the innocents flows truth.” - Rae Carson

32. “Wisdom cannot be stolen - it can only be shared.” - Jefferson Smith

33. “Continued observations in clinical psychological practice lead almost inevitably to the conclusion that deeper and more fundamental than sexuality, deeper than the craving for social power, deeper even than the desire for possessions, there is a still more generalized and universal craving in the human make-up. It is the craving for knowledge of the right direction - for orientation.” - William Sheldon

34. “Many modern artists, philosophers, and theologians reject the knowledge of the past. Thus they must continually start over again from ground zero, their vision restricted to their own narrow perspectives, making themselves artificially primitive.” - Gene Edward Veith Jr.

35. “A love affair with knowledge will never end in heartbreak.” - Michael Marino

36. “A mind is a simulation that simulates itself.” - Erol Ozan

37. “In America, everyone is entitled to an opinion, and it is certainly useful to have a few when a pollster shows up. But these are opinions of a quite different roder from eighteenth- or nineteenth-century opinions. It is probably more accurate to call them emotions rather than opinions, which would account for the fact that they change from week to week, as the pollsters tell us. What is happening here is that television is altering the meaning of 'being informed' by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. I am using this world almost in the precise sense in which it is used by spies in the CIA or KGB. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information--misplace, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information--information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing. In saying this, I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?” - Neil Postman

38. “Beyond all sciences, philosophies, theologies, and histories, a child's relentless inquiry is truly all it takes to remind us that we don't know as much as we think we know.” - Criss Jami

39. “The Prophet (SAW) said: 'Knowledge is only gained through learning and clemency is only gained through perseverance.” - Muhammad Adb Al-Rahman Al-Arifi

40. “A saving, though an immethodical knowledge of Christ, will bring us to heaven, John 17: 2, but a regular and methodical, as well as a saving knowledge of him, will bring heaven into us, Col. 2: 2, 3.” - John Flavel

41. “[...] the less you know, the less you will be aware of your ignorance. The familiar metaphor is that the wider the circle of our knowledge, the greater its contact with the unknown, and the more oppressive our feeling of cognitive inadequacy. By contrast, a small mind finds a small world to match it, and the smaller the mind the more it feels it has the world sussed.” - Raymond Tallis

42. “I believe we inherit a great river of knowledge, a flow of patterns coming from many sources. The information that comes from deep in the evolutionary past we call genetics. The information passed along from hundreds of years ago we call culture. The information passed along from decades ago we call family, and the information offered months ago we call education. But it is all information that flows through us. The brain is adapted to the river of knowledge and exists only as a creature in that river. Our thoughts are profoundly molded by this long historic flow, and none of us exists, self-made, in isolation from it.” - David Brooks

43. “Who is old enough to ask, is old enough to know.” - Sharon Lee

44. “We refuse to believe that which we don't understand.” - Napoleon Hill

45. “No power and no treasure can outweigh the extension of our knowledge.” - Democritus

46. “What we know is not much. What we do not know is immense.” - Pierre-Simon Laplace

47. “Knowledge is that possession that no misfortune can destroy, no authority can revoke, and no enemy can control. This makes knowledge the greatest of all freedoms.” - Bryant McGill

48. “Most people do not actually know how to think for themselves, and unfortunately that prevents them from even knowing it.” - Bryant McGill

49. “There are some who do not learn, and who do not improve as fast as they might, because their eyes and their hearts are not upon God; they do not reflect neither do they have that knowledge which they might have; they miss a good deal which they might receive. We have got to obtain knowledge before we obtain permanent happiness; we have got to be wide awake in the things of God.” - Lorenzo Snow

50. “But when I roamed New York City, knowing so much and capable of speaking so nicely, and yet so lonely, and often hungry and cold, I learned the joke at the core of American self-improvement: knowledge was so much junk to be processed one way or another at great universities. The real treasure the great universities offered was a lifelong membership in a respected artificial extended family.” - Kurt Vonnegut

51. “إن المدرسة المعلوماتية التراكمية معادية للفكر والإبداع، وتدور في إطار الموضوعية المتلقية، السلبية، العقل عندها آلة ترصد وتسجل،وليس طاقة إنسانية مبدعة تعيد صياغة العالم، وهي لاتكترث بالحق أو الحقيقة لأنها غرقت تماما في الحقائق والوقائع والأفكار المتناثرة، ترصدها من الخارج دون تعمق ودون اجتهاد وكأنها أشياء مرصوصة، كم لاهوية له، ولذا تفقد الظواهر شخصيتها ومنحناها الخاص” - عبد الوهاب المسيري

52. “Scholars of the East and West have heroically consecrated their whole working lives to making available, by means of their own disciplines, Sufi literary and philosophical material to the world at large. In many cases they have faithfully recorded the Sufis' own reiteration that the Way of the Sufis cannot be understood by means of the intellect or by ordinary book learning.” - Idries Shah