Quotes about Knowledge

To live among such excellent helps as our libraries afford, to have so many silent wise companions whenever we please.

It is not the reading of many books which is necessary to make a man wise or good, but the well-reading of a few, could he be sure to have the best.

Nothing can be rightly known, if God be not known; nor is any study well managed, nor to any great purpose, if God is not studied. We know little of the creature, till we know it as it stands related to the Creator: single letters, and syllables uncomposed, are no better than nonsense. He who overlooketh him who is the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending,' and seeth not him in all who is the All of all, doth see nothing at all.

Nothing can be rightly known, if God be not known; nor is any study well managed, nor to any great purpose, if God is not studied. We

Make careful choice of the books which you read. Let the Holy Scriptures ever have the pre-eminence; and next [to] them the solid, lively, heavenly treatises which best expound and apply the Scriptures.

Nothing can be rightly known, if God be not known; nor is any study well managed, nor to any great purpose, if God is not studied.

Brethren, experience will teach you that men are not made learned or wise without hard study, unwearied labors, and experience.

have found by experience that an ignorant man who has been an unprofitable hearer has received more knowledge and remorse of conscience in half an hour's close discourse than he did in ten years of public preaching. I know that the public preaching of the gospel is the most excellent means of conversion because we speak to many at once, but it is usually far more effectual to preach it privately to an individual sinner.

Some desire to know merely for the sake of knowing, and that is shameful curiosity. Some desire to know that they may sell their knowledge, and that too is shameful. Some desire to know for reputation's sake, and that is shameful vanity. But there are some who desire to know that they may edify others, and that is praiseworthy; and there are some who desire to know that they themselves may be edified, and that is wise.

Being informed is different from being formed, and the first is a common substitute for the second.

All theologies are blasphemous in so far as they attempt to reduce God to something that can be known through the understanding by which we know other things.

Both Catholics and Protestants have failed our people by mystifying the very notion of mysticism. The word itself has become relegated to a "misty" and distant realm that implies it is only available to very few and something not to be trusted, much less attractive or desirable. For me, the word "mysticism" simply means experiential knowledge of spiritual things, as opposed to book knowledge, secondhand knowledge, or even church knowledge.