Building Knowledge Quotes

I come from a long line of architects. I'm the only one who did not become an architect, but I've been around the drawing aspect and construction my whole life.

Learn from the past, but don't live there. Build on what you know so that you don't repeat mistakes.

There is not a discovery in science, however revolutionary, however sparkling with insight, that does not arise out of what went before.

Not that the moderns are born with more wit than their predecessors, but, finding the world better furnished at their coming into it, they have more leisure for new thoughts, more light to direct them, and more hints to work upon.

We work because it's a chain reaction, each subject leads to the next.

Moreover, the sciences are monuments devoted to the public good; each citizen owes to them a tribute proportional to his talents. While the great men, carried to the summit of the edifice, draw and put up the higher floors, the ordinary artists scattered in the lower floors, or hidden in the obscurity of the foundations, must only seek to improve what cleverer hands have created.

Each succeeding day is the scholar of that which went before it.

Mathematicians stand on each other's shoulders.

I'm satisfied to go in at the bottom - that's the best way to learn what things are all about.