All men desire by nature to know.
-Aristotle
Every man wants to know
what lies beyond his present mental horizon.
-Christian Larson
The unknown is addictive.
-Fauzi Arap
Knowledge is that which, next to virtue,
truly raises one person above another.
-Joseph Addison
There is no desire more natural
than the desire for knowledge.
We try all the ways that can lead us to it.
-Michel de Montaigne
It is good to love the unknown.
-Charles Lamb
A scholar has no ennui.
-Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
Where the tree of knowledge is,
there always is paradise.
-Friedrich Wilhelm von Nietzsche
One of the greatest joys of man
is to take a flight into ignorance in search of knowledge.
-Robert Lynd
Man can learn nothing
except by going from the known to the unknown.
-Claude Bernard
Somewhere, something incredible
is waiting to be known.
-Carl Sagan
In other words,
apart from the known and unknown,
what else is there?
-Harold Pinter
What we know is a drop,
what we don't know is an ocean.
-Isaac Newton
My pleasure comes
from learning something.
-August Strindberg
The joy of discovery is certainly the liveliest
that the mind of man can ever feel.
-Claude Bernard
The most incessant occupation of the human intellect throughout life 
is the ascertainment of truth. 
-John Stuart Mill
Truth is our element.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
No man thoroughly understands a truth
until he has contended against it.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
To become properly acquainted with a truth,
we must first have disbelieved it and disputed against it.
-Novalis
It is the fate of every truth to be a subject for laughter
until it is generally recognized.
-Albert Schweitzer
And he, that yearns the truth to know
Still further inwardly may go.
-Lewis Carroll
Measured objectively,
what a man can wrest from Truth by passionate striving
is utterly infinitesimal.
-Albert Einstein
It is the function of our intellect
to realise the truth through untruths,
and knowledge is nothing
but the continual burning up of error
to set free the light of truth.
-Rabindranth Tagore
The progress of the intellect
is to the clearer vision of causes,
which neglects surface differences.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Only the truth which was acquired
by your own thinking,
through the efforts of your intellect,
becomes a member of your own body,
and only this truth really belongs to you.
-Arthur Schopenhauer
By living your knowledge,
by tasting it, by verifying it, by practicing it
until you feel it becoming your own blood,
your own quintessence,
this knowledge becomes truly yours,
and no one, nor anything, can ever take it away from you.
-Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov
I do not know whether
we can be saved through the intellect,
but I do know that I can be saved by nothing else.
-Dorothy Sayers
Knowledge, as food, is much better
when it has a good dose of seasoning.
-American Proverb
It is not enough to have a good mind.
the main thing is to use it well.
-Rene Descartes
He was far too intelligent
to become really cerebral.
-Ursula K. Le Guin
It is not the brains that matter most,
but that which guides them -
the character, the heart, generous qualities, progressive ideas.
-Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I can't understand why people
are frightened by new ideas.
I'm frighted of old ones.
-John Cage
A man is known
by the company his mind keeps.
-Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Knowledge comes through likeness.
-Meister Eckhart
All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.
-Walter Benjamin
Acquiring knowledge is a form of imitation.
-Jiddu Krishnamurti
We hear and apprehend
only what we already half know.
-Henry David Thoreau
All perception of truth
is the detection of an analogy;
we reason from our hand to our head.
-Henry David Thoreau
The difference between myself
and all the rest of the universe
is nothing more than an idea.
-Alan Watts
Where there is an open mind,
there will always be a frontier.
-Charles Kettering
The object of opening the mind,
as of opening the mouth,
is to shut it again on something solid.
-Gilbert K. Chesterton
Great  intellects are skeptical.
-Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Skepticism: 
the mark and even the pose of the educated mind.
-John Dewey
Skeptical scrutiny is the means,
in both science and religion,
by which deep thoughts can be winnowed
from deep nonsense.
-Carl Sagan
To believe in luck,
if it were not a solecism so to use the word believe, 
is skepticism.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect,
and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer.
-George Santayana
Skepticism is the first step toward truth.
It must be applied generally, because it is the touchstone.
-Denis Diderot
A just thinker will allow full swing
to his skepticism.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Large skepticism leads to large understanding.
Small skepticism leads to small understanding.
No skepticism leads to no understanding.
-Xi Zhi
The thorough skeptic is a dogmatist.
He enjoys the delusion of complete futility.
-Alfred North Whitehead
Skepticism is not intellectual doubt alone
but moral doubt.
-Thomas Carlyle
Do not let yourself be tainted
with a barren skepticism.
-Louis Pasteur
Skepticism is slow suicide.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
We must be skeptical
even of our skepticism.
-Bertram Russell
It is the mark of an educated mind
to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
-Aristotle
I have always felt that a person's intelligence is directly reflected
by the number of conflicting points of view
he can entertain simultaneously on the same topic.
-Abigail Adams
The test of a first-rate intelligence
is the ability to hold two opposing ideas
in the mind at the same time,
and still retain the ability to function.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald
When two texts, or two assertions, perhaps two ideas are in contradiction,
be ready to reconcile them rather than cancel one by the other;
regard them as two different facets, or two successive stages,
of the same reality, a reality convincingly human just because it is complex.
-Marguerite Yourcenar
We are not meant to resolve all contradictions 
but to live with them and rise above them 
and see them in the light of exterior and objective values 
which make them trivial by comparison.
-Thomas Merton
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself.
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
-Walt Whitman
The minute one utters a certainty,
the opposite comes to mind.
-May Sarton
As soon as one has arrived at any position,
try to find in what sense the contrary is true.
-Simone Weil
The paradox is the source
of a thinkers' passion.
-Soren Kierkegaard
The thinker without a paradox
is like a lover without a feeling:
a paltry mediocrity.
-Soren Kirkegaard
A paradox is a truth 
standing on its head in order to attract attention
-attributed to Gilbert K. Chesterton
Paradox exists only from the perspective of the mind.
-Carl Edwin Smith
Paradox is the result of employing two different perspectives
to observe or explain the same thing -
the relative and the absolute.
-Vera Nazarian
He who confronts the paradoxical
exposes himself to reality.
-Friedrich Durrenmatt
The supreme paradox of all thought
is the attempt to discover something that thought cannot think.
-Soren Kierkegaard
Only the paradox comes anywhere near
to comprehending the fullness of life.
-Carl Jung
How wonderful that we have met with a paradox.
Now we have some hope of making progress.
-Niels Bohr
The starting point is a question.
-Alberto Manguel
Questions show the mind's range,
and answers its subtlety.
-Joseph Joubert
In all affairs, it's a healthy thing now and then
to hang a question mark on things you have long taken for granted.
-Bertrand Russell
The real questions are the ones
that obtrude upon your consciousness
whether you like it or not,
the ones that make your mind start vibrating like a jackhammer,
the ones that you "come to terms with"
only to discover that they are still there.
-Ingrid Bengis
The only questions that really matter
are the ones you ask yourself.
-Ursula G. Le Guin
It is better to ask some of the questions
than to know all the answers.
-James Thurber
 No question is so difficult to answer
as that to which the answer is obvious.
-George Bernard Shaw
Sometimes the questions are complicated
and the answers are simple.
-Theodor Geisel, "Dr. Seuss"
Sometimes the questions
are more important than the answers.
-Nancy Willard
It is not the answer that enlightens,
but the question.
-Eugene Ionesco
If we can really understand the problem,
the answer will come out of it,
because the answer is not separate from the problem.
-Jiddu Krishnamurti
The answer lays bound within the question
-The Oculatum
We are not likely to know the right questions
until we are close to knowing the answers.
-Steven Weinberg
All the questions we are asking
are born out of the answers that we already have.
-Jiddu Krishnamurti
When the question is well framed,
the answer will come.
-Jean Shinoda Bolen
Questions and answers click into each other
like cogs of a machine.
-Robert Musil
Always the more beautiful answer
who asks a more beautiful question.
-e e cummings
Only the crystal-clear question
yields a transparent answer.
-Wu-men
Absurdly simple,
like most riddles when you see the answer.
-J. R. R. Tolkien
A riddle does not exist.
If a question can be put at all,
then it can be also be answered.
-Ludwig Wittgenstein
To every answer you can find a new question.
-Yiddish Proverb
If there are questions
then, of course, there are answers,
but the final answer makes the questions seem absurd.
-John Cage
The answer that uproots the question
from its ground is truly inspired.
-Sufi Saying
The only interesting answers
are those which destroy the questions.
-Susan Sontag
The answer is to be so quiet
that the questions stop.
-Carolyn Kleefeld
The most important questions a human being can ask
do not have - or need - answers.
-Madeline L'Engle
Philosophy is not a body of doctrine
but an activity.
-Ludwig Wittgenstein
A philosopher - is a man who constantly tries, sees, suspects,
hopes, dreams of ordinary things -
who is struck by his own thoughts as if they came from without.
-Friedrich Wilhelm von Nietzsche
Every great philosophy is finally a confession,
an involuntary memoir.
-Friedrich Wilhelm von Nietzsche
You do what you have to do in life,
when you form a philosophy
that you can't talk yourself out of.
-Constantine Karamanlis
To be a philosopher
is not merely to have subtle thoughts;
but so to love wisdom
and to live according to its dictates.
-Henry David Thoreau
Be a philosopher,
but amidst all your philosophy,
be still a man.
-David Hume
Hold fast, therefore, O circular philosopher, to thy center
and drive the globe along its orbit
by the momentum of thy thought.
-Amos Bronson Alcott
The true philosopher,
who is not one chiefly by profession,
must be prepared to tread the wine press alone.
-George Santayana
He is but a poor philosopher who holds a view so narrow
as to exclude forms not to his personal taste.
-John Galsworthy
One of the most difficult of the philosopher's tasks
is to find out where the shoe pinches.
-Ludwig Wittgenstein
I like my philosophy smothered in beauty
and not the opposite.
-Wallace Stevens
They are the highest philosophers
who are capable of golden laughter.
-Friedrich Wilhelm von Nietzsche
The Sea
Will be the Sea
Whatever the drop's philosophy.
-Farid ud-Din Attar
A man has not seen a thing
if he has not felt it.
-Henry David Thoreau
A really intelligent man
feels what other men only know.
-Montesquieu
Feelings and images
multiply a philosophy by ten.
-Albert Camus
Whoever starts out for the unknown
must consent to venture alone.
-Andre Gide
It is when we pass our own private gate,
and open our own secret door,
that we step into the land of the giants.
-Gilbert K. Chesterton
If you want go down deep,
you do not need to travel far;
indeed you don't have to leave
your most immediate and familiar surroundings.
-Ludwig Wittgenstein
The landscape lies far and fair within,
and the deepest thinker is the farthest traveled.
-Henry David Thoreau
It may be that the whole is simple,
and that we are looking at it from the wrong point of view.
-Henri Bergson
Higher than actuality stands possibility. 
-Martin Heidegger
Even a thought,
even a possibility,
can shatter us and transform us.
-Friedrich Wilhelm von Nietzsche
A moment's insight
is sometimes worth a life's experience.
-Oliver Wendell Homes
That is what learning is.
You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life,
but in a new way.
-Doris Lessing
To learn means
to have an insight into the fact.
-Jiddu Krishnamurti
Learning is the process of creating a relationship
between something you already understand and something new.
-Tony Robbins
We all learn as much as we wish to and no more.
We learn in different ways, sometimes by not learning.
-Henry Miller
How we learn
is what we learn.
-Bonnie Friedman
The quest for reason 
is for the noncontradictory integration of experience.
-Nathaniel Branden
What is now reason
was formerly impulse or instinct.
-Ovid
Making mental connections
is our most crucial learning tool,
the essence of human intelligence;
to forge links; to go beyond the given;
to see patterns, relationships, contexts.
-Marilyn Ferguson
Our concepts are like threads made of fibres.
The solidity of the thread is not due
to the presence of a single fibre running its full length,
but to the intertwining of a large number of fibres.
-Ludwig Wittgenstein
Intelligence is seeing what is.
-Jiddu Krishnamurti
Intelligence is quickness
in seeing things as they are.
-George Santayana
Wherever there is a single solution,
that solution must always achieve some kind of maximum.
-Piet Hein
Surely an open mind
is an intelligent mind.
-Vanda Scaravelli
Intelligence is the ability
to adapt to change.
-Stephen Hawking
True intelligence very readily conceives
of an intelligence superior to its own;
and this is why truly intelligent men are modest.
-Andre Gide
The greatest intelligence is precisely the one
that suffers the most from its own limitations.
-Andre Gide
An intellectual
is someone whose mind watches itself.
-Albert Camus
Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite. 
-Victor Hugo
Genius is nothing but continued attention.
-Claude Adrien Helvetius
Inspiration and genius -
one and the same.
-Victor Hugo
The principle mark of genius
is not perfection but originality.
-Arthur Koestler
The more original a discovery,
the more obvious it seems afterward.
-Arthur Koestler
The first and last thing
which is required of genius
is the love of truth.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
One of the strongest characteristics of genius
is the power of lighting its own fire.
-John Foster
To know is not to prove, not to explain.
It is to accede to vision.
-Antoine de Saint-Exupery
It is by logic that we prove,
but by intuition that we discover.
-Henri Pointcare
We prove anything we want to prove,
and the real difficulty is to know what we want to prove.
-Emile Chartier, "Alain"
That which is not cannot be proved.
That which is requires no proof.
-Eastern Proverb
That which needs to be proved
cannot be worth much.
-Friedrich Wilhelm von Nietzsche
One can easily throw dust into one's own eyes
with theories.
-Carl Jung
It is the theory
that decides what can be observed.
-Albert Einstein
No theory is good
except on condition that one uses it to go beyond.
-Andre Gide
Learn your theories well but put them aside
when you confront the mystery of the living soul.
-Carl Jung
Ear friend, theory is all grey,
And the golden tree of life is green.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Put your theories in practice
before you expound them.
-Hazrat Inayat Khan
The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life
is to unlearn what is untrue.
-Antisthenes
The problem for all of us...
is not to learn, but to unlearn.
-Gloria Steinem
It is impossible to begin to learn
that which one thinks one already knows.
-Epictetus
It is what we think we know already
that prevents us from learning.
-Claude Bernard
It is only when we forget our learning
that we begin to know.
-Henry David Thoreau
The knowledge quest
can only proceed funeral by funeral.
-Ken Wilber
The problems are solved,
not by giving new information,
but by arranging what we have known all along.
-Ludwig Wittgenstein
The world is my idea.
-Arthur Schopenhauer
To be playful and serious at the same time is possible
and it defines the ideal mental conditions.
-John Dewey
Letting your mind play
is the best way to solve problems.
-Bill Watterson
Only the learning that is enjoyed
will be learned well.
-Judah ha-Nasi, Talmud
Intelligence is nothing without delight.
-Paul Claudel
He who laughs most,
learns best.
-John Cleese
An idea is a prowess of associations.
-Robert Frost
Ideas are like rabbits.
You get a couple and learn how to handle them,
and pretty soon you have a dozen.
-John Steinbeck
The way to have good ideas
is to have a lot of ideas
and throw away the bad ones.
-Linus Pauling
If an idea is not clear,
try to make it clear
by observing it from various angles.
-Torkom Saraydarian
No idea is so soaring
but it will readily put forth roots.
-Henry David Thoreau
Any sincere thought is irresistible.
-Henry David Thoreau
We cannot see anything
until we are possessed with the idea of it,
take it into our heads, -
and then we can hardly see anything else.
-Henry David Thoreau
If you are possessed by an idea,
you find it expressed everywhere,
you even smell it.
-Thomas Mann
Nothing is more dangerous than an idea,
when it’s the only one we have.
-Emile Chartier, "Alain"
Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds.
In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.
-Gaston Bachelard
The great cranium of mankind.
The vast intellect and great heart of mankind.
All ideas, however opposed, spring from a single brain:
the brain of mankind, of all mankind.
-Etty Hillesum
A profound thought
is in a constant state of becoming.
-Albert Camus
One thought fills immensity.
William Blake
There are thousands of ideas
that are impossible to translate into popular language.
-Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Ideas move fast when their time comes.
-Carolyn Heilbrum
There comes a time
when the mind takes a higher plane of knowledge,
but can never prove how it got there.
-Albert Einstein
Some other faculty than the intellect
is necessary for the apprehension of reality.
-Henri Bergson
Thinking is a wall to intuition.
-Kenneth G. Mills
Intuition is the clear conception
of the whole at once.
-Johann Kaspar Lavater
The thoughts that come unsought,
and, as it were, drop into the mind,
are commonly the most valuable of any we have.
-John Locke
Intuition has functioned
when you suddenly realize you know without thinking.
-Kenneth G. Mills
The key to the whole process is twofold.
Concentration and awareness.
Together these produce intuition
which is awareness to the highest degree.
-Sivananda Radha
Intuition is the highest point of intelligence,
and keeping alive that intelligence is inspiration.
-Jiddu Krishnamurti
The real meaning of intelligence, then,
is neither the rational nor the intuitive mind,
but the blending, interaction and integrating
of the two ways of thought.
-Ben Willis
We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect.
The judgement of the intellect is only part of the truth.
-Carl Jung
The blindness of the intellect begins
when it would be something of itself.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
As soon as you see something,
you already start to intellectualize it.
As soon as you intellectualize it,
it is no longer what you saw.
-Shunryn Suzuki
We should take care not to make the intellect our god;
it has, of course, powerful muscles,
but no personality.
-Albert Einstein
The intellect is not a serious thing,
and never has been.
It is an instrument on which one plays,
that is all.
-Oscar Wilde
People who lean on
logic and philosophy and rational exposition
end by starving the best part of the mind.
-William Butler Yeats
A psychology of the objective attitude
is a history of our own personal errors.
-Gaston Bachelard
Trying to understand the workings of the universe
in terms of linear thought and verbal concepts
is a little like trying to see
an enormous mural by Michelangelo in the dark
with a single dull ray of a flashlight.
-Ramesh Balsekar
Education is an admirable thing.
but it is well to remember from time to time
that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
-Oscar Wilde
Wisdom sets bounds, even to knowledge.
-Friedrich Wilhelm von Nietzsche
The things we know best
are the things we haven't been taught.
-Luc de Clapiers, Marquis of Vauvenargues
My criticism lies with this tendency
to consider intellectual work and studies
as being the acme of knowledge and thought,
as if there were nothing else beyond that.
-Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov
The intellect, so skilful in dealing with the inert,
is awkward the moment it touches the living.
-Henri Bergson
The course of every intellectual,
if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough,
ends in the obvious,
from which the non-intellectuals have never stirred.
-Aldous Huxley
All that we know is nothing,
we are merely crammed wastepaper baskets,
unless we are in touch with that which laughs at our knowing.
-D. H. Lawrence
Knowledge dwells in heads
replete with thoughts of other men;
wisdom in minds attentive to their own.
-William Cowper
A learned man is a tank;
a wise man is a spring.
-William R. Alger
There is something in us
that is wiser than our head.
-Arthur Schopenhauer
You will never improve nor transform yourself
by accumulating knowledge in your head.
To be sure, this knowledge can broaden your mind
and your point of view, but that is only on the surface;
but that is only on the surface;
you will always be the same underneath.
-Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov
The most important knowledge
is that which guides the way you lead your life.
-Leo Tolstoy
The only true knowledge
comes from personal experience.
-Sivananda Radha
True knowledge comes when we investigate the knower of things
and not the things to be known.
-Ashokananda
The highest purpose of intellectual cultivation
is to give a man a perfect knowledge and mastery
of his own inner self.
-Novalis
It is on your own self-knowledge and experience
that the knowledge of everything else depends.
-The Cloud of Unknowing
All types of knowledge
ultimately mean self knowledge.
-Bruce Lee
If knowledge does not liberate the self from the self
then ignorance is better than such knowledge.
-Sana'i
So, see the truth of this:
that on the one level you need knowledge,
and here on the other
you don't need knowledge at all.
-Jiddu Krishnamurti

To perceive nonverbally this life as a whole,
not fragmented, not broken up, is to learn.
-Jiddu Krishnamurti
At each stage I reach a balance, a conclusion.
At the next sitting, if I find that there is a weakness in the whole,
I make my way back in to the picture by means of the weakness -
I re-enter through the breach -
and I reconceive the whole.
Thus everything becomes fluid again.
-Henri Matisse
Never, never rest contented with any circle of ideas,
but always be certain that a wider one is still possible.
-Richard Jeffries
The only pleasure is to rediscover for oneself
the whole of knowledge.
-Michel Servin
The Universe will be our vocabulary.
-Motto of the Futurist Cinema (1916)
I am still learning.
-Michelangelo
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