Quotes about Knowledge

If a book is easy and fits nicely into all your language conventions and thought forms, then you probably will not grow much from reading it. It may be entertaining, but not enlarging to your understanding. It's the hard books that count. Raking is easy, but all you get is leaves; digging is hard, but you might find diamonds.

If you ask a living teacher a question, he will probably answer you. If you are puzzled by what he says, you can save yourself the trouble of thinking by asking him what he means. If, however, you ask a book a question, you must answer it yourself. In this respect a book is like nature or the world. When you question it, it answers you only to the extent that you do the work of thinking an analysis yourself.

The truly great books are the few books that are over everybody's head all of the time.

Wisdom is knowing when you can't be wise.

If all the oceans were ink and all the trees were pens, they couldn't write the knowledge that God has.

All of mankind's problems are a result of one major dilemma. What's this dilemma? Possession without comprehension; assignment without instruction; resources without knowledge; having everything but not knowing why. Essentially, the dilemma is that we lack understanding. Without understanding, life is an experiment, and frustration is the reward.

As St. Paul says, what matters isn't so much our knowledge of God as God's knowledge of us; not, as it were, the god we want but the God who wants us. God help us, we don't understand ourselves; how can we expect to understand that Self which stands beside our selves like Niagara beside a trickling tap?

The aim, as in all theological and biblical exploration, is not to replace love with knowledge. Rather, it is to keep love focused upon its true object. We

Transcending "Revelation" All this alerts us to the fact that scripture is more than simply

But, granted that learning without love is sterile and dry, enthusiasm without learning can easily become blind arrogance.

is simply a reminder of what the greatest systematic theologians have always known and recognized — that theology is a matter of loving God with our minds and that loving does not mean merely admiring or 'being intellectually interested in'.

This is not psychoanalysis. It is history.