#owl

The hardest thing of all is to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if there is no cat. ↗

— Confucius

#knowledge #religion #religion

All knowledge that is about human society, and not about the natural world, is historical knowledge, and therefore rests upon judgment and interpretation. This is not to say that facts or data are nonexistent, but that facts get their importance from what is made of them in interpretation… for interpretations depend very much on who the interpreter is, who he or she is addressing, what his or her purpose is, at what historical moment the interpretation takes place. ↗

— Edward W. Said

#human-society #interpretation #knowledge #nature

... informed ignorance provides the natural state of mind for research scientists at the ever-shifting frontiers of knowledge. People who believe themselves ignorant of nothing have neither looked for, nor stumbled upon, the boundary between what is known and unknown in the cosmos. ↗

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

#science #nature

Ignorance is of a peculiar nature; once dispelled, it is impossible to reestablish it. It is not originally a thing of itself, but is only the absence of knowledge; and though man may be kept ignorant, he cannot be made ignorant. ↗

— Thomas Paine

#knowledge #potential #rights-of-man #nature

I mean that the escape of knowledge into the realm of wider society irretrievably alters the nature of our lives. ↗

— Nick Harkaway

#nature

There is in every intellect a natural exigency for a true concept of God: we are born with the thirst to know and to see Him, and therefore it cannot be otherwise. ↗

— Thomas Merton

#intellect #knowledge #nature

There are genuine mysteries in the world that mark the limits of human knowing and thinking. Wisdom is fortified, not destroyed, by understanding its limitations. Ignorance does not make a fool as surely as self-deception. ↗

— Mortimer J. Adler

#limitations #mysteries #wisdom #self-knowledge

The Unknown is not the Unknowable; it need not remain the unknown for us, unless we choose ignorance or persist in our first limitations. For to all things that are not unknowable, all things in the universe, there correspond in that universe faculties which can take cognisance of them, and in man, the microcosm, these faculties are always existant and at a certain stage capable of development. We may choose not to develop them; where they are partially developed, we may discourage and impose on them a kind of atrophy. But, fundamentally all possible knowledge is knowledge within the power of humanity. And since in man there is the inalienable impulse of Nature towards self-realisation, no struggle of the intellect to limit the action of our capacities within a determined area can for ever prevail. ↗

— Sri Aurobindo

#knowledge #mind #philosophy #self #truth

Absolute trust in the reality of things begins to be shaken as the problem of truth enters upon the scene. The moment man ceases merely to live in and with reality and demands a knowledge of this reality, he moves into a new and fundamentally different relation to it. At first, to be sure, the question of truth seems to apply only to particular parts and not to the whole of reality. Within this whole different strata of validity begin to be marked off, reality seems to separate sharply from appearance. But it lies in the very nature of the problem of truth that once it arises it never comes to rest. The concept of truth conceals an immanent dialectic that drives it inexorably forward, forever extending its limits. ↗

— Ernst Cassirer

#knowledge #problem-of-truth #reality #reflection #trust

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

#knowledge #science #nature