#knowledge

A monk should surely love his books with humility, wishing their good and not the glory of his own curiosity; but what the temptation of adultery is for laymen and the yearning for riches is for secular ecclesiastics, the seduction of knowledge is for monks. ↗

— Umberto Eco

#curiosity #knowledge #seduction #vice #love

When prayer, rituals and ascetic life are just a means of self-indulgence, they are harmful rather than beneficial. This is quite obvious to people nowadays, when it is widely recognised that fixations are not the same as valuable and laudable observances. One should not pray if that prayer is vanity; rituals are wrong when they provide lower satisfactions, like emotional stimulus instead of enlightenment; he or she should not be an ascetic who is only enjoying it. ↗

— Idries Shah

#love #sufis #truth #way #wisdom

Men of the world who value the Way all turn to books. But books are nothing more than words. Words have value; what is of value in words is meaning. Meaning has something it is pursuing, but the thing that it is pursuing cannot be put into words and handed down. The world values words and hands down books but, though the world values them, I do not think them worth valuing. What the world takes to be values is not real value. ↗

— Zhuangzi

#limitation #truth #words #men

The propensity to excessive simplification is indeed natural to the mind of man, since it is only by abstraction and generalisation, which necessarily imply the neglect of a multitude of particulars, that he can stretch his puny faculties so as to embrace a minute portion of the illimitable vastness of the universe. But if the propensity is natural and even inevitable, it is nevertheless fraught with peril, since it is apt to narrow and falsify our conception of any subject under investigation. To correct it partially - for to correct it wholly would require an infinite intelligence - we must endeavour to broaden our views by taking account of a wide range of facts and possibilities; and when we have done so to the utmost of our power, we must still remember that from the very nature of things our ideas fall immeasurably short of the reality. ↗

— James George Frazer

#generalisation #knowledge #science #art

Yet the Narrator’s quest is not only for his own identity and vocation. He seeks an understanding of art, sexuality and worldly and political affairs: he is a snoop and a voyeur; he comments and classifies; his taxonomic impulse makes the novel appear to be a vast compendium, replete with burrowing wasps and bedsteads, military strategies, stereoscopes, asparagus and aeroplanes. ↗

— Adam A. Watt

#gnothi-seauton #know-thyself #knowledge #proust #art

These people have learned not from books, but in the fields, in the wood, on the river bank. Their teachers have been the birds themselves, when they sang to them, the sun when it left a glow of crimson behind it at setting, the very trees, and wild herbs. ↗

— Anton Chekhov

#nature #nature

I think it's good for a person to spend time alone. It gives them an opportunity to discover who they are and to figure out why they are always alone. ↗

— Amy Sedaris

#being-alone #self-knowledge #time

The more I read, the more I acquire, the more certain I am that I know nothing. ↗

— Voltaire

#self-knowledge #wisdom #wisdom

Any fool can know. The point is to understand. ↗

— Albert Einstein

#learning #understanding #wisdom #wisdom

A woman, especially if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can. ↗

— Jane Austen

#women #women