April 18

It is not the quantity of knowledge that is important, but its quality. It is possible to know a great deal without knowing what is most necessary.

1

It is not shameful or harmful to not know something. No one can know everything. But it is shameful and harmful to pretend that you know that which you do not.

2

People cannot know and understand everything that happens in the world, which is why they reason falsely about many things. Human ignorance comes in two forms: one type of ignorance is pure, natural ignorance, in which people are born; the other ignorance is an ignorance of the truly wise, so to speak. After a person studies all the sciences and learns everything that people knew and know, he will see that all this knowledge combined is so paltry that there is no way to use it to gain a real understanding of God’s world, and he will become convinced that, in essence, learned people know just as little as those who are simple and uneducated. But there are superficial people who have learned a little of something, who have picked up the tips of various sciences and have grown arrogant. They have departed from natural ignorance but have not yet arrived at the true wisdom of those scholars who have understood the imperfection and insignificance of all human knowledge. These are the people who consider themselves very clever and who are muddying the world. They make self-confident and reckless judgements and, naturally, always make mistakes. They know how to throw dust into people’s eyes, and people often treat them with respect, but the simple people despise them because they see their uselessness, and they, in turn, despise the people, deeming them ignorant.

— Pascal

3

If only one group of people were allowed to produce food and the rest forbidden to do it, or placed in a position which made it impossible to do, then food would not be good. This is what has happened to sciences and arts, which have been monopolized by one caste, the only difference being the fact that while material food cannot deviate too far from nature, spiritual food can deviate considerably.

4

Wisdom is a great and vast subject, it demands all the free time that you can dedicate to it. It does not matter how many questions you manage to solve, you will still have a multitude more waiting to be solved. These questions are so vast and so numerous that they require you to remove from your consciousness everything superfluous in order to give your mind the space to work. Should I waste my life on mere words? And yet it often happens that scientists spend more time contemplating discourses than life. Observe what evil is born of excessive philosophizing and how dangerous it can be for truth.

— Seneca

5

The methodical chatter of the universities is oftentimes only a mutual agreement to avoid solving difficult questions, which is done by giving your words an ambiguous and changeable meaning, because the convenient and for the most part indifferent “I don’t know” is not well received in the academies.

— Kant

6

Truth has to overcome a thousand obstacles to make its way to paper in one piece, and then again from paper to the head. Liars are the weakest enemies of truth. The most dangerous enemies of truth are, firstly, the enthusiastic writer who speaks of all things and considers everything the same way other people do when they had a little bit to drink; secondly, the person who considers himself an expert on human nature, who sees, or wants to see, the reflection of a person’s whole life reflected in his every action; and lastly, the righteous, pious person, who believes everything out of respect, who does not examine anything of what he had learned up to the age of fifteen and who builds the little of what he examines upon an unexamined foundation. It is these people who are the most dangerous enemies of truth.

— Lichtenberg

7

The most ardent defenders of any science, who cannot bear the tiniest sidelong glance upon it, are typically those individuals who have made little progress in it and are secretly conscious of their insufficiency.

— Lichtenberg

8

Culture is a facade which more often than not conceals ignorance rather than enlightenment.

— Lucy Mallory

9

A scholar who produces nothing is like a cloud that does not rain.

— Eastern wisdom

10

The chief fault of bad writers is trying to express their direct thoughts using words that are suitable only for thoughts that have been properly contemplated. If instead they expressed their thoughts using suitable words, they would always contribute something of their own, which would improve the whole and would make them worthy of attention.

— Lichtenberg

The most harmful thing for true knowledge is the use of ambiguous concepts and terms. And that is exactly what those so-called scholars are doing by coming up with unclear, non-existent, imaginary words to describe the things they do not understand.