Useful Knowledge Quotes (page 2)
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My name isn't Offred, I have another name, which nobody uses now because t's forbidden. I tell myself it doesn't matter, your name is like your telephone number, useful only to others; but what I tell myself is wrong, it does matter. I keep the knowledge of this name like something hidden, some treasure I'll come back to dig up, one day. I think of this name as buried. This name has an aura around it, like an amulet, some charm that's survived from an unimaginably distant past. I lie in my...
Margaret Atwood
Why covet a knowledge of new facts? Day and night, house and garden, a few books, a few actions, serve us as well as would all trades and all spectacles. We are far from having exhausted the significance of the few symbols we use. We can come to use them yet with a terrible simplicity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
But guilt is guilt. It doesn't go away. It can't be nullified. It can't even be fully understood, I'm certain - it's roots run too deep into private and long-standing karma. About the only thing that saves my neck when I get to feeling this way is that guilt is an imperfect form of knowledge. Just because it isn't perfect doesn't mean that it can't be used. The hard thing to do is to put it to practical use, before it gets around to paralyzing you.
J. D. Salinger
One might suppose that reality must be held to at all costs. However, though that may be the moral thing to do, it is not necessarily the most useful thing to do. The Greeks themselves chose the ideal over the real in their geometry and demonstrated very well that far more could be achieved by consideration of abstract line and form than by a study of the real lines and forms of the world; the greater understanding achieved through abstraction could be applied most usefully to the very...
Isaac Asimov
What's this flesh? A little cruded milk. Fantastical puff-paste. Our bodies are weaker than those. Paper prisons boys use to keep flies in; more contemptible, Since our is to preserve earth-worms. Didst thou ever seen A lark in a cage? Such is the soul in the body: this world. Is like her little turf of grass, and the heaven o'er our heads Like her looking-glass, only gives us a miserable knowledge Of the small compass of our prison.
John Webster
Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one's own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge. Yet all too often, guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of communication; it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness.
Audre Lorde
In truth, knowledge is a great and very useful quality; those who despise it give evidence enough of their stupidity. Yet I do not set its value at that extreme measure that some attribute to it, such as the philosopher Herillus, who find in it the sovereign good and think it has the power to make us wise and happy.
Michel de Montaigne
To the philosophers of India, however, Relativity is no new discovery, just as the concept of light years is no matter for astonishment to people used to thinking of time in millions of kalpas, (A kalpa is about 4,320,000 years). The fact that the wise men of India have not been concerned with technological applications of this knowledge arises from the circumstance that technology is but one of innumerable ways of applying it.
Alan Watts
One will seem to promote virtue better by using encouragement and persuasion of speech than law and necessity. For it is likely that he who is held back from wrongdoing by law will err in secret but that he who is urged to what he should by persuasion will do nothing wrong either in secret or openly. Therefore he who acts rightly from understanding and knowledge proves to be at the same time courageous and right-minded.
Democritus