Famous Quotes & Sayings

Herman Melville

People seem to have a great love for names. For to know a great many names seems to look like knowing a good many things.

Herman Melville

You know nothing till you know all; which is the reason we never know any thing.

Henry David Thoreau

Every man has to learn the points of the compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction.

Henry David Thoreau

While England endeavors to cure the potato-rot, will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?

Henry David Thoreau

What is chastity? How shall a man know if he is chaste? He shall not know it. We have heard of this virtue, but we know not what it is.

Henry David Thoreau

Long enough I had heard of irrelevant things; now at length I was glad to make acquaintance with the light that dwells in rotten wood. Where is all your knowledge gone to? It evaporates completely, for it has no depth.

Henry David Thoreau

That is a pathetic inquiry among travelers and geographers after the site of ancient Troy. It is not near where they think it is.When a thing is decayed and gone, how indistinct must be the place it occupied!

Henry David Thoreau

Such is always the pursuit of knowledge. The celestial fruits, the golden apples of the Hesperides, are ever guarded by a hundred-headed dragon which never sleeps, so that it is an Herculean labor to pluck them.

Henry David Thoreau

We bless and curse ourselves.

Henry David Thoreau

Since all things are good, men fail at last to distinguish which is the bane and which the antidote.

Henry David Thoreau

If I ever see more clearly at one time than at another, the medium through which I see is clearer.

Henry David Thoreau

Always the laws of light are the same, but the modes and degrees of seeing vary.

Henry David Thoreau

The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secrets of things.

Henry David Thoreau

Some creatures are made to see in the dark.

Henry David Thoreau

History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning ofthings, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,--when did burdock and plantain sprout first?

Henry David Thoreau

The researcher is more memorable than the researched.

Henry David Thoreau

Give me a sentence which no intelligence can understand. There must be a kind of life and palpitation to it, and under its words akind of blood must circulate forever.

Henry David Thoreau

It is true, we are such poor navigators that our thoughts, for the most part, stand off and on upon a harborless coast, are conversant only with the bights of the bays of poesy, or steer for the public ports of entry, and go into the dry docks of science, where they merely refit for this world, and no natural currents concur to individualize them.

Henry David Thoreau

All perception of truth is the detection of an analogy.

Henry David Thoreau

Much is said about the progress of science in these centuries. I should say that the useful results of science had accumulated, but that there had been no accumulation of knowledge, strictly speaking, for posteriry; for knowledge is to be aquired only by corresponding experience. How can be know what we are told merely? Each man can interpret another's experience only by his own.

Henry David Thoreau

Even the facts of science may dust the mind by their dryness, unless they are ... rendered fertile by the dews of fresh and living truth. Knowledge does not come to us by details, but in flashes of light from heaven.

Henry David Thoreau

The knowledge of an unlearned man is living and luxuriant like a forest, but covered with mosses and lichens and for the most part inaccessible and going to waste; the knowledge of the man of science is like timber collected in yards for public works, which still supports a green sprout here and there, but even this is liable to dry rot.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

I do not know is a phrase which becomes us.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The one thing we do not know is the limit of the knowable.

Jean Rostand

It is sometimes important for science to know how to forget the things she is surest of.

Jean de La Fontaine

He knoweth the universe, and himself he knoweth not.

Jean de La Fontaine

Example is a dangerous lure: where the wasp got through the gnat sticks fast.

Gro Harlem Brundtland

I have repeatedly stressed that we have the knowledge to reduce hunger and poverty.

Gerald Durrell

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

Hannah Arendt

The conviction that everything that happens on earth must be comprehensible to man can lead to interpreting history by commonplaces.

Harold Pinter

How can the unknown merit reverence? In other words how can you revere that of which you are ignorant? At the same time, it would be ridiculous to propose that what we know merits reverence. What we know merits any one of a number of things, but it stands to reason reverence isn't one of them. In other words, apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?

Jacques Barzun

Of true knowledge at any time, a good part is merely convenient, necessary indeed to the worker, but not to an understanding of his subject: One can judge a building without knowing where to buy the bricks; one can understand a violin sonata without knowing how to score for the instrument. The work may in fact be better understood without a knowledge of the details of its manufacture, of attention to these tends to distract from meaning and effect.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Hasn't knowledge only crippled me from seeing truth? Is knowledge itself illusory?