Education and Knowledge

We can understand almost anything, but we can't understand how we understand.

Information is not knowledge.

There is no education like adversity.

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

Only the educated are free

Wisdom is the daughter of experience.

A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?

 

The separation between the two cultures has been getting deeper under our eyes; there is now precious little communication between them. . . . The traditional culture . . . is, of course, mainly literary . . . the scientific culture is expansive, not restrictive.

 

Literary intellectuals at one pole—at the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension—sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding.

 

Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher. The idea of being a writer attracts a good many shiftless people, those who are merely burdened with poetic feelings or afflicted with sensibility.

 

“Normal science” means research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements, achievements that some particular scientific community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice.

 

The remoter and more general aspects of the law are those which give it universal interest. It is through them that you not only become a great master in your calling, but connect your subject with the universe and catch an echo of the infinite, a glimpse of its unfathomable process, a hint of the universal law.

 

For the rational study of the law the black-letter man may be the man of the present, but the man of the future is the man of statistics and the master of economics.

 

There is one disadvantage which the man of philosophical habits of mind suffers, as compared with the man of action. While he is talcing an enlarged and rational view of the matter before him, he lets his chance slip through his fingers.

Taste is the fundamental quality which sums up all other qualities. It is the ne plus ultra of the intelligence.

A poet on Pegasus, reciting his own verses, is hardly more to be dreaded than a mounted specialist.

Wherever learning breeds specialists, the sum of human culture is enhanced thereby. That is the illusion and consolation of specialists.

The world’s great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men.

Those who wish to seem learned to fools, seem fools to the learned. .

Pity wraps the student of the past in an ambrosial cloud, and washes his limbs with eternal youth.

To be master of any branch of knowledge, you must master those which lie next to it; and thus to know anything you must know all.

A wise man recognizes the convenience of a general statement, but he bows to the authority of a particular fact.

The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts but learning how to make facts live.

What refuge is there for the victim who is oppressed with the feeling that there are a thousand new books he ought to read, while life is only long enough for him to attempt to read a hundred?