Showing posts with label knowledge. Show all posts
Showing posts with label knowledge. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 19, 2023

Sherlock on knowledge

I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.

It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgment.

Sherlock Holmes, by Arthur Conan Doyle in A Study in Scarlet

Sunday, October 01, 2023

Truer words ....

There is no doubt that being human is incredibly difficult and cannot be mastered in one lifetime.

Dead men don’t find things out. 

Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time

 

Friday, July 15, 2022

Blake: From The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings.

The fox condemns the trap, not himself.

What is now proved was once only imagined.

Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth.

Expect poison from the standing water.

You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.

To create a little flower is the labor of ages.

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. 

 

William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell



Monday, June 13, 2022

To know good by knowing good is the privilege of the unfallen.

Catherine Nicholson, on Milton in the NYR 

 

Friday, February 18, 2022

We must not expect to find reason anywhere in Nature, but only the evidence of will!

Pliny the Elder, Natural History 

Wednesday, November 24, 2021

What’s wisdom but knowing what is right, and what is the right thing to do?

Iain M. Banks, Use of Weapons

Thursday, March 25, 2021

A life is not such a tremendous time to learn to express your ideas.

Henry Adams

Saturday, January 30, 2021

Friday, August 28, 2020

We are what we do, not what we think.  Only the interactions count.

Iain Banks, The Player of Games


Saturday, July 11, 2020

Men get very fond of the things they defend, especially when they find themselves defending something stupid.


Theodore Sturgeon in his wonderful short story, The Widget, The Wadget, and Boff 

Friday, July 10, 2020

Knowledge is a pile of bricks, and understanding is a way of building.

Theodore  Sturgeon

Sunday, April 12, 2020

Men do not know the natural disease of the mind; it does nothing but ferret and inquire, and is eternally wheeling, juggling, and perplexing itself like silkworms, and then suffocates itself in its work;  It thinks it discovers at a great distance, I know not what glimpses of light and imaginary truth: but whilst running to it, so many difficulties, hindrances, and new inquisitions cross it, that it loses its way, and is made drunk with the motion.

Montaigne

Monday, February 10, 2020

When all is summed up, a man never speaks of himself without loss; a man's accusations of himself are always believed; his praises never.... the wise may learn more of fools, than fools can of the wise.

Montaigne

Thursday, February 06, 2020

Though all that has arrived, by report, of our knowledge of times past should be true, and known by some one person, it would be less than nothing in comparison of what is unknown. And of this same image of the world, which glides away whilst we live upon it, how wretched and limited is the knowledge of the most curious; not only of particular events, which fortune often renders exemplary and of great concern, but of the state of great governments and nations, a hundred more escape us than ever come to our knowledge.

Montaigne

Thursday, October 03, 2019

Everything flows and nothing abides; everything gives way and nothing stays fixed.... It is in changing that things find repose.

Men who love wisdom should acquaint themselves with a great many particulars.

Heraclitus (per Philip Wheelwright, The PreSocratics)

Friday, June 21, 2019

The "good"... does not stand for anything that is empirically given.  It always grows out of an impasse, at a moment of indecision; thus it is always the product of a question: what is the good.


Bruno Snell on Socrates


Thursday, June 06, 2019

Events cause knowledge, but knowledge does not cause events. 

Montaigne

Wednesday, April 10, 2019

Human beings and fundamental particles share one absolute commonality: they exist in their interactions.  In between times, their positions and trajectories are indecipherable even to themselves.

Nick Harkaway, Gnomon

Saturday, April 06, 2019

I am not obliged not to utter absurdities, provided I am not deceived in them and know them to be such....

We easily enough confess in others an advantage of courage, strength, experience, activity, and beauty, but an advantage in judgment we yield to none....

This capacity of trying the truth, whatever it be, in myself, and this free humour of not over easily subjecting my belief, I owe principally to myself; for the strongest and most general imaginations I have are those that, as a man may say, were born with me; they are natural and entirely my own. I produced them crude and simple, with a strong and bold production, but a little troubled and imperfect; I have since established and fortified them with the authority of others and the sound examples of the ancients, whom I have found of the same judgment.

Montaigne, Essays, Second Book, Chapter 17.

Friday, March 29, 2019

For there are these three things that endure: Faith, Hope and Love, but the greatest of these is Love.
Run after love and be zealous for the gifts of The Spirit, that you may know the truth.


1 Corinthians 13-14