Trivial Knowledge Quotes

In a deserted stretch of the Karadj highway Munis had come face-to-face with unbridled lust, although she knew what lust was before being touched by it. The problem was that she had an unbounded awareness of things, an awareness that instilled undue caution in her, making her fearful that action would lead to ignominy, humiliation. This created in her a desire to be ordinary, average. Yet she did not truly know what it meant to be ordinary. She did not know that it meant not loving an earthworm, not genuflecting at the altar of withered leaves, not standing in prayer at the call of a lark, not climbing a mountain to see the sunrise, not staying awake all night to gaze at the Ursa Major. She did not differentiate between earth and gravel, but she distinguished the earth from the sky. She had not seen the skies of the earth, but she knew there were earths of the sky. She saw herself in an inevitable process of stagnation. She was already partially rotten within.
"What can I do with this mass of trivial knowledge?" she wondered aloud. "How can I cut through it? ~ Shahrnush Parsipur

... imagine that the earth - four thousand six hundred million years old - [were] a forty-six-year-old woman ... . It had taken the whole of the Earth Woman's life for the earth to become what it was. For the oceans to part. For the mountains to rise. The Earth Woman was eleven years old ... when the first single-celled organisms appeared. The first animals, creatures like worms and jellyfish, appeared only when she was forty. She was over forty-five - just eight months ago - when dinosaurs roamed the earth. The whole of human civilization as we know it began only two hours ago in the Earth Woman's life ... . It was an awe-inspiring and humbling thought ... that the whole of contemporary history, the World Wars, the War of Dreams, the Man on the Moon, science, literature, philosophy, the pursuit of knowledge - was no more than a blink of the Earth Woman's eye. ~ Arundhati Roy

There are two antagonistic elements of society in America," Seward had proclaimed, "freedom and slavery. Freedom is in harmony with our system of government and with the spirit of the age, and is therefore passive and quiescent. Slavery is in conflict with that system, with justice, with humanity, and is therefore organized, defensive, active, and perpetually aggressive." Free labor, he said, demands universal suffrage and the widespread "diffusion of knowledge." The slave-based system, by contrast "cherishes ignorance because it is the only security for oppression. ~ Doris Kearns Goodwin

Satan does not care what you know. He only fears what you understand and apply. In fact, his assignment is to hinder your understanding. ~ Theophilus Ajadi

Those people who develop the ability to continuously acquire new and better forms of knowledge that they can apply to their work and to their lives will be the movers and shakers in our society for the indefinite future. ~ Brian Tracy

Ignite me with knowledge and I shall make you enjoy the sparkling lights. ~ Bela Anĝelo

Knowledge is great; wisdom is even better. ~ Jay Allison

I always valued my reading skills as highly as I did my basketball skills. In college and in the N.B.A., I read at every opportunity. When age diminished my basketball skills and I retired, I still had everything I'd learned through reading: knowledge of the world and its history, an aptitude for critical thinking and the ability to write. ~ Kareem Abdul -Jabbar

Fine art is knowledge made visible. ~ Gustave Courbet

I know that knowledge and intelligence are not the same thing - but they do live in the same neighborhood. I know once again, firsthand, the joy of learning. ~ A. J. Jacobs

The development of the telescope, together with increased knowledge of things, brought men to see that the earth is not what man had once thought it to be. ~ Joseph Franklin Rutherford

One is fully conscious when he or she is the results of having been informed and instructed by the experience of his or her ancestors and use that knowledge to master, understand and become able to create institutions that allow him or her to live in harmony with the rest of nature and the universe. ~ James Small

Knowledge is power-and power of one sort or another is the secret lust of human souls; and here is, beside the sense of exploration, the undefinable interest of a story, and above all, something forbidden, to stimulate the contumacious appetite. ~ Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

There can be no excess to love, none to knowledge, none to beauty. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Om began to feel the acute depression that steals over every realist in the presence of an optimist. ~ Terry Pratchett

Training in most fields is longer and more intense than ever. People spend years of sixty-, seventy-, eighty-hour weeks building their base of knowledge and experience before going out into practice on their own - whether they are doctors or professors or lawyers or engineers. They have sought to perfect themselves. It is not clear how we could produce substantially more expertise than we already have. Yet our failures remain frequent. They persist despite remarkable individual ability. * ~ Atul Gawande

This is life.
Learning to love through loss. Seeking warm pockets in the bitter cold. Finding the worth of a smile on a cloudy day. Carrying the weight of the world on weary shoulders - mistakes, sins, injustices - added upon daily. Enduring burdens that spur greater strength.
This is life.
Sorting through layers of expressions staring you straight in the eye. A battle to be right when wrong, to be good when bad, to be content when in need, and to laugh when tearing up.
This is life.
Valuing things of no worth. Reevaluating dreams. Laboring ceaselessly against the current. Seeing less, wanting more, having enough.
This is life.
Chasing the moon when the sun would extend its warmth. Slapping the hand that would offer a gentle caress. Cowering at personal, monstrous shadows. Giving and taking in unbalanced weights. Diminishing the majesty of mountains in order to form our own lowly hills. Hoping for more than we deserve.
This is life.
Hurting. Despairing. Losing. Weeping. Suffering. Laboring. Sinking. Mourning. Appreciating with greater capacity and sincerity a learned knowledge that these adversities do have their opposites.
This is life.
A taste. A revelation. A banishment. A mercy. A test. An experience. A turbulent sea-voyage that shall assuredly reach the unseen shore, making seasoned sailors of us all.
This is life. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

You are born for service, service is love, service is joy, service brings endless peace and happiness. ~ Debasish Mridha

In the end we can never be given knowledge by others; we can only be stimulated. We must develop our own knowledge. ~ Charles Tart

The motive for metaphor ... is a desire to associate, and finally to identify, the human mind with what goes on outside it, because the only genuine joy you can have is in those rare moments when you feel that although we may know in part, as Paul says, we are also a part of what we know. ~ Northrop Frye

So all I have is the knowledge that I saw! That I saw without being afraid and without turning away, and that I didn't forgive the unforgivable. Forgiveness is a reflex for when you can't stand what you know. I resisted that reflex. That's my sole, solitary, lonely accomplishment. ~ Jane Smiley

Quite a few people still listen to vinyl records, use film cameras to take photographs, and look up phone numbers in the printed Yellow Pages. But the old technologies lose their economic and cultural force. They become progress's dead ends. It's the new technologies that govern production and consumption, that guide people's behavior and shape their perceptions. That's why the future of knowledge and culture no longer lies in books or newspapers or TV shows or radio programs or records or CDs. It lies in digital files shot through our universal medium at the speed of light. ~ Nicholas Carr

I had a foretaste of another, larger kind of knowledge: one I believe human beings will be able to access in ever larger numbers in the future. But conveying that knowledge now is rather like a chimpanzee, becoming human for a single day to experience all of the wonders of human knowledge, and then returning to one's chimp friends and trying to tell them what it was like knowing several different Romance languages, the calculus, and the immense scale of the universe. ~ Eben Alexander

If you're an artist, it's great to have a knowledge of the business and be educated about that, but you've got to keep the balance right between business and artistry; otherwise, you get cynical. ~ Gugu Mbatha-Raw

In this forest of humanity we hate each other more than we love each other. When we will learn to love each other, only then we will see the peace. ~ Debasish Mridha

One man thinks justice consists in paying debts, and has no measure in his abhorrence of another who is very remiss in this duty and makes the creditor wait tediously. But that second man has his own way of looking at things; asks himself Which debt must I pay first, the debt to the rich, or the debt to the poor? the debt of money or the debt of thought to mankind, of genius to nature? For you, O broker, there is not other principle but arithmetic. For me, commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred; ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Computerization brings about an essential change in the way the worker can know the world and, with it, a crisis of confidence inthe possibility of certain knowledge. ~ Shoshana Zuboff

I went into a lather of misery watching them, and thinking of you, and how in the end you'll all be locked together, like the poor beasts that get their antlers mixed and are found dead that way, their heads fattened with a knowledge of each other that they never wanted, having had to contemplate each other, head-on, eye to eye, until death; well, that will be you and Jenny and Robin. ~ Djuna Barnes

Humanism is my Religion, Good is my adoption , Bad is my Elimination, Acceptance is my Decision, Love is My Gift , Relation is my Affection ,Truth is My Strength, Help Is My Credit , Knowledge is My Treasure ~ Jagan Kumar

The earliest surviving manuscript containing Artephius' 'Ars Sintrillia' is from the seventeenth century, titled 'Artetti ac Mininii Apologia in Artem Magicam' under the heading 'De Scientia Praeteritorum Praesentium ac Futuorum'. This describes the use of three vases of different materials filled with water, wine and oil in which there are semi-precious stones. These are arranged in several ways with candles, and by the reflection of the rays of the sun, moon and stars into the liquids from several instruments, including a sword, make possible various kinds of divination, especially knowledge of the past, present and future ~ Nicholas Clulee

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

There is a widespread philosophical tendency towards the view which tells us that Man is the measure of all things, that truth is man-made, that space and time and the world of universals are properties of the mind, and that, if there be anything not created by the mind, it is unknowable and of no account for us. This view, if our previous discussions were correct, is untrue; but in addition to being untrue, it has the effect of robbing philosophic contemplation of all that gives it value, since it fetters contemplation to Self. What it calls knowledge is not a union with the not-Self, but a set of prejudices, habits, and desires, making an impenetrable veil between us and the world beyond. The man who finds pleasure in such a theory of knowledge is like a man who never leaves the domestic circle for fear his word might not be law. ~ Bertrand Russell

The efficient market hypothesis (EMH) explains this phenomenon: current market prices reflect the total knowledge and expectations of all investors, and it is highly unlikely that one investor can know more than the market does collectively. For ~ Larry E. Swedroe

Amid this din of complaint and trivial offense, how to know what really mattered, how to identify the true crisis when it came along? ~ Scott Anderson

I carried the books to my room and read through the night. I loved the fiery pages of Mary Wollstonecraft, but there was a single line written by John Stuart Mill that, when I read it, moved the world: "It is a subject on which nothing final can be known." The subject Mill had in mind was the nature of women. Mill claimed that women have been coaxed, cajoled, shoved and squashed into a series of feminine contortions for so many centuries, that it is now quite impossible to define their natural abilities or aspirations.

Blood rushed to my brain; I felt an animating surge of adrenaline, of possibility, of a frontier being pushed outward. Of the nature of women, nothing final can be known. Never had I found such comfort in a void, in the black absence of knowledge. It seemed to say: whatever you are, you are woman. ~ Tara Westover