Human Knowledge Quotes

For if a man by magical arts and sacrifices will bring down the moon, and darken the sun, and induce storms, or fine weather, I should not believe that there was anything divine, but human, in these things, provided the power of the divine were overpowered by human knowledge and subjected to it. ~ Hippocrates

To admit we do not understand a phenomenon is not to admit the presence of the miraculous but merely, reasonably, to accept the limitations of human knowledge. God was invented to explain what our ancestors couldn't comprehend: the radiant mystery of being. The existence of the incomprehensible, however, is not a proof of god. ~ Salman Rushdie

Botany, the science of the vegetable kingdom, is one of the most attractive, most useful, and most extensive departments of human knowledge. It is, above every other, the science of beauty. ~ Joseph Paxton

The quest for human knowledge is quintessential element of being human, it's a part of our nature. We are all scientists and it's up to each and everyone of us to embark on our own self journey to inquiry. ~ Frank Huguenard

[Mathematics] is security. Certainty. Truth. Beauty. Insight. Structure. Architecture. I see mathematics, the part of human knowledge that I call mathematics, as one thing-one great, glorious thing. Whether it is differential topology, or functional analysis, or homological algebra, it is all one thing ... They are intimately interconnected, they are all facets of the same thing. That interconnection, that architecture, is secure truth and is beauty. That's what mathematics is to me. ~ Paul Halmos

Linnaeus's last lesson, of which he himself was unaware, was that professorships kill philosophers. Oh, I'm vain enough to want my burgeoning Flora Japonica to be published one day
as a votive offering to human knowledge
but a seat at Uppsala, or Leiden, or Cambridge, holds no allure. My heart is the East's in this lifetime. This is my third year in Nagasaki, and I have work enough for another three, or six. During the court embassy I can see landscapes no European botanist ever saw. My seminarians are keen young men
with one young woman
and visiting scholars bring me specimens from all over the empire. ~ David Mitchell

Words define us,' Mom continued, as I struggled to make my clumsy marks look like her elegant script. 'We must protect our knowledge and pass it on whenever we can. If we are ever to become a society again, we must teach others how to remain human. ~ Julie Kagawa

Human knowledge is the parent of doubt. ~ Sir Fulke Greville

On the ostensible exactitude of certain branches of human knowledge, including mathematics. The exactness is a fake. ~ Alfred North Whitehead

Often times we allow ourselves to become impatient, by viewing God's promises based on our human knowledge. Our thoughts and ways are irrelevant in his judgment to grant any of our requests. We need to have patience and trust in God for answers to our requests. ~ Ellen J. Barrier

Elections, for their part, are typically popularity contests rather than measures of candidates' relative competency or effectiveness. Imagine if scientific truth were determined according to which scientist was most popular. To be successful, scientists would have to be charismatic and attractive - and human knowledge would suffer terribly. ~ Nathan Myhrvold

These facts make the creator of music a being like the gods, and make music itself the supreme mystery of human knowledge. ~ Claude Levi-Strauss

The history of human knowledge has so uninterruptedly shown that to collateral, or incidental, or accidental events we are indebted for the most numerous and most valuable discoveries, that it has at length become necessary, in any prospective view of improvement, to make not only large, but the largest allowances for inventions that shall arise by chance, and quite out of the range of ordinary expectation. It is no longer philosophical to base, upon what has been, a vision of what is to be. Accident is admitted as a portion of the substructure. We make chance a matter of absolute calculation. We subject the unlooked for and unimagined, to the mathematical formulae of the schools. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

It is an undeniable fact that the universe is only knowable to us through the human minds ability to perceive reality. If all human knowledge is rooted in consciousness, perhaps we are viewing not the real universe based on limitations of the brain. This proposition leads to the conclusion that the apparent evolution of the cosmos since the Big Bang has been totally dependent upon human consciousness. We create reality in our own image as a collective dream. ~ Deepak Chopra

The preservation of our free society in the years and decades to come will depend ultimately on whether we succeed or fail in directing the enormous power of human knowledge to the enrichment of our own lives and the shaping of a rational and civilized world order ... It is the task of education, more than any other instrument of foreign policy to help close the dangerous gap between the economic and technological interdependence of the people of the world and their psychological, political and spiritual alienation. ~ J. William Fulbright

Human knowledge consists not only of libraries of parchment and ink - it is also comprised of the volumes of knowledge that are written on the human heart, chiselled on the human soul, and engraved on the human psyche. ~ Michael Jackson

In a world in which the total of human knowledge is doubling about every ten years, our security can rest only on our ability to learn. ~ Nathaniel Branden

In the end, it cannot be doubted that each of us can see only a part of the picture. The doctor sees one, the patient another, the engineer a third, the economist a fourth, the pearl diver a fifth, the alcoholic a sixth, the cable guy a seventh, the sheep farmer an eighth, the Indian beggar a ninth, the pastor a tenth. Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still it is never complete. And Truth comes somewhere above all of them, where, ~ Paul Kalanithi

All human knowledge thus begins with intuitions, proceeds thence to concepts, and ends with ideas. ~ Immanuel Kant

They never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum of human knowledge. ~ Thomas Reed

So does a whole world, with all its greatnesses and littlenesses, lie in a twinkling star. And as mere human knowledge can split a ray of light and analyse the manner of its composition, so, sublimer intelligences may read in the feeble shining of this earth of ours, every thought and act, every vice and virtue, of every responsible creature on it. ~ Charles Dickens

My two older brothers are both molecular biologists and neuroscientists, and I feel like representing them accurately is never done in movies, and I really wanted to at least capture the spirit of a Ph.D. student whose goal and aspiration is to increase the sum total of human knowledge. That is noble. That was really, really important, to capture the three-dimensionality of scientists. Scientists fall in love, scientists have the greatest sense of humor, scientists are passionate. ~ Mike Cahill

History has shown that in every age and in every field of human knowledge, many of the views which almost everyone accepted as true and never bothered to think about further, were in time proven completely wrong. ~ Philip Arthur Fisher

Human knowledge hasn't been complete enough to understand the afterlife if it hasn't been through the valley of death. ~ Toba Beta

The human brain has billions of neurons and hundreds of billions of interconnections. It can process more than two million bits of information per second and can remember everything you have ever seen or heard. ~ Ben Carson

Based on what I saw over a decade of medical treatment, you may be in serious trouble if you do not have knowledge of human health and biomedical systems. ~ Steven Magee

A man would make but a very sorry chemist if he attended to that department of human knowledge alone. ~ Mary Shelley

We tend to think human knowledge as progressive; because we know more and more, our parents and grandparents are back numbers. But a contrary theory is possible - that we simply recognize different things at different times and in different ways. ~ Robertson Davies

Lord Krishna ... proclaims Self-realization, true wisdom, as the highest branch of all human knowledge-the king of all sciences, the very essence of dharma ("religion")-for it alone permanently uproots the cause of man's threefold suffering and reveals to him his true nature of Bliss. Self-realization is yoga or "oneness" with truth-the direct perception or experience of truth by the all-knowing intuitive faculty of the soul. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda

Human knowledge has been changing from the word go and people in certain respects behave more rationally than they did when they didn't have it. They spend less time doing rain dances and more time seeding clouds. ~ Herbert Simon

The world is in some essential sense a construct. Human knowledge is radically interpretive. There are no perspective-independent facts. Every act of perception and cognition is contingent, mediated, situated, contextual, theory-soaked. Human language cannot establish its ground in an independent reality. Meaning is rendered by the mind and cannot be assumed to inhere in the object, in the world beyond the mind, for that world can never be contacted without having already been saturated by the mind's own nature. That world cannot even be justifiably postulated. Radical uncertainty prevails, for in the end what one knows and experiences is to an indeterminate extent a projection. ~ Richard Tarnas

All of the great writers and sages we are so quick to quote have simply given their interpretation of what it means to be human. ~ Chris Matakas

Human knowledge progresses when people recognize that they may be wrong even on issues that seem certain to them. Wisdom involves openness to those who disagree with us. It is only when our ideas have been subjected to criticism and all objections considered - if necessary seeking these objections out - that we have any right to think of our judgement as better than another's. ~ Nigel Warburton

I want to talk about another kind of high country now in the world of thought, which in some ways, for me at least, seems to parallel or produce feelings similar to this, and call it the high country of the mind.

If all of human knowledge, everything that's known, is believed to be an enormous hierarchic structure, then the high country of the mind is found at the uppermost reaches of this structure in the most general, the most abstract considerations of all.

Few people travel here. There's no real profit to be made from wandering through it, yet like this high country of the material world all around us, it has its own austere beauty that to some people makes the hardships of traveling through it seem worthwhile.

In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty, and to the enormous magnitude of questions asked, and to the answers proposed to these questions. The sweep goes on and on and on so obviously much further than the mind can grasp one hesitates even to go near for fear of getting lost in them and never finding one's way out. ~ Robert M. Pirsig

Mankind's most dangerous enemy is the human imagination. What their minds can imagine is far more malicious than the deepest furnaces of their chimerical Hell. They imagined an invisible god to corrupt their thoughts with everlasting fantasies and eternal lies. When the human species invented God the darkness of imagination was present. Mankind imagined an unseen creator to form their bodies and then to reform them indestructible upon death. The mortal truth became the immortal delusion. They possessed no knowledge of God so they invented him. Where human knowledge ends the imagined God begins. ~ C.J. Anderson

The essential insight and consistent point of view of Islam is tawhid: the fundamental Oneness underlying all of existence. From the perspective of tawhid, everything is emerging from God, being sustained by God, and ultimately returning to God. This has profound significance for all of our experience within this existence. All areas of human knowledge are related to this fundamental, unifying Truth. Sufism is the science, the objective knowledge, of the souls relationship to God. This science describes an Origin, a downward arc of manifestation, and an upward arc of return. In the arc of manifestation, everything is coming down from God into successive levels of ever denser realities. In the arc of return, we recognize our Origin and begin the journey back toward its light. This essentially means that we ourselves must become more conscious of the light within ourselves.

[...]

The arc of return calls us to make a journey from darkness and toward the light. The immediate darkness we face around us is the imaginary world created by human ignorance, fear, self-righteousness, and hatred. We must not succumb to the mass heedlessness and self-hypnotism which presents itself to us, mostly through the mass media, as the so-called real world.
It is our responsibility to find and act upon the knowledge that can guide us in that journey. This means establishing the truth of tawhid within our own minds and hearts.

~ Essays and talks by Kabir Helmins ~ Kabir Edmund Helminski

Human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced. Nature to be commanded must be obeyed; and that which in contemplation is as the cause is in operation as the rule. ~ Francis Bacon

A person who wants to know everything eventually comes to a stage where his/her curiosity of knowing everything comes to an end and that is the stage of Enlightenment. ~ Sangita Pareek

- This, she said, is a book. It is one of our ways of codifying and keeping human knowledge. When it cannot be kept in a person's head, this is one method of keeping it safe. It is a good way of moving ideas from one head to another, as it only requires one person's time to do it, and not two. ~ Jesse Ball

There is no nobler profession, nor no greater calling, than to be among those unheralded many who gave and give their lives to the preservation of human knowledge, passed with commitment and care from one generation to the next. ~ Laurence Overmire

There is no faith, however respectable, no interest, however legitimate, which must not accommodate itself to the progress of human knowledge and bend before truth. ~ Paul Broca

Do you enjoy reading?' 'I enjoyed Fifty Shades of Grey.' Bryant quailed at the thought. 'That's not really reading, is it? More like staring at an assortment of words.' 'It is very popular.' 'So is taking photographs of your dinner for Facebook, but that doesn't mean it adds to the total sum of human knowledge. ~ Christopher Fowler

I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.2 - PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY, at a dinner in honor of all living recipients of the Nobel Prize, 1962 ~ Jon Meacham

In the eighteenth century, philosophers considered the whole of human knowledge, including science, to be their field and discussed questions such as: Did the universe have a beginning? However, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, science became too technical and mathematical for the philosophers, or anyone else except a few specialists. Philosophers reduced the scope of their inquiries so much that Wittgenstein, the most famous philosopher of this century, said, "The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language." What a comedown from the great tradition of philosophy from Aristotle to Kant! ~ Stephen Hawking

Upon a given body to generate and superinduce a new nature or new natures is the work and aim of human power. To discover the Form of a given nature, or its true difference, or its causal nature, or fount of its emanation ... this is the work and aim of human knowledge. ~ Francis Bacon

The foundation of all human knowledge, the beginning of human consciousness, must be that each and every one of us is an object of love. Before you know if you have red hair or brown, before you know if you are black or white, before you know of what religion you are a part, you have to know that you are loved ~ Michael Jackson

What you select from, in order to tell your story, is nothing less than everything. What you build up your world from, your local, intelligible rational, coherent world, is nothing less than everything ... All human knowledge is local. Every life, each human life is local, is arbitrary, the infinitesimal momentary glitter of a reflection. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Newton's time it was possible for an educated person to have a grasp of the whole of human knowledge, at least in outline. But since then, the pace of the development of science has made this impossible. ~ Stephen Hawking

Listening to Ella furiously and endlessly unfurl the yarns of the Mingus tales, I understood that the need to tell stories is deeply embedded in our minds, and inseparably entangled with the mechanisms that generate and absorb language. Narrative imagination
and therefore fiction
is a basic evolutionary tool of survival. We process the world by telling stories and produce human knowledge through our engagement with imagined selves. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

Struggle toward the capital-T Truth, but recognize that the task is impossible - or that if a correct answer is possible, verification certainly is impossible.
In the end, it cannot be doubted that each of us can see only a part of the picture. The doctor sees one, the patient another, the engineer a third, the economist a fourth, the pearl diver a fifth, the alcoholic a sixth, the cable guy a seventh, the sheep farmer an eighth, the Indian beggar a ninth, the pastor a tenth. Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still it is never complete. And Truth comes somewhere above all of them, where, as at the end of that Sunday's reading;
the sower and reaper can rejoice together. For here the saying is verified that "One sows and another reaps." I sent you to reap what you have not worked for; others have done the work, and you are sharing the fruits of their work. ~ Paul Kalanithi

If you are a person who contributes something new to the realm of human knowledge, I will be the first one to stand and applaud. ~ Ingrid Holm-Garibay

If all of human knowledge is like a library that we can borrow from or add to, then when men don't put these kinds of stories [(their abuse from others)] on the shelves, nobody can borrow them--we all miss out. ~ Oliver Thorn

Our human knowledge is a candle burnt On a dim altar to a sun-vast Truth. ~ Sri Aurobindo

Furnished as all Europe now is with Academies of Science, with nice instruments and the spirit of experiment, the progress of human knowledge will be rapid and discoveries made of which we have at present no conception. I begin to be almost sorry I was born so soon, since I cannot have the happiness of knowing what will be known a hundred years hence. ~ Benjamin Franklin

Before the Internet, coordinating more than 100,000 people, let alone paying them, was essentially impossible. But now with the Internet, I've just shown you a project where we've gotten 750 million people to help us digitize human knowledge. ~ Luis Von Ahn

The irony is that science has served only to show how small human knowledge is. ~ Masanobu Fukuoka

My journey deep into coma, outside this lowly physical realm and into the loftiest dwelling place of the almighty Creator, revealed the indescribably immense chasm between our human knowledge and the awe-inspiring realm of God. ~ Eben Alexander

The Divine is simply that which science has not yet explained. In effect, God = Infinity - Human Knowledge. ~ Ashwin Sanghi

God and his love, and of multiple layers of human folly, which rings true at all kinds of levels of human knowledge and experience. ~ N. T. Wright

I love the Internet, but it's hard not to get lost in it. It's not like a book where you start and get to the end. It's like we've found a way to encapsulate all of human knowledge within one thing only to learn that you can't do that. It's an overabundance of information. ~ Jarvis Cocker

As human knowledge has grown, it has also become plain that every religious story ever told about how we got here is quite simply wrong. This, finally, is what all religions have in common. They didn't get it right. ~ Salman Rushdie

One of the major challenges facing creative individuals is that of building upon the continuity of human knowledge while achieving novel insights ... On the one hand, to intensify an inquiry and develop a sense of commitment to a creative life, the learner needs models, teachers, and collaborators. On the other hand, the individual, while building upon the past, needs to transform it, and thus broaden his or her choices. ~ Vera John-Steiner

Unfortunately, it seems that we, as a society, have entered into a Faustian deal. Yes, we have these amazing handheld marvels of the digital age - tablets and smartphones - miraculous glowing devices that connect people throughout the globe and can literally access the sum of all human knowledge in the palm of our hand. But what is the price of all this future tech? The psyche and soul of an entire generation. The sad truth is that for the oh-so-satisfying ease, comfort and titillation of these jewels of the modern age, we've unwittingly thrown an entire generation under the virtual bus. ~ Nicholas Kardaras

Maybe we can comprehend a flower or an insect, but we can never comprehend ourselves. Even less can we expect to comprehend the universe. ~ Jostein Gaarder

[Google is] an omnivorous collector of information, a hyperencyclopedic vault of human knowledge, an unerring auctioneer, an eerily skilful student of languages, behaviour, and desires. ~ Steven Levy

It has been said, and perhaps with truth, that the conclusions of Political Economy partake more of the certainty of the stricter sciences than those of most of the other branches of human knowledge. ~ Thomas Malthus

We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine. ~ H.L. Mencken

The science of political economy is essentially practical, and applicable to the common business of human life. There are few branches of human knowledge where false views may do more harm, or just views more good. ~ Thomas Malthus

The explosion of human knowledge has accelerated to the point where even the most brilliant can't cope with it any more. Theories have rigidified into dogma just as they did in the Middle Ages. The leading experts feel obligated to protect their creed against the heretics. ~ John Brunner

His blade of human knowledge, natural astuteness particularized by long association with cases in the police courts, had been tempered by brief immersions in the waters of general philosophy. ~ James Joyce

Any material element or resource which, in order to become of use or value to men, requires the application of human knowledge and effort, should be private property-by the right of those who apply the knowledge and effort. ~ Ayn Rand

I found out that with one hundred and fifty well-chosen books a man possesses, if not a complete summary of all human knowledge, at least all that a man need really know. ~ Alexandre Dumas

As commonly practised, philosophy is the attempt to find good reasons for conventional beliefs'
'There is no mechanism of selection in the history of ideas akin to that of the natural selection of genetic mutations in evolution'
'Human knowledge is one thing, human well-being is another.There is no predetermined harmony between the two'
'In the struggle for life, the taste for truth is a luxury-or else a disability ~ John Gray

Thanks to technology, we now have access to the entirety of human knowledge from a device that fits in our pocket. The internet is humanity's greatest gift. ~ Nicky Verd

In less than eight years "The Origin of Species" has produced conviction in the minds of a majority of the most eminent living men of science. New facts, new problems, new difficulties as they arise are accepted, solved, or removed by this theory; and its principles are illustrated by the progress and conclusions of every well established branch of human knowledge. ~ Alfred Russel Wallace

Debates about the imagination and its role in human knowledge go back in the West to ancient Greece around the secrets and enigmas of the revealed "symbol" and its relationship to the more plodding ways of reason and rational knowledge. The most recent chapter of that larger conversation goes back to the eighteenth century and what we now call the Romantic movement. The poets and philosophers of the latter asked: What is the imagination? Is it simply a spinner of fantasies? Or can it also become a "window" of revealed truths from some other deeper part of the soul or world? Or, better yet, like some secret two-way mirror in a modern-day police station, is the imagination both, depending on whether one is looking at or through its reflecting surface, that is, depending on which side of it one is standing? Can one stand on both sides? ~ Whitley Strieber

The purpose of human existence is to learn and to understand as much as we can of what came before us, so we can further the sum total of human knowledge in our life. ~ Erik Naggum

The pretensions of final truth are always partlyan effort to obscure a darkly felt consciousness of the limits of human knowledge. ~ Reinhold Niebuhr

To express the same idea in still another way, I think that human knowledge is essentially active. ~ Jean Piaget

This means that no single logic is strong enough to support the total construction of human knowledge. ~ Jean Piaget

Since human knowledge is not perfect, a more knowledgeable person is not always right. ~ Raheel Farooq

Cities are more than the sum of their infrastructure. They transcend brick and mortar, concrete and steel. They're the vessels into which human knowledge is poured. ~ Rick Yancey

Hegel said that `truth` is subjective, thus rejecting the existence of any `truth` above or beyond human reason. All knowledge is human knowledge. ~ Jostein Gaarder

Those who want to row on the ocean of human knowledge do not get far, and the storm drives those out of their course who set sail. ~ Franz Grillparzer

I possessed nearly five thousand volumes in my library at Rome; but after reading them over many times, I found out that with a hundred and fifty well-chosen books a man possesses a complete analysis of all human knowledge, or at least all that is either useful or desirable to be acquainted with. – Abbe Faria ~ Alexandre Dumas

Even if the sum total of human knowledge is available online, a book is still a powerful thing. ~ M.H. Van Keuren

It is the close observation of little things which is the secret of success in business, in art, in science, and in every pursuit in life. Human knowledge is but an accumulation of small facts made by successive generations of men
the little bits of knowledge and experience carefully treasured up by them growing at length into a mighty pyramid. ~ Samuel Smiles

To inquisitive minds like yours and mine the reflection that the quantity of human knowledge bears no proportion to the quantity of human ignorance must be in one view rather pleasing, viz., that though we are to live forever we may be continually amused and delighted with learning something new. ~ Benjamin Franklin

No general description of the mode of advance of human knowledge can be just which leaves out of account the social aspect of knowledge. That is of its very essence. What a thing society is! The workingman, with his trade union, knows that. Men and women moving in polite society understand it, still better. But Bohemians, like me, whose work is done in solitude, are apt to forget that not only is a man as a whole little better than a brute in solitude, but also that everything that bears any important meaning to him must receive its interpretation from social considerations. ~ Charles Sanders Peirce

The range of human knowledge today is so great that we're all specialists and the distance between specializations has become so great that anyone who seeks to wander freely between them almost has to forego closeness with the people around him. ~ Robert M. Pirsig

The most promising words ever written on the maps of human knowledge are terra incognita, unknown territory. ~ Daniel J. Boorstin

We humans, through old habits, and because of the inherent structure of human knowledge have a tendency to make static, definite, and, in a way, absolutistic one-valued statements. But when we fight absolutism, we quite often establish, instead, some other dogma equally silly and harmful. For instance, an active atheist is psycho-logically as unsound as a rabid theist. ~ Alfred Korzybski

Knowledge consists in the search for truth - the search for objectively true, explanatory theories. It is not the search for certainty. To err is human. All human knowledge is fallible and therefore uncertain. It follows that we must distinguish sharply between truth and certainty. That to err is human means not only that we must constantly struggle against error, but also that, even when we have taken the greatest care, we cannot be completely certain that we have not made a mistake… To combat the mistake, the error, means therefore to search for objective truth and to do everything possible to discover and eliminate falsehoods. This is the task of scientific activity. Hence we can say: our aim as scientists is objective truth; more truth, more interesting truth, more intelligible truth. We cannot reasonably aim at certainty.... Since we can never know anything for sure, it is simply not worth searching for certainty; but it is well worth searching for truth; and we do this chiefly by searching for mistakes, so that we can correct them. ~ Karl Popper

Nature, keeping only useless secrets, had placed within reach and in sight of human beings the things it was necessary for them to know. ~ Michel Foucault

If one does not make human knowledge wholly dependent upon the original self-knowledge and consequent revelation of God to man, then man will have to seek knowledge within himself as the final reference point. Then he will have to seek an exhaustive understanding of reality. He will have to hold that if he cannot attain to such an exhaustive understanding of reality he has no true knowledge of anything at all. Either man must then know everything or he knows nothing. This is the dilemma that confronts every form of non-Christian epistemology ~ Cornelius Van Til

If we live in a world of states, and if out-of-state existence is impossible, then we all must live as national citizens. We are the nation, and the nation is us. This is as fundamental as it is an inescapable reality. Nationalism engulfs both the individual and the collective; it produces the 'I' and 'We' dialectically and separately. Not only does nationalism produce the community and its individual members: it is itself the community and its realized individual subjects, for without these there is no nationalism.

"Leading sociologists and philosophers have emphasized the pervasive presence of the community in individual consciousnesses, where the social bond is an essential part of the self. It is not only that the 'I' is a member of the 'We,' but, more importantly, that the 'We' is a necessary member of the 'I.' It is an axiom of sociological theory, writes Scheler, that all human knowledge 'precedes levels of self-contagiousness of one's self-value. There is no "I" without "We." The "We" is filled with contents prior to the "I." ' Likewise, Mannheim emphasizes ideas and thought structures as functions of social relations that exist within the group, excluding the possibility of any ideas arising independently of socially shared meanings. The social reality of nationalism not only generates meanings but is itself a 'context of meaning'; hence our insistence that nationalism constitutes and is constituted by the community as a social order. 'It is senseless to p ~ Wael B. Hallaq

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing. ~ Jimmy Wales

Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still it is never complete. ~ Paul Kalanithi

Since all terms that are defined are defined by means of other terms, it is clear that human knowledge must always be content to accept some terms as intelligible without definition, in order to have a starting point for its definitions ... [and] since human powers are finite, the definitions known to us must always begin somewhere, with terms undefined for the moment, though perhaps not permanently. - Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy ~ Bertrand Russell

No one has yet been found so firm of mind and purpose as resolutely to compel himself to sweep away all theories and common notions, and to apply the understanding, thus made fair and even, to a fresh examination of particulars. Thus it happens that human knowledge, as we have it, is a mere medley and ill-digested mass, made up of much credulity and much accident, and also of the childish notions which we at first imbibed. ~ Francis Bacon