Knowledge Quotes

Knowledge of the past and of the places of the earth is the ornament and food of the mind of man.

He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.

Learning is the only thing the mind never exhausts, never fears, and never regrets.

Nature is the source of all true knowledge. She has her own logic, her own laws, she has no effect without cause nor invention without necessity.

Art is the queen of all sciences communicating knowledge to all the generations of the world.

For, verily, great love springs from great knowledge of the beloved object, and if you little know it, you will be able to love it only little or not at all.

All sciences are vain and full of errors that are not born of Experience, the mother of all Knowledge.

The acquisition of knowledge is always of use to the intellect, because it may thus drive out useless things and retain the good. For nothing can be loved or hated unless it is first known.

And you who wish to represent by words the form of man and all the aspects of his membrification, relinquish that idea. For the more minutely you describe the more you will confine the mind of the reader, and the more you will keep him from the knowledge of the thing described. And so it is necessary to draw and to describe.

If the painter has clumsy hands, he will be apt to introduce them into his works, and so of any other part of his person, which may not happen to be so beautiful as it ought to be. He must, therefore, guard particularly against that self-love, or too good opinion of his own person, and study by every means to acquire the knowledge of what is most beautiful, and of his own defects, that he may adopt the one and avoid the other.

All knowledge which ends in words will die as quickly as it came to life, with the exception of the written word: which is its mechanical part.

He who has access to the fountain does not go to the water-pot.

Happy will they be who lend ear to the words of the dead.

Abbreviators do harm to knowledge and to love.

It is true that impatience, the mother of stupidity, praises brevity, as if such persons had not life long enough to serve them to acquire a complete knowledge of one single subject, such as the human body; and then they want to comprehend the mind of God in which the universe is included, weighing it minutely and mincing it into infinite parts, as if they had to dissect it!

We know more about the movement of celestial bodies than about the soil underfoot.

Feathers shall raise men even as they do birds towards heaven :- That is by letters written with their quills.

Shun those studies in which the work that results dies with the worker.

Good literature proceeds from men of natural probity, and since one ought rather to praise the inception than the result, you should give greater praise to a man of probity unskilled in letters than to one skilled in letters but devoid of probity.

Show me a family of readers, and I will show you the people who move the world.