Also see Knowledge - or lack thereof!, Knowledge Song Lists, Foolishness Song Lists, Ideas and Changes Song Lists, Word Play and Higher Education.

Quotes

• An age is called Dark, not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it. (James Michener)
• As a rule, he or she who has the most information will have the greatest success in life. (Disraeli)
• Asking dumb questions is easier than correcting dumb mistakes.
• Be curious always! For knowledge will not acquire you; you must acquire it. (Sudie Back)
• The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.
• Better to understand a little than to misunderstand a lot.
• Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance. (George Bernard Shaw)
• The biggest cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid people are so sure about things and the intelligent folks are so full of doubts. (Bertrand Russell)
• But certainly, for us who understand life, figures are a matter of indifference. (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
• A closed mind gathers no intelligence
• Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago. (Bernard Berenson)
• The creative thinker is flexible and adaptable and prepared to rearrange his thinking. (A. J. Cropley)
• Discovery is seeing what everybody else has seen but thinking what nobody else has thought. (Sarah Ban Breathnach)
• Do not be so open-minded that your brains fall out. (G.K. Chesterton)
• Don't be afraid of failing because of a mistake;
  be afraid of failing to learn from a mistake.
• Don't refuse to go on an occasional wild goose chase. That is what wild geese are made for. (Henry S. Haskins)
• Doubt is uncomfortable, certainty is ridiculous
• The easiest way to grow as a person is to surround yourself with people smarter than you are.
• Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily; and why older persons, especially if vain or important, cannot learn at all. (Thomas Szasz)
• Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world. (Arthur Schopenhauer)
• Everyone is ignorant...only on different subjects.
• Experience is a good school, but the fees are high. (Heinrich Heine)
• Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterward. (Vernon Law )
• Experience is not what happens to a man. It is what a man does with what happens to him. (Aldous Huxley)
• The expert in anything was once a beginner.
• Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof. (John Kenneth Galbraith)
• Fight for your opinions, but do not believe that they contain the whole truth or the only truth. (Charles A. Dana)
• A fool must now and then be right by chance.
• Generally the theories we believe we call facts,
  the facts we disbelieve we call theories. (Felix Cohen)
• The greatest unexplored area lies under you hat.
• Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices, but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence. (Albert Einstien)
• The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see. (Ayn Rand)
• He presents me with what is always an acceptable gift who brings me news of a great thought before unknown. He enriches me without impoverishing himself. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
• He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask remains a fool forever. (Old Chinese saying)
• I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. (Isaac Newton)
• I find that a great part of the information I have was acquired by looking up something and finding something else on the way. (Franklin P. Adams)
• I have never in my life learned anything from any man who agreed with me. (Dudley Field Malone)
• I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious. (Albert Einstein)
• I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living. (Dr. Seuss)
• I not only use all the brains that I have, but all that I can borrow. (Woodrow Wilson)
• I think, at a child's birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift should be curiosity. (Eleanor Roosevelt)
• If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties. (Francis Bacon)
• If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants. (Albert Einstein)
• If you have knowledge, let others light their candle by it.
• If you keep your mind sufficiently open, people will throw a lot of rubbish in it. (W. A. Orton)
• If you lose the power to laugh, you lose the power to think.
• If you realize you aren't so wise today as you thought you were yesterday, you're wiser today.
• Imagination is intelligence having fun.
• Imagination is more important than knowledge. (Albert Einstein)
• In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted. (Bertrand Russell)
• In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
• In the beginners mind there are many possibilities, but in the experts mind there are few. (Shunryu Suzuki)
• An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.
• It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.
• It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows. (Epictetus)
• It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in argument. (William G. McAdoo)
• It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it. (Descartes)
• It is of interest to note that while some dolphins are reported to have learned English--up to fifty words used in correct context--no human being has been reported to have learned dolphinese.
• It's not easy for those with a PBS mind to live in an MTV world.
• It's not how much you know but the ability to get information and then act on it that gets things done.
• It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer. (Albert Einstein)
• It's not the exact word if you can substitute another word for it without some loss of meaning.
• Knowledge has outstripped character development, and the young today are given an education rather than an upbringing. (Ilya Ehrenburg)
• Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
• Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit...Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.
• Knowledge is power, especially when it is hitched to a workhorse. (O.A. Battista)
• Knowledge is two-fold, and consists not only in an affirmation of what is true, but in the negation of that which is false. (Charles Caleb Colton)
• Learn as though you are to live forever--live as though you are going to die tomorrow. (Farmers Almanac)
• The learning and knowledge that we have, is, at the most, but little compared with that of which we are ignorant.
• Learning carries within itself certain dangers because out of necessity one has to learn from one's enemies. (Leon Trotsky)
• Learning too soon our limitations, we never learn our powers.
• Let go of your attachment to being right, and suddenly your mind is more open. You're able to benefit from the unique viewpoints of others, without being crippled by your own judgment. (Ralph Marston)
• Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever. (Gandhi)
• Look and you will find it--what is unsought will go undetected. (Sophocles)
• A man can only attain knowledge with the help of those who possess it. This must be understood from the very beginning. One must learn from him who knows. (George Gurdjieff)
• It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely the same reasons. (Douglas Adams)
• A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor. (Victor Hugo)
• The man who doesn't read has no advantage over the man who can't read. (Mark Twain)
• The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be ignited. (Plutarch)
• A mind once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimension. (Oliver Wendell Holmes)
• The more extensive a man's knowledge of what has been done, the greater will be his power of knowing what to do. (Benjamin Disraeli)
• The more you know the less you need to say. (Jim Rohn)
• The most difficult thing in the world is to know how to do a thing and to watch someone else doing it wrong, without commenting.
• The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not "Eureka!" but "That's funny..." (Isaac Asimov)
• Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know. (Aldous Huxley)
• Most new discoveries are suddenly-seen things that were always there. (Sarah Ban Breathnach)
• The next best thing to being clever is being able to quote someone who is. (Mary Pettibone Poole)
• The next best thing to knowing something is knowing where to find it. (Samuel Johnson)
• No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong. (Albert Einstein)
• Not knowing the truth doesn't make you ignorant – not wanting to know the truth is what makes you ignorant.
• Not to know is bad; not to wish to know is worse. (Nigerian Proverb)
• Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity. (Martin Luther King, Jr.)
• One of the great joys of life is creativity. Information goes in, gets shuffled about, and comes out in new and interesting ways. (Peter McWilliams)
• One part of knowledge consists in being ignorant of such things as are not worthy to be known. (Crates)
• An open mind is good, so is an open window; but you put a screen on it to keep the bugs out.
• People learn something every day, and a lot of times it's that what they learned the day before was wrong. (Bill Vaughan)
• The person who graduates today and stops learning tomorrow is uneducated the day after.
• Practice random acts of intelligence and senseless acts of self-control.
• Questioning and doubting what's going on these days does not make you anti-anything. Nor does it make you a conspiracy theorist. Actually, questioning IS and should be, the place of reason. The fact that questioning has become taboo, should, in fact, send a chill up everyone's spine.
• Research is the act of going up alleys to see if they are blind.
• Sarcasm: an ingenious way of making intelligent people feel stupid.
• Science is the refusal to believe on the basis of hope. (Carrie P. Snow)
• She who never made a mistake never made a discovery.
• Sign on a scientist's door: Gone Fission
• Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every conceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing. (Thomas Huxley)
• Smart is when you believe only half of what you hear. Brilliant is when you know which half to believe. (Robert Orben)
• Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish. (Euripides)
• That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way. (Doris Lessing)
• There are no mistakes, only lessons.
• There is nothing permanent but change. (Heraclitus)
• There is one thing even more vital to science than intelligent methods; and that is, the sincere desire to find out the truth, whatever it may be. (Charles Pierce)
• Things do not change, we change. (Henry David Thoreau)
• The things we know best are the things we haven't been taught. (Vauvenargues)
• To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to always remain a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history? (Cicero)
• To ignore the facts does not change the facts.
• The trouble with people is not that they don't know but that they know so much that ain't so. (Josh Billings )
• 'Trust the science' is the most anti-science statement ever. Questioning science is how you DO science!
• The universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper. (Eden Phillpotts)
• The value of knowledge lies not in its accumulation but in its utilization.
• Vision is the art of seeing things invisible. (Jonathan Swift)
• We are an intelligent species and the use of our intelligence quite properly gives us pleasure...Understanding is joyous. (Carl Sagan)
• What is now proved was once only imagined. (William Blake)
• When a person has access to both the intuitive, creative and visual right brain, and the analytical, logical, verbal left brain, then the whole brain is working...And this tool is best suited to the reality of what life is, because life is not just logical--it is also emotional. (Stephen R. Covey)
• When the student is ready, the master appears. (Buddhist proverb)
• When you know a thing, to hold that you know it; and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it--this is knowledge. (Confucius)
• When you make the finding yourself--even if you're the last person on Earth to see the light--you'll never forget it. (Carl Sagan)
• When you talk, you only repeat what you already know. But if you listen, you may learn something new. (Dalai Lama)
• When you teach your son, you teach your son's son. (The Talmud)
• A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds. (Francis Bacon)
• The world does not pay for what a person knows. But it pays for what a person does with what he knows. (Laurence Lee)
• You can get by on charm for about fifteen minutes.
  After that, you'd better know something.
• You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him discover it within himself. (Galileo)
• You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way. (Marvin Minsky)

Quotes about Genius

• Even at a Mensa convention, someone is the dumbest person in the room.
• The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
• Genius ain't anything more than elegant common sense. (Josh Billings)
• A genius is one who shoots at something no one else can see--and hits it.
• A genius is someone who is screwed up in a useful way.
• I am convinced all of humanity is born with more gifts than we know. Most are born geniuses and just get de-geniused rapidly. (Buckminster Fuller)
• It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing. (Gertrude Stein)
• The world is always ready to receive talent with open arms. Very often it does not know what to do with genius. (Oliver Wendell Holmes)
• You're smart if you only believe half of what you hear...and you're downright brilliant if you know which half. (Marilin Ragaway)

Quotes about Wisdom

• All wisdom consists in caring immensely for a few right things, and not caring a straw about the rest. (John Buchan)
• The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook. (William James)
• Every man is a fool for at least five minutes every day; wisdom consists of not exceeding the limit. (Elbert Hubbard)
• Examinations are formidable even to the best prepared, for the greatest fool may ask more than the wisest man can answer. (Charles Caleb Colton)
• The heart is wiser than the intellect. (Holland J. G.)
• I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. (Thomas Carlyle)
• Many wise words are spoken in jest,
  but they don't compare with the number of stupid words spoken in earnest.
• Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience. (George Bernard Shaw)
• Patience is the companion of wisdom. (St. Augustine)
• Silence is foolish if we are wise, but wise if we are foolish. (Charles Caleb Colton)
• Some folks are wise and some are otherwise. (Tobias Smollett)
• We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us. (Marcel Proust)
• We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it--
  lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove lid.
  She will never sit down on a hot stove lid again--and that is well;
  but also she will never sit down on a cold one. (Mark Twain)
• Well I am certainly wiser than this man. It is only too likely that neither of us has any knowledge to boast of; but he thinks that he knows something which he does not know, whereas I am quite conscious of my ignorance. At any rate it seems that I am wiser than he is to this small extent, that I do not think that I know what I do not know. (Socrates)
• The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts. (Bertrand Russell)
• Wisdom begins with wonder. (Socrates)
• Wisdom is more precious than pearls. (Jewish Proverb)
• Wisdom is not in words Wisdom is meaning within words (Khalil Gibran)
• Wisdom is often nearer when we stoop than when we soar.
• You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions. (Naguib Mahfouz)

Quotes about education

• Curiosity is the very basis of education and if you tell me that curiosity killed the cat, I say only the cat died nobly. (Arnold Edinborough)
• Don't let school interfere with your education.
• Education...has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading. (G. M. Trevelyan)
• Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance. (Will Durant)
• Education is an admirable thing, but it well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught. (Oscar Wilde)
• Education is learning what you didn't even know you didn't know. (Daniel J. Boorstin)
• Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire. (William Yeats)
• Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today. (Malcom X)
• Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self confidence. (Robert Frost)
• Education is the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent. (John Maynard Keynes)
• Education is the movement from darkness to light. (Allan Bloom)
• An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't. (Anatole France)
• Education means developing the mind, not stuffing the memory.
• Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one. (Malcolm S. Forbes)
• If you think education is expensive, try ignorance (Derek Bok)
• Ignorance is more costly to any State than education. (Booker T. Washington, 1898)
• It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. (Albert Einstein)
• It is only the ignorant who despise education. (Syrus)
• It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. (Aristotle)
• Knowledge has outstripped character development, and the young today are given an education rather than an upbringing. (Ilya Ehrenburg)
• The most effective kind of education is that a child should play amongst lovely things.
• Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants. (John W. Gardner)
• My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors. (Maya Angelou)
• Only the educated are free. (Epictetus)
• The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet. (Aristotle)
• The truly educated never graduate.
• Education is the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent. (John Maynard Keynes)

How Smart Are You?

(Passing requires four correct answers)

1. How long did the Hundred Years War last?
2. Which country makes Panama hats?
3. From which animal do we get catgut?
4. In which month do Russians celebrate the October Revolution?
5. What is a camel's hair brush made of?
6. The Canary Islands in the Pacific are named after what animal?
7. What was King George VI's first name?
8. What color is a purple finch?
9. Where are Chinese gooseberries from?
10. What is the color of the black box in a commercial airplane?

Answers:

1. 116 years
2. Ecuador
3. sheep and horses
4. November
5. squirrel fur
6. dogs
7. Albert
8. crimson
9. New Zealand
10. orange, of course

Great Accomplishments Depend on More Than Genetic Genius

(Erma Bombeck)

The controversial sperm bank in San Diego County has a limited partnership, no drive-up window and a low rate of interest.
Depositors are limited to Nobel Prize winners and erudite scholars. It doesn't matter who withdraws as long as she is female and willing to carry a baby sired by a genius.
The purpose, the director says, is to create 'brighter children' from the ranks of whites.
I was thinking about this the other morning when I turned on the light in my bathroom. Had a less-than-physically-perfect deaf man not invented it, I would be in darkness.
I turned on the radio for my morning news fix and realized if a deformed hunchback had not had a major part in its development, I would be left in silence.
I literally grew up under a president whose political record has never been matched, you who could not walk or, indeed, move his legs.
A high school dropout had invented the automobile I drove. Two brothers from Dayton, Ohio, who also dropped out of high school, had developed the planes I traveled in.
I thought of Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad, who never had won a Nobel Prize for literature.
I thought of the parade of black athletes who had stirred this country with their accomplishments and all the minorities who had battled their way through prejudice to make a million contributions to our arts and sciences. I thought of Martin Luther, who had an I.Q; of 115, and Abraham Lincoln, who also was below 'genius' level.
None of them would have been eligible as sperm donors of the 'new society'.
But mostly, I thought of a man who finished the fourth grade and worked for a Midwestern city, who married a 14-year-old girl from an orphanage . . . and had me.
A genetic disaster? Maybe. But I'm bright enough to know genes don't dominate us . . . we overcome them.