54 Insightful Knowledge Quotes

In our ever-evolving world, knowledge remains one of the most powerful tools at our disposal. It guides us, shapes our decisions, and influences the way we perceive the universe around us. For those eager to expand their horizons and gain deeper understanding, the words of sages, scholars, and thinkers throughout history offer invaluable insights. In this spirit, we've curated a selection of the top 54 insightful knowledge quotes, each one a gem of wisdom meant to inspire reflection and intellectual growth. Whether you're seeking motivation or a new perspective, these quotes are sure to enrich your journey toward greater knowledge and understanding.

1. “If it were customary to send little girls to school and teach them the same subjects as are taught to boys, they would learn just as fully and would understand the subtleties of all arts and sciences.” - Christine de Pizan

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

3. “There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance.” - Hippocrates

4. “Herein lies the tragedy of the age: not that men are poor, — all men know something of poverty; not that men are wicked, — who is good? not that men are ignorant, — what is Truth? Nay, but that men know so little of men.” - W. E. B. DuBois

5. “Someone said, 'The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.' Precisely, and they are that which we know.” - T.S. Eliot

6. “Knowledge is a better weapon than a sword.” - Patricia Briggs

7. “It is said there are flowers that bloom only once in a hundred years. Why should there not be some that bloom once in a thousand, in ten thousand years? Perhaps we never know about them simply because this "once in a thousand years" has come today.” - Zamyatin

8. “Mathematical Knowledge adds a manly Vigour to the Mind, frees it from Prejudice, Credulity, and Superstition.” - John Arbuthnot

9. “You can't know, you can only believe - or not.” - C.S. Lewis

10. “I set out to discover the why of it, and to transform my pleasure into knowledge.” - Charles Baudelaire

11. “Knowledge is the eye that must direct the foot of obedience.” - Thomas Watson

12. “She took refuge on the firm ground of fiction, through which indeed there curled the blue river of truth.” - Henry James

13. “Interviewer: Didn't Sagan want to believe?Druyan: he didn't want to believe. he wanted to know.” - Ann Druyan

14. “The ability to retain a child's view of the world with at the same time a mature understanding of what it means to retain it, is extremely rare - and a person who has these qualities is likely to be able to contribute something really important to our thinking.” - Mortimer J. Adler

15. “....a good book can teach you about the world and about yourself. You learn more than how to read better; you also learn more about life. You become wiser. Not just more knowledgeable - books that provide nothing but information can produce that result. But wiser, in the sense that you are more deeply aware of the great and enduring truths of human life.” - Mortimer J. Adler

16. “Everything I need to know... I learned in kindergarten.” - Robert Fulghum

17. “And whenever any one informs us that he has found a man who knows all the arts, and all things else that anybody knows, and every single thing with a higher degree of accuracy than any other man –whoever tells us this, I think that we can only imagine him to be a simple creature who is likely to have been deceived by some wizard or actor whom he met, and whom he thought all-knowing, because he himself was unable to analyze the nature of knowledge and ignorance and imitation.” - Plato

18. “Those who know nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own.” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

19. “The happiness of the drop is to die in the river.” - Imam Al- Ghazali

20. “Certainty is the most vivid condition of ignorance and the most necessarycondition for knowledge.” - Kedar Joshi

21. “What Brahman is cannot be described. All things in the world — the Vedas, the Puranas, the Tantras, the six systems of philosophy — have been defiled, like food that has been touched by the tongue, for they have been read or uttered by the tongue. Only one thing has not been defiled in this way, and that is Brahman. No one has ever been able to say what Brahman is.” - Sri Ramakrishna

22. “The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.” - Huston Smith

23. “It's common platitude that knowledge is neutral but every now and then it would be useful if it was on your side and not theirs.” - John Brunner

24. “Conquer the angry one by not getting angry; conquer the wicked by goodness; conquer the stingy by generosity, and the liar by speaking the truth.[Verse 223]” - Siddhārtha Gautama

25. “An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less until he knows absolutely everything about nothing.” - Nicholas Butler

26. “...Writings can be stolen, or changed, or used for evil purposes. But isn't the risk worth taking? The more people who share knowledge, the greater safeguard for it. Isn't there more danger in ignorance than knowledge?” - Lloyd Alexander

27. “Logic is immaturity weaving its nets of gossamer wherewith it aims to catch the behemoth of knowledge. Logic is a crutch for the cripple, but a burden for the swift of foot and a greater burden still for the wise.” - Mikhail Naimy

28. “Human knowledge consists not only of libraries of parchment and ink - it is also comprised of the volumes of knowledge that are written on the human heart, chiselled on the human soul, and engraved on the human psyche. ” - Michael Jackson

29. “Wilderness gave us knowledge. Wilderness made us human. We came from here. Perhaps that is why so many of us feel a strong bond to this land called Serengeti; it is the land of our youth.” - Boyd Norton

30. “Ideas are the source of all things” - Plato

31. “Knowledge is power, and the right knowledge lets man perform miraculous, almost godlike tasks.” - Dan Brown

32. “Flame is not the only fire.” Her tone turned almost stern. “You have brought your folk another spark far greater than any flame. You have opened their eyes to the world, Aljan, shown them lands and peoples formerly beyond their ken. You have whistled them out of their cramped, closed, inward-facing ring and led them into my Dance, the Great Circle and Cycle encompassing all. <…> Nay, flame has not been the greatest of my gifts to you. Knowledge, Aljan, that even now remakes the world. Knowledge is the fire.” - Meredith Ann Pierce

33. “Ah! how little knowledge does a man acquire in his life. He gathers it up like water, but like water it runs between 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!' Is it not so?” - H. Rider Haggard

34. “There is no knowing that does not begin with knowing God.” - John Calvin

35. “Science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves.” - Richard Feynman

36. “all appears to change when we change” - Henri Frédéric Amiel

37. “I am a student of life, and don't want to miss any experience. There's poetry in this sort of thing, you know--or perhaps you don't know, but it's all the same.” - H.P. Lovecraft

38. “Accepting the reality of change gives rise to equanimity.” - Allan Lokos

39. “Despite popular theories, I believe people fall in love based not on good looks or fate but on knowledge. Either they are amazed by something a beloved knows that they themselves do not know; or they discover a common rare knowledge; or they can supply knowledge to someone who's lacking. Hasn't everyone found a strange ignorance in someone beguiling? . . .Nowadays, trendy librarians, wanting to be important, say, Knowledge is power. I know better. Knowledge is love.” - Elizabeth McCracken

40. “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

41. “The most important lesson I have ever learned is that I haven't learned anything.” - Michel Templet

42. “Iago’s treatment of Othello conforms to Bacon’s definition of scientific enquiry as putting Nature to the Question. If a member of the audience were to interrupt the play and ask him: "What are you doing? could not Iago answer with a boyish giggle, "Nothing. I’m only trying to find out what Othello is really like"? And we must admit that his experiment is highly successful. By the end of the play he does know the scientific truth about the object to which he has reduced Othello. That is what makes his parting shot, What you know, you know, so terrifying for, by then, Othello has become a thing, incapable of knowing anything.And why shouldn’t Iago do this? After all, he has certainly acquired knowledge. What makes it impossible for us to condemn him self-righteously is that, in our culture, we have all accepted the notion that the right to know is absolute and unlimited. […] We are quite prepared to admit that, while food and sex are good in themselves, an uncontrolled pursuit of either is not, but it is difficult for us to believe that intellectual curiosity is a desire like any other, and to realize that correct knowledge and truth are not identical. To apply a categorical imperative to knowing, so that, instead of asking, "What can I know?" we ask, "What, at this moment, am I meant to know?" – to entertain the possibility that the only knowledge which can be true for us is the knowledge we can live up to – that seems to all of us crazy and almost immoral. But, in that case, who are we to say to Iago – "No, you mustn’t.” - W.H. Auden

43. “The increase of knowledge has forcedthe thinker to specialise, with the result that there is nobody capable to deal with civilisation as a whole. We are playing a game of chess in which nobody can see more than two or three squares at once, and so it has become impossible to form a coherent plan.” - Aleister Crowley

44. “Only when he has attained a final knowledge of all things will man have come to know himself. For things are only the boundaries of man.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

45. “Omnipotence and omniscience are the end of power and knowledge.” - Dejan Stojanovic

46. “إذا أردت أن تسمو، يجب أت تعرف أكثر..” - ثامر عدنان شاكر

47. “Reason is God's crowning gift to man, and you are rightTo warn me against losing mine. I cannot say—I hope that I shall never want to say!— that youHave reasoned badly. Yet there are other menWho can reason, too; and their opinions might be helpful.You are not in a position to know everythingThat people say or do, or what they feel:Your temper terrifies them—everyoneWill tell you only what you like to hear.” - Sophocles

48. “People are either scholars or learners, everyone else are mobs.” - Imam Ali bin abi Taleb

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

50. “The Sufi way is through knowledge and practice, not through intellect and talk.” - Idries Shah

51. “We don't really know anything. Those who accept this are more likely to learn something.” - Wayne Gerard Trotman

52. “Success is not about your techniques, it’s not solely about the wisdom or the knowledge you have, it’s about your mindset and your actions.” - Steve Maraboli

53. “The more you read within a balanced life, the more time you have. Strange but true.” - Mark O'Brien

54. “To furnish the means of acquiring knowledge is ... the greatest benefit that can be conferred upon mankind. It prolongs life itself and enlarges the sphere of existence.” - John Quincy Adams