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The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.
Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination.
Science is facts; just as houses are made of stones, so is science made of facts; but a pile of stones is not a house and a collection of facts is not necessarily science.
The sublime, gradually divided into separate entities as we grow in knowledge, does not readily merge again in our mind; this means that we are deprived in stages of the best thing granted to us, of the sense of oneness which lifts us up completely into sharing a sense of the infinite, and, on the other hand, we are all the time diminishing in stature as we grow in knowledge. Whereas before we were like giants in view of the whole, we now see ourselves as dwarfs in the face of separate sections.
As the sphere of knowledge expands, the surface area of ignorance grows ever larger.
Book: Tripping by Charles Hayes, page 447
As you build the fire bigger, the greater the darkness that you reveal.
Book: Tripping by Charles Hayes, page 447
Those who believe in the power of broad patterns and rules, rather than the authority of individuals or institutions, are not intimidated by the boundaries and hierarchies of knowledge.
I think we have to go to the young people, right from the very beginning. The whole structure of how we learn about science has been warped and is getting more warped by the testing requirements that are put in place now because science is being taught as a set of facts instead of being portrayed as a process or a trajectory, and the trajectory is what really matters. Knowledge is plastic and is always evolving, and ideas mature and take on different shapes. The only way that you are going to distinguish between an immature idea and a mature idea is if you have a better understanding of how science works. So that is why I focused that book on young people. Kids are the only chunk of society left that is open to new ways of thinking. The more I learned over the years, the more rigid and entrenched people get the older they are, in terms of the way they feel the world works.
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urthstripe /
belief, believe, candy, future, germs, jade, knowledge, life, light, politicians, sex, soap, stars, true, world
#2346
I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren’t true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they’re true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen-I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is regularly visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones who look like wrinkedly lemurs and bad ones who mutilate our cattle and want out water and our women. I believe the future sucks and I believe the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone’s ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline of good sex in America is coincidant with the decline in drive-in movie theatres from state-to-state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe they are better then the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to germs so that one day we’ll all be wiped out by the common cold like the martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the best poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed siberian shaman. I believe that man’s destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really DID taste better when I was a kid, that its aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, and that there’s a cat in a box somewhere who’s alive and dead at the same time(Although if they don’t ever open the box it’ll just be two different types of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older then the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn’t even know I’m alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of casual chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn’t done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what’s going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman’s right to choose, a baby’s right to live, and while all life is sacred there’s nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you’re alive and that you may as well lie back and enjoy it.
Book: “American Gods” by Neil Gaiman
Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.
We know what we are, but know not what we may be.
Some say, “those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.” I say, “those who ignore history…are in for BIG surprise.”
TV: The Colbert Réport: 22 Feb 2006
There is nothing new under the sun but there are lots of old things we don’t know.
Yet with how many things are we upon the brink of becoming acquainted, if cowardice or carelessness did not restrain our inquiries.
Book: Frankenstein
You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing - that’s what counts.
Knowledge is the small part of ignorance that we arrange and classify.
Learning to learn is to know how to navigate in a forest of facts, ideas, and theories, a proliferation of constantly changing items of knowledge. Learning to learn is to know what to ignore but at the same time not rejecting innovation and research.
If we represent knowledge as a tree, we know that things that are divided are yet connected. We know that to observe the divisions and ignore the connections is to destroy the tree.
There is no rational ground of any sort or kind in keeping a child ignorant of anything that he may wish to know, whether on sex or on any other matter. And we shall never get a sane population until this fact is recognized in early education, which is impossible so long as the churches are able to control educational politics.
Book: “Why I Am Not a Christian, and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects”, 1957 (p. 29)
The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.
I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there.
The hacker class has an ambivalent relation to education. Hackers desire knowledge, not education. The hacker comes into being through the pure liberty of knowledge in and of itself.
Book: “A Hacker Manifesto” by McKenzie Wark, [055]
Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens.
The easiest and surest way of acquiring facts is to learn them in groups, in systems, and systemized knowledge is science. You can very often carry two facts fastened together more easily than one by itself, as a housemaid can carry two pails of water with a hoop more easily than one without it.
Might not remember his name, but he knows the formula.
speaking about Richard
Wonder, rather than doubt, is the root of knowledge.
Your talk is surely the handiwork of wisdom because not one word of it do I understand.
Book: “The Third Policeman” by Flann O’Brien
A key component of wisdom is knowing the limits of your knowledge. Truly smart people understand that they don’t have all the answers.
The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you the knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.
I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.
It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not possession but the act of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment.
It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Inevitably one begins to twist the facts to suit the theories.
Of all the frictional resistances, the one that most retards human movement is ignorance.
He whose desires are drawn toward knowledge in every form will be absorbed in the pleasures of the soul, and will hardly feel bodily pleasures—I mean, if he be a true philosopher and not a sham one.
What do you see? … She looked down, murmuring her answer. “I see stone and dust and ashes.” It was how he had taught her. Question and answer, all day and every day; forcing her to look to focus on what was in front of her. Yes, and to make those fine distinctions between things that were the basis of all knowledge.
Book: “Myst: The Book of Ti’ana” by Rand Miller, pg. 71
She taught me what is good and what is to be valued, those truths which cannot be shaken or changed.
Book: “Myst: The Book of Atrus” by Rand Miller
Learning occurs at the fringe of what you know already. If you don’t know much, there’s not much you can learn.
Knowledge is, indeed, that which, next to virtue, truly and essentially raises one man above another.
To acquire knowledge, one must study; but to acquire wisdom, one must observe.
The true lover of learning then must from his earliest youth, as far as in him lies, desire all truth.
Numbers are the highest degree of knowledge. It is knowledge itself.
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