Mel S > Mel's Quotes

“I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.”
― Maya Angelou

“The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“No thief, however skillful, can rob one of knowledge, and that is why knowledge is the best and safest treasure to acquire.”
― L. Frank Baum, The Lost Princess of Oz

“I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think”
― Socrates

“Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.”
― John Locke

“For me, I am driven by two main philosophies: know more today about the world than I knew yesterday and lessen the suffering of others. You'd be surprised how far that gets you.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson

“The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.”
― Anais Nin

“All knowledge hurts.”
― Cassandra Clare, City of Bones

“I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teaching my blood whispers to me.”
― Hermann Hesse, Demian: Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend

“Last night I lost the world, and gained the universe.”
― C. JoyBell C.

“Doctor Who: You want weapons? We're in a library. Books are the best weapon in the world. This room's the greatest arsenal we could have. Arm yourself!

(from Tooth and Claw in Season 2)”
― Russell T. Davies

“For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you'd be doomed. You'd be ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care”
― Theodore Roosevelt

“I have a friend who's an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don't agree with very well. He'll hold up a flower and say "look how beautiful it is," and I'll agree. Then he says "I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing," and I think that he's kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is ... I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it's not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there's also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts.”
― Richard P. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman

“Inventory:

"Four be the things I am wiser to know:
Idleness, sorrow, a friend, and a foe.
Four be the things I'd been better without:
Love, curiosity, freckles, and doubt.
Three be the things I shall never attain:
Envy, content, and sufficient champagne.
Three be the things I shall have till I die:
Laughter and hope and a sock in the eye.”
― Dorothy Parker, The Complete Poems of Dorothy Parker

“Knowledge, like air, is vital to life. Like air, no one should be denied it.”
― Alan Moore, V for Vendetta

“Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“Learning does not make one learned: there are those who have knowledge and those who have understanding. The first requires memory and the second philosophy.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian god may exist; so may the gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them.”
― Bertrand Russell , Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects

“What is now proved was once only imagined.”
― William Blake

“Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social enviroment. Most people are incapable of forming such opinions."

(Essay to Leo Baeck, 1953)”
― Albert Einstein

“Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.”
― Alfred Lord Tennyson

“Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.”
― Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers

“It was better to know the worst than to wonder.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind

“I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies but not the madness of people.”
― Isaac Newton

“Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.”
― Johann wolfgang von Goethe

“The time will come when diligent research over long periods will bring to light things which now lie hidden. A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not be enough for the investigation of so vast a subject... And so this knowledge will be unfolded only through long successive ages. There will come a time when our descendants will be amazed that we did not know things that are so plain to them... Many discoveries are reserved for ages still to come, when memory of us will have been effaced.”
― Seneca, Natural Questions