This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Real knowledge, like everything else of value, is not to be obtained easily. It must be worked for, studied for, thought for, and more than all, must be prayed for." - Thomas Arnold, aka Thomas "Tom" Arnold the Younger
"It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge." - Brooks Atkinson, fully Justin Brooks Atkinson
"Poetry is not concerned with telling people what to do, but with extending our knowledge of good and evil, perhaps making the necessity for action more urgent and its nature more clear, but only leading us to the point where it is possible for us to make a rational and moral choice." - W. H. Auden and J. Garrett
"He only can attain to virtue who knows and imitates God - which knowledge and imitation are the only cause of blessedness... for philosophy is directed to the obtaining of the blessed life, and he who loves God is blessed in the enjoyment of God." - Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL
"To wisdom belongs the intellectual apprehension of eternal things; to knowledge, the rational knowledge of temporal things." - Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL
"Without understanding, no knowledge; without knowledge, no understanding." - Elazar ben Azariah, alt. spelling Eleazar
"For there are two modes of acquiring knowledge, namely, by reasoning and experience. Reasoning draws a conclusion and makes us grant the conclusion, but does not make the conclusion certain, nor does it remove doubt so that the mind may rest on the intuition of truth, unless the mind discovers it by the path of experience; since many have the arguments relating to what can be known, but because they lack experience they neglect the arguments, and neither avoid what is harmful nor follow what is good. For if a man who has never seen fire should prove by adequate reasoning that fire burns and injures things and destroys them, his mind would not be satisfied thereby, nor would he avoid fire, until he placed his hand or some combustible substance in the fire, so that he might prove by experience that which reasoning taught. But when he has had actual experience of combustion his mind is made certain and rests in the full light of truth. Therefore reasoning does not suffice, but experience does. " - Roger Bacon, scholastic accolade Doctor Mirabilis meaning "Wonderful Teacher"
"There in fact four very significant stumbling-blocks in the way of grasping the truth, which hinder every man however learned, and scarcely allow anyone to win a clear title to wisdom, namely, the example of weak and unworthy authority, long-standing custom, the feeling of the ignorant crowd, and the hiding of our own ignorance while making a display of our apparent knowledge... there are two modes of acquiring knowledge, namely by reasoning and experience." - Roger Bacon, scholastic accolade Doctor Mirabilis meaning "Wonderful Teacher"
"If civilization has profoundly modified man, it is by accumulating in his social surroundings, as in a reservoir, the habits and knowledge which society pours into the individual at each new generation. Scratch the surface, abolish everything we owe to an education which is perpetual and unceasing, and you find in the depth of our nature primitive humanity, or something very near it." - Henri Bergson, aka Henri-Louis Bergson
"Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?" - Bible or The Bible or Holy Bible NULL
"That God is eternal, is agreed by all who possess reason. What then is eternity?... Eternity is the complete and simultaneous possession of endless life in a single whole... God lives ever in an eternal present, his knowledge transcends all movement of time, and abides in the indivisibility of his present; he grasps the past and the future in all their infinite extent, and with his indivisible cognition he contemplates all events as if they were even now taking place." - Boethius, fully Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius NULL
"The shortest and surest way of arriving at real knowledge is to unlearn the lessons we have been taught, to mount the first principles, and take nobody's word about them." - Henry Bolingbroke, Henry IV of England
"What man knows should find expression in what he does. The chief value of superior knowledge is that it leads to a performing manhood." - John Christian Bovee
"To say, "well done" to any bit of good work is to take hold of the powers which have made the effort and strengthen them beyond our knowledge." - Phillips Brooks
"There is no stopping the world’s tendency to throw off imposed restraints, the religious authority that is based on the ignorance of the many, the political authority that is based on the knowledge of the few." - Van Wyck Brooks
"How willingly I would as a poet exchange some of this lumbering, ponderous, helpless knowledge of books for some experience of life and man. But all this grumbling is a vile thing." - Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning
"By the time the child can draw more that scribble, by the age of four or five years, an already well-formed body of conceptual knowledge formulated in language dominates his memory and controls his graphic work. Drawings are graphic accounts of essentially verbal processes. As an essentially verbal education gains control, the child abandons his graphic efforts and relies almost entirely on words. Language has first spoilt drawing and then swallowed it up completely." - Karl Bühler, fully Karl Ludwig Bühler
"All the knowledge that we mortals can acquire is not knowledge positive, but knowledge comparative, and subject to the errors and passions of humanity." - Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
"Genius in the poet, like the nomad of Arabia, ever a wanderer, still ever makes a home where the well or the palm-tree invites it to pitch the tent. Perpetually passing out of himself and his own positive circumstantial condition of being into other hearts and into other conditions, the poet obtains his knowledge of human life by transporting his own life into the lives of others." - Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
"It is not wisdom but ignorance that teaches men presumption. Genius may sometimes be arrogant, but nothing is so diffident as knowledge." - Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
"Out of the ashes of misanthropy benevolence rises again; we find many virtues where we had imagined all was vice, many acts of disinterested friendship where we had fancied all was calculation and fraud - and so gradually from the two extremes we pass to the proper medium; and, feeling that no human being is wholly good or wholly base, we learn that true knowledge of mankind which induces us to expect little and forgive much. The world cures alike the optimist and the misanthrope." - Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
"Reading without purpose is sauntering, not exercise. More is got from one book on which the thought settles for definite end in knowledge, than from libraries skimmed over by a wandering eye." - Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
"What, after all, is heaven, but a transition from dim guesses and blind struggling with a mysterious and adverse fate to the fullness of all wisdom - from ignorance, in a word, to knowledge, but knowledge of what order?" - Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
"Decision of character is one of the most important of human qualities, philosophically considered. Speculation, knowledge, is not the chief end of man; it is action." - Jacob Burnap
"Knowledge cannot be stolen from us. It cannot be bought or sold. We may be poor, and the sheriff may come and sell our furniture, or drive away our cow, or take our pet lamb, and leave us homeless and penniless; abut he cannot lay the law’s hand upon the jewelry of our minds." - Elihu Burritt
"But these are foolish things to all the wise, and I love wisdom more than she loves me; my tendency to philosophize on most things, from a tyrant to a tree; but still the spouseless virgin Knowledge flies, what are we? and whence come we? what shall be our ultimate existence? What’s our present? Are questions answerless, and yet incessant." -
"The first step to knowledge is to know that we are ignorant." - Richard Cecil
"It has often been observed, that those who have the most time at their disposal profit by it the least. A single hour in the day, steadily given to the study of some interesting subject, brings unexpected accumulations of knowledge." - William Ellery Channing
"They who have read about everything are thought to understand everything, but it is not always so; reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours. We are of the ruminating kind, and it is not enough to cram ourselves with a great load of collections - we must chew them over again." - William Ellery Channing
"Man's knowledge of science has clearly outstripped his knowledge of man. Our only hope of making the atom servant rather than master lies in education, in a broad liberal education where each student within his capacity can free himself from trammels of dogmatic prejudice and apply his educational accouterment to besetting social and human problems." - Harry Woodburn Chase
"Hope is the last gift given to man, and the only gift not given to youth. Youth is pre-eminently the period in which a man can be lyric, fanatical, poetic; but youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged." - G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton
"Ignorance is an enemy, even to its owner. Knowledge is a friend, even to its hater. Ignorance hates knowledge because it is too pure. Knowledge fears ignorance because it is too sure." - Sri Chinmoy, born Chinmoy Kumar Ghose
"Knowledge is the only instrument of production that is not subject to diminishing returns." - John Bates Clark
"Man often acquires must so much knowledge as to discover his ignorance, and attains so much experience as to regret his follies, and then dies." - William Benton Clulow
"Ethics is the vital principle of Judaism. Its religion aims to be, and is, moral doctrine. Love of God is knowledge of God, and that is knowledge of the ultimate moral purpose of mankind." - Hermann Cohen
"Pedants, who have the least knowledge to be proud of, are impelled most by vanity." - Wilkie Collins, fully William Wilkie Collins
"(Paraphrased by Lyall Watson) Our knowledge of all things is determined by our perception of them, and that perception is a construction based on local expectations." - J. W. Connor
"It is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge." - Joseph Conrad, born Teodor Josef Konrad Korzeniowski
"Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers. It may not be difficult to store up in the mind a vast quantity of facts within a comparatively short time, but the ability to form judgments requires the severe discipline of hard work and the tempering heat of experience and maturity." - Calvin Coolidge, fully John Calvin Coolidge, Jr.
"People sometimes refer to higher education as the higher learning, but colleges and universities are much more than the knowledge factories; they are testaments to man's perennial struggle to make a better world for himself, his children, and his children's children. This, indeed, is their sovereign purpose. They are great fortifications against ignorance and irrationality; but they are more than places of higher learning - they are centers and symbols of man's higher yearning." - William H. Cowley
"Knowledge dwells in heads replete with thoughts of other men; wisdom in minds attentive to their own." - William Cowper
"The sure foundations of the State are laid in knowledge, not in ignorance; and every sneer at education, at culture, at book learning, which is the recorded wisdom of the experience of mankind, is the demagogue’s sneer at intelligent liberty, inviting national degeneracy and ruin." - George William Curtis
"The child's entire life is influenced by his ability to listen. Good listening habits make it possible for him to broaden his knowledge, enjoy music, conversation, storytelling, drama; discriminating listening makes it possible for him to select radio and television programs for enjoyment. Critical listening helps him function intelligently in selection of governmental leaders. It is quite possible that the ability to listen effectively may be one of the most valuable tools he can use in his efforts to bring understanding and peace to the world." - Lucile Cypreansen