Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Knowing

"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers." - Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke

"Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers." - Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke

"Knowledge is the knowing that we can not know. The dull pray; the geniuses are light mockers. How respectable is earnestness on every platform! but intellect kills it." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Knowledge is the knowing that we cannot know." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that may be wrong. I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without having any purpose." - Richard Feynman, fully Richard Phillips Feynman

"True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing…" - Socrates NULL

"In knowing nothing is the sweetest life." - Sophocles NULL

"God is All-knowing and All-powerful. He does not stand in need of any recommendation or help form any prophet or anyone else; otherwise, where would be the difference between God and man?" -

"Ninety percent of the world's woe comes from people not knowing themselves, their abilities, their frailties, and even their real virtues. Most of us go almost all the way through life as complete strangers to ourselves - so how can we know anything else?" -

"That [which is beyond every name and form] is comprehended only by the one with no comprehension of it: anyone comprehending, knows it not. Unknown to the knowing, it is the unknowing known." - Upanishads or The Upanishads NULL

"The most important single ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with people." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"There is much more learning than knowing in the world." - Thomas Fuller

"My soul is myself; the well-spring or point of consciousness, or center of inner activity… the most real thing in the universe to me; the start of all other knowing, the test by which I judge all other data." - Upton Sinclair, fully Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr.

"I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things. Love a friend, a wife, something – whatever you like – you will be on the way to knowing more about Him; that is what I say to myself. But one must love with a lofty and serious intimate sympathy, with strength, with intelligence; and one must always try to know deeper, better, and more. That leads to God, that leads to unwavering faith." - Vincent van Gogh, fully Vincent Willem van Gogh

"Risk comes from not knowing what you're doing." - Warren Buffett, fully Warren Edward Buffett, aka Oracle of Omaha

"Life must progress in part by the imprudence of those who undertake the impossible, no knowing what they do." - William Ernest Hocking

"The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness." - William Saroyan

"The wise man, knowing how to enjoy achieved results without having constantly to replace them with others, finds in them an attachment to life in the hour of difficulty. But the man who has always pinned all his hopes on the future and lived with his eyes fixed upon it, has nothing in the past as a comfort against the present's afflictions, for the past was nothing to him but a series of hastily experienced stages. What blinded him to himself was his expectation always to find further on the happiness he had so far missed. Now he is stopped in his tracks; from now on nothing remains behind or ahead of him to fix his gaze upon. " - Émile Durkheim, fully David Émile Durkheim

"Unhappiness is not knowing what we want and killing ourselves to get it. " - Don Herold

"Human beings are so divided, are becoming more and more divided, and more subdivided in themselves, reflecting the world, that they reach out desperately, not knowing they do it, for information about other groups inside their own country, let alone about groups in other countries. It is a blind grasping out for their own wholeness, and the novel-report is a means towards it." - Doris Lessing, fully Doris May Lessing, born Doris May Tayler

"If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without them knowing it." - Edward Bernays, fully Edward Louis Bernays

"Local knowledge is at one with lived experience if indeed it is true that this knowledge is of the localities in which the knowing subject lives. To live is to live locally, and to know is first of all to know the places one is in." - Edward S. Casey

"There is no knowing or sensing a place except by being in that place and to be in a place is not, then, subsequent to perception– as Kant dogmatically assumed– but is an ingredient in perception itself. Such knowledge, genuinely local knowledge, is itself experiential" - Edward S. Casey

"An expert is someone who has succeeded in making decisions and judgements simpler through knowing what to pay attention to and what to ignore." - Edward de Bono

"It's only when we truly know and understand that we have a limited time on earth - and that we have no way of knowing when our time is up, we will then begin to live each day to the fullest, as if it was the only one we had. " - Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

"Care and responsibility are constituent elements of love, but without respect for and knowledge of the beloved person, love deteriorates into domination and possessiveness. Respect is not fear and awe; it denotes, in accordance with the root of the word (respicere = to look at), the ability to see a person as he is, to be aware of his individuality and uniqueness. To respect a person is not possible without knowing him; care and responsibilty would be blind if they were not guided by the knowledge of the person's individuality." - Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm

"The pain of not knowing what to do was exceeded only by that of knowing what I had done" - Erich Segal, fully Erich Wolf Segal

"If the substance of the spiritual experience is always and everywhere the same, differences in its expression and interpretation are secondary and not a valid cause for conflict and intolerance. The world to which our quantum brain connects us is fundamentally one, whether its oneness is due to an information field within the natural world or the work of a divine transcendent intelligence. To enter into communion with this oneness has been the quest of all the great teachers and spiritual masters. And to understand the nature of this oneness has been, and is, the ultimate quest of all great scientists. Still today, physicists seek the one equation that would anchor their famous "Theory of Everything," the theory that would account for all the laws of nature and explain everything that ever happened in our integrally whole universe. Einstein said that knowing this equation would be reading the mind of God." - Ervin László

"The witness is frequent and insistent that God is inherently relational and personal. So God cannot be either received or understood apart from our being personal and realtional as well. That most emphatically excludes the detached intellect as a way of knowing God. It excludes programmatic work as a way of knowing God. It excludes cultivation of the ecstatic and visionary as a way of knowing God. God is not an abstract idea that can be mastered, not an impersonal force that can be used, not a private experience that can be indulged." - Eugene Peterson

"The truest way to be deceived is to think oneself more knowing than others." -

"To attempt seeing Truth without knowing Falsehood. It is the attempt to see the Light without knowing the Darkness. It cannot be. " - Frank Herbert, formally Franklin Patrick Herbert, Jr.

"It's not the honors and the prizes and the fancy outsides of life which ultimately nourish our souls. It's the knowing that we can be trusted, that we never have to fear the truth, that the bedrock of our very being is good stuff." - Fred Rogers, "Mister Rogers," born Frederick McFeely Rogers

"The goal to be reached is the mind’s insight into what knowing is. Impatience asks for the impossible, wants to reach the goal without the means of getting there. The length of the journey has to be borne with, for every moment is necessary... and because by nothing less could that all-pervading mind ever manage to become conscious of what itself is — for that reason, the individual mind, in the nature of the case, cannot expect by less toil to grasp what its own substance contains." - Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

"Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep." - George Lois

"Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. " - Gilda Radner, fully Gilda Susan Radner

"Knowing trees, I understand the meaning of patience. Knowing grass, I can appreciate persistence. " - Hal Borland, formally Harold Glen Borland

"We grown-up people think that we appreciate music, but if we realized the sense that an infant has brought with it of appreciating sound and rhythm, we would never boast of knowing music. The infant is music itself." - Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

"The holy ones whom God gave you to save are everyone you meet or look upon, not knowing who they are, all those you saw an instant and forgot, and those you knew a long while since, and those you will meet yet, the unremembered and the not yet born." - Helen Schucman, born Helen Cohn

"From one Soul of the Universe are all Souls derived... Of these Souls there are many changes, some into a more fortunate estate, and some quite contrary... Not all human souls but only the pious ones are divine. Once separated from the body, and after the struggle to acquire piety, which consists in knowing God and injuring none, such a soul becomes all intelligence. The impious soul, however, punishes itself by seeking a human body to enter into, for no other body can receive a human soul it cannot enter the body of an animal devoid of reason. Divine law preserves the human soul from such infamy... The soul passeth from form to form and the mansions of her pilgrimage are manifold. Thou puttest off thy bodies as raiment and as vesture dost thou fold them up. Thou art from old, O Soul of Man yea, thou art from everlasting." - Hermes Trismegistus

"The ultimate victory in competition is derived from the inner satisfaction of knowing that you have done your best and that you have gotten the most out of what you had to give." - Howard Cosell, fully Howard William Cosell, born Howard William Cohen

"People under delusion accumulate tainted merits but do not tread the Path. They are under the impression that to accumulate merits and to tread the Path are one and the same thing. Though their merits for alms-giving and offerings are infinite. They do not realize that the ultimate source of sin lies in the three poisons within their own mind. They expect to expiate their sins by accumulating merit. Without knowing that felicities obtained in future lives have nothing to do with the expiation of sins. Why not get rid of the sin within our own mind, for this is true repentance?" - Dajian Hui-neng or Huineng

"Surely education is not merely to give you knowledge, but also to give you the capacity to look at the world objectively, to see what is happening - the wars, the destruction, the violence, the brutality. The function of education is to find out how to live differently, not merely to pass exams, to get a degree, become qualified in certain ways. It is to help you to face the world in a totally different, intelligent way, knowing you have to earn a livelihood, knowing all the responsibilities, the miseries of it all." - Jiddu Krishnamurti

"Without understanding the process of thought, how thought comes into being, the ways of your own individual thinking, how your thought is driven by motives, by desires, by anxieties, - without knowing the whole content of thought you cannot possibly bring about tranquillity." - Jiddu Krishnamurti

"Don't imitate. If you want to know who you are, please avoid imitation, that's a way of avoiding knowing yourself." - Osho, born Chandra Mohan Jain, also known as Acharya Rajneesh and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh NULL

"Life is a mystery; that means it cannot be solved. And when all efforts to solve it prove futile, the mystery dawns upon you. Then the doors are open; then you are invited. As a knower, nobody enters the divine; as a child, ignorant, not knowing at all- the mystery embraces you. With a knowing mind you are clever, not innocent. Innocence is the door." - Osho, born Chandra Mohan Jain, also known as Acharya Rajneesh and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh NULL

"We teach a subject not to produce little living librarians on teh subject, but rather to get a student to think... for himself, to consider matters... to take part in the process of knowledge-getting. Knowing is a process, not a product." - Jerome Bruner, fully Jerome Seymour Bruner

"Having gained distance and sophistication of perception, we can turn and recognize who we have been all along. Now it can dawn on us: we are our world knowing itself. We can relinquish our separateness. We can come home again -- and participate in our world in a richer, more responsible and poignantly beautiful way than before, in our infancy." - Joanna Macy, fully Joanna Rogers Macy

"Life's an adventure... sometimes a risky one. The key is knowing what to take risks for, and how to take them well." - John Graham

"Try to understand men. If you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and almost always leads to love." - John Steinbeck, fully John Ernst Steinbeck

"Our chief wisdom consists in knowing our follies and faults, that we may correct them. True wisdom is a thing very extraordinary. Happy are they that have it; and next to them, not the many that think they have it, but the few that are sensible of their own defects and imperfections, and know that they have it not." - John Tillotson, Archbishop of Canterbury