Desire For Knowledge Quotes

Man did not address his inquiries to the earth on which he stood until a remarkably late stage in the development of his desire for knowledge. And the answers he received to the questions, "Where do I come from?", "What is man?", although they made him poorer by a few illusions, gave him in compensation a knowledge of his past that is vaster than he could ever have dreamed. For it emerged that the history of life was his history too ... ~ Gustav Heinrich Ralph Von Koenigswald

[I]t was with a good end in mind – that of acquiring the knowledge of good and evil – that Eve allowed herself to be carried away and eat the forbidden fruit. But Adam was not moved by this desire for knowledge, but simply by greed: he ate it because he heard Eve say it tasted good. ~ Moderata Fonte

The tremendous historical need of our unsatisfied modern culture, the assembling around one of countless other cultures, the consuming desire for knowledge
what does all this point to, if not to the loss of myth, the loss of the mythical home, the mythical maternal womb? ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Restrain an inordinate desire for knowledge, in which is found much anxiety and deception. Learned men always wish to appear so, and desire recognition of their wisdom. But there are many matters, knowledge of which brings little or no advantage to the soul. ~ Thomas A Kempis

If the school sends out children with a desire for knowledge and some idea of how to acquire and use it, it will have done its work. ~ Richard Livingstone

If you march your Winter Journeys you will have your reward, so long as all you want is a penguin's egg. ~ Apsley Cherry-Garrard

The search for truth is, as it always has been, the noblest expression of the human spirit. Man's insatiable desire for knowledge about himself, about his environment and the forces by which he is surrounded, gives life its meaning and purpose, and clothes it with final dignity ... And yet we know, deep in our hearts, that knowledge is not enough ... Unless we can anchor our knowledge to moral purposes, the ultimate result will be dust and ashes- dust and ashes that will bury the hopes and monuments of men beyond recovery. ~ Raymond B. Fosdick

Our professional competence and pride should rest not alone in our possession of knowledge but as well in our ability to communicate it. Of course we shall carry on our research, and of course we shall applaud the colleague who 'produces,' but we shan't be happy if he offers that as a substitute for inspiring young people with a desire for knowledge, a sense of taste, and a regard for virtue. ~ Denham Sutcliffe

Ever since the dawn of civilization, people have not been content to see events as unconnected and inexplicable. They have craved an understanding of the underlying order in the world. Today we still yearn to know why we are here and where we came from. Humanity's deepest desire for knowledge is justification enough for our continuing quest. And our goal is nothing less than a complete description of the universe we live in. ~ Stephen Hawking

The desire for knowledge begins with searching and seeking. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Knowledge is the eye of desire and can become the pilot of the soul. ~ Will Durant

It wasn't so much that I was in search of answers. In fact, I was wary of the whole idea of answers. I wanted to climb all the way inside of the questions and see what was there. ~ Dani Shapiro

Our desire for knowledge is not bad but our failure to believe what God said is deadly. ~ Jonah Books.com

Wonder is defined by Thomas [Aquinas] in the Summa Theologiae [I-II, Q. 32, a. 8], as the desiderium sciendi, the desire for knowledge, active longing to know. ~ Josef Pieper

She had a great desire for knowledge, but she really preferred almost any source of information to the printed page; she had an immense curiosity about life, and was constantly staring and wondering. She carried within herself a great fund of life, and her deepest enjoyment was to feel the continuity between the movements of her own heart and the agitations of the world. For this reason she was fond of seeing great crowds and large stretches of country, of reading about revolutions and wars, of looking at historical pictures ... ~ Henry James

Man seeks to learn, and man kills himself because of the loss of cohesion in his religious society; he does not kill himself because of his learning. It is certainly not the learning he acquires that disorganizes religion; but the desire for knowledge wakens because religion becomes disorganized. ~ Emile Durkheim

Wonder [admiratio astonishment, marvel] is a kind of desire for knowledge. The situation arises when one sees an effect and does not know its cause, or when the cause of the particular effect is one that exceeds his power of understanding. Hence, wonder is a cause of pleasure insofar as there is annexed the hope of attaining understanding of that which one wants to know ... For desire is especially aroused by the awareness of ignorance, and consequently a man takes the greatest pleasure in those things which he discovers for himself or learns from the ground up. ~ Thomas Aquinas

Moderation is necessary even in our desire for knowledge so as not to know things badly. ~ Baltasar Gracian

The poor girl liked to be thought clever, but she hated to be thought bookish; she used to read in secret and, though her memory was excellent, to abstain from showy reference. She had a great desire for knowledge, but she really preferred almost any source of information to printed page; she had an immense curiosity about life and was constantly staring and wondering. She carried herself with a great fund of life, and her deepest enjoyment was to feel the continuity between the movements of her own soul and agitations of the world. ~ Henry James

Wonder is the desire for knowledge. ~ Thomas Aquinas

The desire for knowledge is so great and it works in such a way that the human heart, despite its experience of insurmountable limitation, yearns for the infinite riches which lie beyond, knowing that there is to be found the satisfying answer to every question as yet unanswered. ~ Pope John Paul II

What does our great historical hunger signify, our clutching about us of countless cultures, our consuming desire for knowledge, if not the loss of myth, of a mythic home, the mythic womb? ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Kant ... was also quite aware that "the urgent need" of reason is both different from and "more than mere quest and desire for knowledge." Hence, the distinguishing of the two faculties, reason and intellect, coincides with a distinction between two altogether different mental activities, thinking and knowing. ~ Hannah Arendt

The tiny, initial clue ... by allowing us to imagine what we do not know, stimulates a desire for knowledge. ~ Marcel Proust

Love is desire for knowledge. ~ Cesare Pavese

Take from the philosopher the pleasure of being heard and his desire for knowledge ceases. ~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

My father ... never required me to study anything, but he knew how to inspire in me a great desire for knowledge. Before learning to read, my greatest pleasure was to listen to passages from Buffon's natural history. I constantly requested him to read me the history of animals and birds ... ~ Andre Marie Ampere

And I tell you, if you have the desire for knowledge and the power to give it physical expression, go out and explore. ~ Apsley Cherry-Garrard

...the Party member's books represented ammunition in the class struggle rather than any desire for knowledge for its own sake. ~ Robert Barltrop

But the truth is that there is no more conscious inconsistency between the humility of a Christian and the rapacity of a Christian than there is between the humility of a lover and the rapacity of a lover. The truth is that there are no things for which men will make such herculean efforts as the things of which they know they are unworthy. There never was a man in love who did not declare that, if he strained every nerve to breaking, he was going to have his desire. And there never was a man in love who did not declare also that he ought not to have it. ~ G.K. Chesterton

And yes, there definitely are many good desires. For example, without the desire for food we would not stay alive. It is when our desire becomes an unquenchable craving or obsession, or causes us to do harm to ourselves or others, that it creates suffering and unhappiness. If you have ever been hurt because you tied your happiness or well-being to a person, place, opinion, self-identity, behavior, or goal, then you have firsthand experience of desire. ~ Don Altman

Personal ministry is not about always knowing what to say. It is not about fixing everything in sight that is broken. Personal ministry is about connecting people with Christ so that they are able to think as he would have them think, desire what he says is best, and do what he calls them to do even if their circumstances never get "fixed." It involves exposing hurt, lost, and confused people to God's glory, so that they give up their pursuit of their own glory and live for his. ~ Paul David Tripp

But it was Aldo's pen that became his most forceful tool. He started a newsletter for rangers called the Carson Pine Cone. Aldo used it to "scatter seeds of knowledge, encouragement, and enthusiasm." Most of the Pine Cone's articles, poems, jokes, editorials, and drawings were Aldo's own. His readers soon realized that the forest animals were as important to him as the trees. His goal was to bring back the "flavor of the wilds. ~ Marybeth Lorbiecki

There are branches of learning and education which we must study merely with a view to leisure spent in intellectual activity, and these are to be valued for their own sake; whereas those kinds of knowledge which are useful in business are to be deemed necessary, and exist for the sake of other things. ~ Aristotle.

Mental chemistry creates interest, Emotional chemistry Generates Affection, Physical chemistry generates desire, and Spiritual chemistry creates love. A soulmate includes all four...and I will not settle for anything less! ~ John Gray

I dream that someone in space says to me: So let us rush, then, to see the world. It is shaped like an egg, covered with seas and continents, warmed and lighted by the sun. It has churches of indescribable beauty, raised to gods that have never been seen; cities whose distant roofs and smokestacks will make your heart leap; ballparks and comfortable auditoriums in which people listen to music of the most serious import; to celebrate life is recorded. Here the joy of women's breasts and backsides, the colors of water, the shapes of trees, athletes, dreams, houses, the shapes of ecstasy and dismay, the shape even of an old shoe, are celebrated. Let us rush to see the world. They serve steak there on jet planes, and dance at sea. They have invented musical instruments to express love, peaceableness; to stir the finest memories and aspirations. They have invented games to catch the hearts of young men. They have ceremonies to exalt the love of men and women. They make their vows to music and the sound of bells. They have invented ways to heat their houses in the winter and cool them in the summer. They have even invented engines to cut their grass. They have free schools for the pursuit of knowledge, pools to swim in, zoos, vast manufactories of all kinds. They explore space and the trenches of the sea. Oh, let us rush to see this world. ~ John Cheever

Without this original, pre-political, and pre-social community, no common project could ever come to exist. For, no project of this kind can be formed independently from its rootedness in the organic structure of desire and action. ~ Michel Henry

The establishment of medical studies in the university (as opposed to some other possible institutional home) created a linkage between medicine and other branches of knowledge that profoundly shaped the development of medicine. Specifically, a degree in the faculty of arts came to be a typical (if not quite universal) prerequisite for medical studies; and this meant that medical students came equipped with the logical and philosophical tools that would transform medicine (for better or for worse) into a rigorous, scholastic enterprise. ~ David C. Lindberg

But there is one thing only at which I have wondered at times, and yet it seemed foolish to think of it. It will happen sometimes when one has worked hard and done all that one can for the purpose before one-it is happened then that I have stood up and been content with the world of things and with what has been done there through me. And this may be pride, or it may be the full stress of the whole being and delight in labour-there are 100 explanations. That I have wondered whether that profound repose was not communicated from some far source and whether the life that is in it was altogether governed by time. And I'm sure that state never comes while I am concerned with myself, and I have thought today that in some strange way that state was itself the Stone. But if so then assuredly none of these men shall find it secret."
"Is that the end of desire?" Chloe said. ~ Charles Williams

Our Heavenly Father is the Father of our spirits, and Jesus Christ is the Creator of this world. They know and understand us and the world around us better than anyone else. Looking to a higher source for knowledge and power can help us far more than relying on the wisdom of the world. We need to have the Spirit and look to the prophets and our priesthood leaders. We also need to look to the scriptures, which contain God's words to holy men. ~ Allan F. Packer

There's isn't any slight of hand in Spirituality, everything you desire is right there for you to see. ~ Stanley Victor Paskavich

I spin worlds where we could be together. I dream you. For me, imagination and desire are very close. ~ Jeanette Winterson

Travel can also be the spirit of adventure somewhat tamed, for those who desire to do something they are a bit afraid of. ~ Ella Maillart

If you were offered the chance to live your own life again, would you seize the opportunity? The only real philosophical answer is automatically self-contradictory: 'Only if I did not know that I was doing so.' To go through the entire experience once more would be banal and Sisyphean - even if it did build muscle - whereas to wish to be young again and to have the benefit of one's learned and acquired existence is not at all to wish for a repeat performance, or a Groundhog Day. And the mind ought to, but cannot, set some limits to wish-thinking. All right, same me but with more money, an even sturdier penis, slightly different parents, a briefer latency period ... the thing is absurd. I seriously would like to know what it was to be a woman, but like blind Tiresias would also want the option of re-metamorphosing if I wished. How terrible it is that we have so many more desires than opportunities. ~ Christopher Hitchens

It is not good for a man to be too cognizant of his physical and spiritual mechanisms. Complete knowledge reveals limits to human possibilities, and the less a man is by nature limited in his purposes, the less he can tolerate limits. ~ Stanislaw Lem

I am not at all sure that the majority of the human race have not been ugly, and even among those "lords of their kind," the British, squat figures, ill-shapen nostrils, and dingy complexions are not startling exceptions. Yet there is a great deal of family love amongst us. I have a friend or two whose class of features is such that the Apollo curl on the summit of their brows would be decidedly trying; yet to my certain knowledge tender hearts have beaten for them, and their miniatures - flattering, but still not lovely - are kissed in secret by motherly lips. I have seen many an excellent matron, who could have never in her best days have been handsome, and yet she had a packet of yellow love-letters in a private drawer, and sweet children showered kisses on her sallow cheeks. And I believe there have been plenty of young heroes, of middle stature and feeble beards, who have felt quite sure they could never love anything more insignificant than a Diana, and yet have found themselves in middle life happily settled with a wife who waddles. Yes! Thank God; human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty - it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it. ~ George Eliot

Whatever my limited knowledge, I tried to make up for it with energy. ~ Eric Greitens

Dorothy tries to sum it all up before leaving Oz. "It's that if ever I go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own backyard," she tells Glinda, the Good Witch of the North. "Because if it isn't there, I never really lost it to begin with. Is that it?"
"That's all it is," confirms Glinda. ~ Joey Green

Now suppose both death and hell were utterly defeated. Suppose the fight was fixed. Suppose God took you on a crystal ball trip into your future and you saw with indubitable certainty that despite everything - your sin, your smallness, your stupidity - you could have free for the asking your whole crazy heart's deepest desire: heaven, eternal joy. Would you not return fearless and singing? What can earth do to you, if you are guaranteed heaven? To fear the worst earthly loss would be like a millionaire fearing the loss of a penny - less, a scratch on a penny. ~ Peter Kreeft

For apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, individuals cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other. ~ Paulo Freire

Intimacy between people requires closeness as well as distance. It is like dancing. Sometimes we are very close, touching each other or holding each other; sometimes we move away from each other and let the space between us become an area where we can freely move.
To keep the right balance between closeness and distance requires hard work, especially since the needs of the partners may be quite different at a given moment. One might desire closeness while the other wants distance. One might want to be held while the other looks for independence. A perfect balance seldom occurs, but the honest and open search for that balance can give birth to a beautiful dance, worthy to behold. ~ Henri J.M. Nouwen

There are no bad drawings.
Drawings are experiences.
The more you draw, the more experienced you'll get.
In fact, you'll learn more from bad or unpredictable or weird experiences than from those that go exactly as you'd hoped and planned.
So let it go.
Release your ego's desire for perfection.
Take risks.
Stretch.
Grow.
Create as much as you can, whenever you can. ~ Danny Gregory

Man's complete lack of responsibility, for his behavior and for his nature, is the bitterest drop which the man of knowledge must swallow. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

[God] tells the woman that she will now bring forth children in sorrow, and desire an unworthy, sometimes resentful man, who will in consequence lord her biological fate over her, permanently. What might this mean? It could just mean that God is a patriarchal tyrant, as politically motivated interpretations of the ancient story insist. I think it's - merely descriptive.
Merely. And here is why: As human beings evolved, the brains that eventually gave rise to self-consciousness expanded tremendously. This produced an evolutionary arms race between fetal head and female pelvis.56 The female graciously widened her hips, almost to the point where running would no longer be possible. The baby, for his part, allowed himself to be born more than a year early, compared to other mammals of his size, and evolved a semi-collapsible head.57 This was and is a painful adjustment for both. The essentially fetal baby is almost completely dependent on his mother for everything during that first year. The programmability of his massive brain means that he must be trained until he is eighteen (or thirty) before being pushed out of the nest. This is to say nothing of the woman's consequential pain in childbirth, and high risk of death for mother and infant alike. This all means that women pay a high price for pregnancy and child-rearing, particularly in the early stages, and that one of the inevitable consequences is increased dependence upon the sometimes unreliable and always problematic ~ Jordan B. Peterson

From now on, he wrote, we must always take into account our knowledge that we can destroy ourselves at will, with all our history and perhaps life on earth itself. Nothing stops us but our own free choosing. If we want to survive, we have to decide to live. Thus, he offered a philosophy designed for a species that had just scared the hell out of itself, but that finally felt ready to grow up and take responsibility. ~ Sarah Bakewell

It's a little-known secret, and it should probably stay that way: attempting suicide usually jump-starts your brain chemistry. There must be something about taking all those pills that either floods the brain sufficiently or depletes it so completely that balance is restored. Whatever the mechanism, the result is that you emerge on the other side of the attempt with an awareness of what it means to be alive. Simple acts seem miraculous: you can stand transfixed for hours just watching the wind ruffle the tiny hairs along the top of your arm. And always, with every sensation, is the knowledge that you must have survived for a reason. You just can't doubt it anymore. You must have a purpose, or you would have died. You have the rest of your life to discover what that purpose is. And you can't wait to start looking. ~ Terri Cheney

In an incongruity, as these cases exemplify, the innovative solution has to be clearly definable. It has to be feasible with the existing, known technology, and with easily available resources. It requires hard developmental work, of course. But if a great deal of research and new knowledge is still needed, it is not yet ready for the entrepreneur, not yet 'ripe'. The innovation that successfully exploits an incongruity between economic realities has to be simple rather than complicated, 'obvious' rather than grandiose. ~ Peter F. Drucker

There's a lot of information that has been in peoples' heads and hasn't gotten onto the Internet. Even as the Web has gotten really big, there's just been this gap. So we made Quora as a general place for people to share knowledge of all kinds. ~ Adam D'Angelo

When ye set about a difficult quest - if ye're Kahnyen'kehaka, I mean - ye generally go aside for a time, to fast and pray for guidance. We havena time to be doing that now, of course. But often, while ye're doing that, ye choose a talisman - or to be right about it, it chooses you - " He sounded completely matter-of-fact about this procedure, Roger noted. "And ye carry it with ye through the quest, to keep the attention of the spirits upon your desire and ensure your success. ~ Diana Gabaldon

The problem with nationalism is not the desire for self-determination itself, but the particular epistemological illusion that you can be at home, you can be understood, only among people like yourself. What is wrong with nationalism is not the desire to be a master in your own house, but the conviction that only people like yourself deserve to be in the house. ~ Michael Ignatieff

Please, God,' Ruth would pray, 'don't let me be competitive. Let me realize what a privilege it is to study. Let me remember that knowledge must be pursued for its own sake and please, please stop me wanting to beat Verena Plackett in the exams.'
She prayed hard and she meant what she said. But God was busy that autumn as the International Brigade came back, defeated, from Spain, Hitler's bestialities increased, and sparrows everywhere continued to fall. ~ Eva Ibbotson

In Philosophy, the contemplations of man do either penetrate unto God, or are circumferred to Nature, or are reflected and reverted upon himself. Out of which several inquiries there do arise three knowledges, Divine Philosophy, Natural Philosophy, and Human Philosophy or Humanity. For all things are marked and stamped with this triple character of the power of God, the difference of Nature and the use of Man. ~ Francis Bacon

A rural Venus, Selah rises from the
gold foliage of the Sixhiboux River, sweeps
petals of water from her skin. At once,
clouds begin to sob for such beauty.
Clothing drops like leaves.
"No one makes poetry,my Mme.
Butterfly, my Carmen, in Whylah,"
I whisper. She smiles: "We'll shape it with
our souls."
Desire illuminates the dark manuscript
of our skin with beetles and butterflies.
After the lightning and rain has ceased,
after the lightning and rain of lovemaking
has ceased, Selah will dive again into the
sunflower-open river. ~ George Elliott Clarke

If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world. ~ C.S. Lewis

Sometimes I feel so full of love that there is no room for a breath. ~ Debasish Mridha

There are people who are surprised at my politics and being a conservative and the rest of it. But the truth of the matter is, to my knowledge, I have never been overlooked or turned down for anything that I wanted to do that was being offered to me. ~ Wayne Newton