Theme
Knowledge
Learning, education, and the pursuit of understanding.
Every quote here is provenance-checked. AI will happily put a fake quote on a beautiful slide — these are the ones you can actually use, with the right name on them.
Ready for your slide
Verified quotes about knowledge
Each is traced to a real source and correctly credited. ✓ Free to use = public domain, cleared for commercial reuse. Open one for a paste-ready credit line and its reuse status.
“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us”
“A little learning is a dangerous thing”
“A quotation is a handy thing to have about, saving one the trouble of thinking for oneself, always a laborious business”
“A teacher, a really good sensei, is never a giver of 'truth'; he is a guide, a pointer to the truth that the student must discover for himself”
“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”
“All men by nature desire to know”
“And this our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in every thing”
“As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own”
“Books will soon be obsolete in the schools”
“But the best evidence we have that time travel is not possible, and never will be, is that we have not been invaded by hordes of tourists from the future”
“Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy”
“Do not only practice your art, but force your way into its secrets, for it and knowledge can raise men to the divine”
“Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater”
“Don't join the book burners. Don't think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed”
“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world”
“Education is the passport to the future”
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”
“From so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved”
“He knows nothing, and thinks that he knows; I neither know nor think that I know”
“He who learns but does not think, is lost”
“History is more or less bunk”
“I am always doing what I can't do yet in order to learn how to do it”
“I believe talent is like electricity. We don't understand electricity. We use it”
“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use”
“I probably have a 20,000-word vocabulary. I'll match my wits with anyone on literature, science and the arts”
“I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail”
“I think, therefore I am”
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”
“If you invent a breakthrough in artificial intelligence so machines can learn, that is worth 10 Microsofts”
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles”
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe”
“Imagination is more important than knowledge”
“Isn't it a pleasure to study and practice what you have learned?”
“Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do”
“Knowledge itself is power”
“Learning without thought is labour lost; thought without learning is perilous”
“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind”
“Much learning does not teach understanding”
“Nature to be commanded must be obeyed”
“Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature”
“One child, one teacher, one book, one pen can change the world”
“Organize, agitate, educate must be our war cry”
“Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not”
“Risk comes from not knowing what you're doing”
“Science and everyday life cannot and should not be separated”
“Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition”
“That brain of mine is something more than merely mortal, as time will show”
“The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind”
“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world”
“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go”
“The most violent element in society is ignorance”
“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom”
“The scientific man does not aim at an immediate result. His duty is to lay the foundation for those who are to come, and point the way”
“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved”
“These books ain't window dressing. I think Machiavelli's the most sophisticated writer outside of Shakespeare”
“Thirty years from now the big university campuses will be relics. Universities won't survive”
“Three things are necessary for the salvation of man: to know what he ought to believe; to know what he ought to desire; and to know what he ought to do”
“We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special”
“We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and the depths of our answers, our willingness to embrace what is true rather than what feels good”
“We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we're curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths”
“We're made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself”
“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe”
“When you know a thing, to hold that you know it; and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it — this is knowledge”
“Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes”
“Wisdom is the daughter of experience”
“Wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder”
“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning”
“A child miseducated is a child lost”
“All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them”
“An alleged scientific discovery has no merit unless it can be explained to a barmaid”
“Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas”
“Chance favors the prepared mind”
“Common Sense Is Nothing More Than a Deposit of Prejudices Laid Down in the Mind Before Age Eighteen”
“Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance”
“Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today”
“Eureka! I have found it!”
“Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week”
“Give me a place to stand, and I shall move the earth”
“God does not play dice with the universe”
“History is but a fable agreed upon”
“I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book”
“Ignorance of each other is what has made unity impossible in the past. Therefore we need enlightenment. We need more light about each other. Light creates understanding, understanding creates love, love creates patience, and patience creates unity”
“In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous”
“In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual”
“Living is like tearing through a museum. Not until later do you really start absorbing what you saw, thinking about it, looking it up in a book, and remembering — because you can't take it all in at once”
“Marconi is a good fellow. Let him continue. He is using seventeen of my patents”
“No two persons ever read the same book”
“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood”
“Read 500 pages like this every day. That's how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest”
“Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance”
“The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is 'What does a woman want?'”
“The Hardest Thing in the World to Understand Is Income Taxes”
“There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things”
“When a subject becomes totally obsolete we make it a required course”
“Wonder is the beginning of wisdom”
“You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think”
No public-domain quotes on this theme yet — try another, or use an in-copyright one with attribution.
Don’t get caught out
Commonly shared about knowledge — but misattributed
Popular knowledge lines that get pinned on the wrong name. If you use one, credit it correctly.
“There Was a Young Lady Named Bright Whose Speed Was Far Faster Than Light”
ReallyA. H. Reginald Buller · not Albert Einstein
“Education Is What Remains After You Have Forgotten Everything You Learned In School”
ReallyUnknown — anonymous origin · not Albert Einstein
“The Telegraph is Like a Very, Very Long Cat (or Dog)”
ReallyUnknown · not Albert Einstein
“They're Cheering Us Both, You Because Nobody Understands You, and Me Because Everybody Understands Me”
ReallyHans Albert or Eduard Einstein · not Charlie Chaplin
“We Don't Know Who Discovered Water, But We Know It Wasn't a Fish”
ReallyJohn M. Culkin · not Albert Einstein
“Any field that has the word science in its name is guaranteed thereby not to be a science”
ReallyFrank Harary · not Richard Feynman
“If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics”
ReallyRichard Feynman · but not in these words
“Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings”
ReallyUnknown · not Richard Feynman
“Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it”
ReallyUnknown · not Richard Feynman
“Shut up and calculate!”
ReallyN. David Mermin · not Richard Feynman
“The philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds”
ReallyUnknown · not Richard Feynman
“If you can't explain something to a first-year student, then you haven't really understood it”
ReallyRichard Feynman · but not in these words
“Education Is the Inculcation of the Incomprehensible Into the Ignorant by the Incompetent”
ReallyNo verified originator · not John Maynard Keynes
“History Does Not Repeat Itself. The Historians Repeat One Another”
ReallyMax Beerbohm · not Oscar Wilde
“I Know Only Two Tunes: One of Them Is Yankee Doodle, and the Other Isn't”
ReallyUlysses S. Grant · not Abraham Lincoln
“I Would Challenge You To a Battle of Wits, But I See You Are Unarmed”
ReallyFrank Fay · not Mark Twain
“Let Us Hope Darwinism is Not True, But If It is, Let Us Pray It Does Not Become Widely Known”
ReallyRobert Forman Horton · not Charles Darwin
“Military Intelligence is a Contradiction in Terms or an Oxymoron”
ReallyJohn Charteris · not George Carlin