Quotes by Philosophers - Page 321

The man who discovers new knowledge is the permanent benefactor of humanity.
Ayn Rand
...[M]oral instruction, although containing much that is convincing for the reason, ...accomplishes... little... [because] the teachers themselves have not got their own notions clear, and when they endeavor to make up for this by raking up motives of moral goodness from every quarter, trying to make their physic right strong, they spoil it.
Immanuel Kant
...[T]hese people... are my dangerous accusers because those who hear them suppose that anyone who inquires into such matters... theories about the heavens... and everything below the earth... must be an atheist.
Socrates
Open thy mind; take in what I explain and keep it there; because to understand is not to know, if thou dost not retain...
Dante Alighieri
Sometimes you should ask yourself if the world would be a better place without your existence, then you would know if you are on the right path or not.
Gift Gugu Mona
We humans, through old habits, and because of the inherent structure of human knowledge have a tendency to make static, definite, and, in a way, absolutistic one-valued statements. But when we fight absolutism, we quite often establish, instead, some other dogma equally silly and harmful. For instance, an active atheist is psycho-logically as unsound as a rabid theist.
Alfred Korzybski
That's a rhetorical question, and trying to answer rhetorical questions instead of being cowed by them is a good habit to cultivate.
Daniel C. Dennett
Neither love without knowledge nor knowledge without love can produce a good life.
Bertrand Russell
But of all the deadly theories by means of which you are now being destroyed, I would like to warn you about one of the deadliest and most crucial: the alleged dichotomy of science and ethics. It is the doctrine that man's science and ethics - or his knowledge and values, or his body and soul - are two separate, antagonistic aspects of his existence, and that man is caught between them, as a precarious, permanent traitor to their conflicting demands.
Ayn Rand
Given the opportunity of 'Earth-School' enrollment - some are humble enough to learn and grow, stubborn enough to fail and repeat, and wise enough to graduate and never return.
T.F. Hodge
Now there are four chief obstacles in grasping truth, which hinder every man, however learned, and scarcely allow anyone to win a clear title to learning, namely, submission to faulty and unworthy authority, influence of custom, popular prejudice, and concealment of our own ignorance accompanied by an ostentatious display of our knowledge.
Roger Bacon
…the more things you know, or pretend to know, the more powerful you are. It doesn’t matter if things are true. What counts, remember, is to possess a secret.
Umberto Eco
Certainty is the most vivid condition of ignorance and the most necessarycondition for knowledge.
Kedar Joshi
Every other knowledge is harmful to him who does not have knowledge of goodness.
Michel de Montaigne
I would address one general admonition to all, that they consider what are the true ends of knowledge, and that they seek it not either for pleasure of the mind, or for contention, or for superiority to others, or for profit, or for fame, or power, or any of these inferior things, but for the benefit and use of life; and that they perfect and govern it in charity. For it was from lust of power that the Angels fell, from lust of knowledge that man fell, but of charity there can be no excess, neither did angel or man come in danger by it.
Francis Bacon
Foresight of phenomenon and power over them depend on knowledge of their sequences, and not upon any notion we may have formed respecting their origin or inmost nature.
John Stuart Mill
Later times have laid all the blame upon the Goths and Vandals, but, however unwilling the partizans of the Christian system may be to believe or to acknowledge it, it is nevertheless true, that the age of ignorance commenced with the Christian system.There was more knowledge in the world before that period, than for many centuries afterwards; and as to religious knowledge, the Christian system, as already said, was only another species of mythology; and the mythology to which it succeeded, was a corruption of an ancient system of theism.; and if we take our stand about the beginning of the sixteenth century, we look back through that long chasm, to the times of the Ancients, as over a vast sandy desert, in which not a shrub appears to intercept the vision to the fertile hills beyond.
Thomas Paine
The final discovery is the discovery of knowledge.
Kedar Joshi
We must not attach knowledge to the mind, we have to incorporate it there.
Michel de Montaigne
If things far away don’t concern you, you’ll soon mourn things close at hand.
Confucius
Neglect of mathematics work injury to all knowledge, since he who is ignorant of it cannot know the other sciences or things of this world. And what is worst, those who are thus ignorant are unable to perceive their own ignorance, and so do not seek a remedy.
Roger Bacon
Wandering across the vast room, I stopped at a set of shelves as high as the ceiling, and holding about six hundred volumes - all classics on the history of Soalris, starting with the nine volumes of Giese's monumental and already relatively obsolescent monograph. Display for its own sake was improbable in these surroundings. The collection was a respective tribute to the memory of the pioneers. I took down the massive volumes of Giese and sat leafing through them. Rheya had also located som reading matter. Looking over her shoulder, I saw that she had picked one of the many books brought out by the first expedition, the Interplanetary Cookery Book, which could have been the personal property of Giese himself. She was pouring over the recipes adapted to the arduous conditions of interstellar flight. I said nothing, and returned to the book resting on my knees. Solaris - Ten Years of Exploration had appeared as volumes 4-12 of the Solariana collection whose most recent additions were numbered in the thousands.
Stanisław Lem
The greatest challenge that has surreptitiously arisen in our age is the challenge of knowledge, indeed, not as against ignorance; but knowledge as conceived and disseminated throughout the world by Western civilization; knowledge whose nature has become problematic because it has lost its true purpose due to being unjustly conceived, and has thus brought about chaos in man's life instead of, and rather than, peace and justice; knowledge which pretends to be real but which is productive of confusion and scepticism, which has elevated doubt and conjecture to the 'scientific' rank in methodology; knowledge which has, for the first time in history, brought chaos to the Three Kingdom of Nature; the animal, vegetal and mineral.
Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas
A monk should surely love his books with humility, wishing their good and not the glory of his own curiosity; but what the temptation of adultery is for laymen and the yearning for riches is for secular ecclesiastics, the seduction of knowledge is for monks.
Umberto Eco
Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.
Baruch Spinoza
The power of thought is the light of knowledge, the power of will is the energy of character, the power of heart is love. Reason, love and power of will are perfections of man.
Ludwig Feuerbach
Only the subject's individual consciousness can testify for the unwitnessed acts, and there is no act more deprived of external testimony than the act of knowing.
Olavo de Carvalho
Only through Beauty's morning-gate, dost thou penetrate the land of knowledge.
Friedrich Schiller
An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less until he knows absolutely everything about nothing.
Nicholas Murray Butler
The Christian does not avoid sin to achieve salvation, but rather salvation brings him to a desire not to sin. The closer that one's spirit is synchronized with the holy knowledge of God, the more he comprehends how and why sin is destructive to himself and others in each and every circumstance. The dwindling desire for sin is a premature gift of Heaven - where there will be no sin, where all will, too, possess that full and complete wisdom; all will have perfect reasons not to sin. In this way, free will might still exist, but the shared wisdom of God will simply outwit all desires, impulses, and needs to sin.
Criss Jami
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
As the biggest library if it is in disorder is not as useful as a small but well-arranged one, so you may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value to you than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself; because only through ordering what you know by comparing every truth with every other truth can you take complete possession of your knowledge and get it into your power.
Arthur Schopenhauer
The Search for reason ends at the known; on the immense expanse beyond it only the sense of the ineffable can glide. It alone knows the route to that which is remote from experience and understanding. Neither of them is amphibious: reason cannot go beyond the shore, and the sense of the ineffable is out of place where we measure, where we weigh. We do not leave the shore of the known in search of adventure or suspense or because of the failure of reason to answer our questions. We sail because our mind is like a fantastic seashell, and when applying our ear to its lips we hear a perpetual murmur from the waves beyond the shore. Citizens of two realms, we all must sustain a dual allegiance: we sense the ineffable in one realm, we name and exploit reality in another. Between the two we set up a system of references, but we can never fill the gap. They are as far and as close to each other as time and calendar, as violin and melody, as life and what lies beyond the last breath.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
Knowledge without courage is sterile.
Baltasar Gracián
The meditative mind sees disagreeable or agreeable things with equanimity, patience, and good-will. Transcendent knowledge is seeing reality in utter simplicity. (146)
Jean-Yves Leloup
Knowledge unqualified is knowledge simply of something learned.
Plato
The complexities of adult life get in the way of the truth.
Mortimer J. Adler
The range of human knowledge today is so great that we're all specialists and the distance between specializations has become so great that anyone who seeks to wander freely between them almost has to forego closeness with the people around him.
Robert M. Pirsig
It is like the thirsty traveller who at first sincerely sought the water of knowledge, but who later, having found it plain perhaps, proceeded to temper his cup with the salt of doubt so that his thirst now becomes insatiable though he drinks incessantly, and that in thus drinking the water that cannot slake his thirst, he has forgotten the original and true purpose for which the water was sought.
Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas
Knowledge kills action action requires the veils of illusion.
Friedrich Nietzsche
No power and no treasure can outweigh the extension of our knowledge.
Democritus
Then we shan’t regard anyone as a lover of knowledge or wisdom who is fussy about what he studies…
Plato
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
Television, radio, and all the sources of amusement and information that surround us in our daily lives are also artificial props. They can give us the impression that our minds are active, because we are required to react to stimuli from the outside. But the power of those external stimuli to keep us going is limited. They are like drugs. We grow used to them, and we continuously need more and more of them. Eventually, they have little or no effect. Then, if we lack resources within ourselves, we cease to grow intellectually, morally, and spiritually. And we we cease to grow, we begin to die.
Mortimer J. Adler
Since we cannot know all there is to be known about anything, we ought to know a little about everything.
Blaise Pascal
All children are atheists, they have no idea of God.
Paul Henri Thiry d'Holbach
Judgement can do without knowledge: but not knowledge without judgement.
Michel de Montaigne
Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.
Aldous Huxley
A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild-flower discovered on the prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East. Genius is a light which makes the darkness visible, like the lightning’s flash, which perchance shatters the temple of knowledge itself--and not a taper lighted at the hearthstone of the race, which pales before the light of common day.
Henry David Thoreau
The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you actually don’t know.
Robert M. Pirsig
To ask the 'right' question is far more important than to receive the answer. The solution of a problem lies in the understanding of the problem; the answer is not outside the problem, it is in the problem.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
If the ignorance of nature gave birth to such a variety of gods, the knowledge of this nature is calculated to destroy them.
Paul Henri Thiry d'Holbach
Knowledge is not made for understanding it is made for cutting.
Michel Foucault
Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. Books, the oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves of every cottage. They have no cause of their own to plead, but while they enlighten and sustain the reader his common sense will not refuse them. Their authors are a natural and irresistible aristocracy in every society, and, more than kings or emperors, exert an influence on mankind.
Henry David Thoreau
When most of the greatest individuals in history were misunderstood and you've spent so much of your own adult life misunderstood, you can't help but believe that the majority of people know very little worth knowing.
Criss Jami
Those who don't know must learn from those who do.
Plato
What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.
Bertrand Russell
Acquiring knowledge is a form of imitation.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
I think that knowledge enslaves us, that at the base of all knowledge there is a servility, the acceptation of a way of life wherein each moment has meaning only in relation to another or others that will follow it.
Georges Bataille
Knowledge is the food of the soul.
Plato