Essential Knowledge Quotes

The only purpose of education is to teach a student how to live his life-by developing his mind and equipping him to deal with reality. The training he needs is theoretical, i.e., conceptual. He has to be taught to think, to understand, to integrate, to prove. He has to be taught the essentials of the knowledge discovered in the past-and he has to be equipped to acquire further knowledge by his own effort.

By realizing that we are ignorant of the most important things, we realize at the same time that the most important thing for us, or the one thing needful, is quest for knowledge of the most important things or quest for wisdom.

Science proceeds by successive answers to questions more and more subtle, coming nearer and nearer to the very essence of phenomena.

Do not learn more than you absolutely need to get through life.

Democracy can be sustained and developed only by people who understand its essence.

I require every Taipei student to swim; if they can't pass the test they won't graduate. Why do I do that? Because I think that is very, very important integral part of their education.

Now it is established in the sciences that no knowledge is acquired save through the study of its causes and beginnings, if it has had causes and beginnings; nor completed except by knowledge of its accidents and accompanying essentials.

What people most need now is to apply their conversion skills to those things that are essential for their survival. They need to convert facts into logic, free will into purpose, conscience into decision. They need to convert historical experience into a design for a sane world.

The Bible contains more knowledge necessary to man in his present state than any other book in the world.

But in physics I soon learned to scent out the paths that led to the depths, and to disregard everything else, all the many things that clutter up the mind, and divert it from the essential. The hitch in this was, of course, the fact that one had to cram all this stuff into one's mind for the examination, whether one liked it or not.

Books are infinite in number and time is short. The secret of knowledge is to take what is essential. Take that and try to live up to it.

Better to know a few things which are good and necessary than many things which are useless and mediocre

What we are after is the root and not the branches. The root is the real knowledge; the branches are surface knowledge. Real knowledge breeds 'body feel' and personal expression; surface knowledge breeds mechanical conditioning and imposing limitation and squelches creativity.

Science advances through tentative answers to a series of more and more subtle questions which reach deeper and deeper into the essence of natural phenomena.

What is important is not the quantity of your knowledge but its quality. You can know many things without knowing the most important.

I blame the newspapers because every day they call our attention to insignificant things, while three or four times in our lives,we read books that contain essential things. Once we feverishly tear the band of paper enclosing our newspapers, things should change and we should find--I do not know--the Pensées by Pascal!

There is little to be gained by seeking after the mysteries, for there is hardly time in a lifetime to master the plain and precious things.

The books I loved in childhood - the first loves - I've read so often that I've internalized them in some really essential way: they are more inside me now than out.

I cannot understand why poetry is not taught at schools as a way of seeing, a quick, untiring path to essentials.

Know the philosophy, know the details, and ignore everything in the middle.

We say knowledge is the basic foundation of the universe. Everything is first based on something being known.

Real wisdom is not the knowledge of everything, but the knowledge of which things in life are necessary, which are less necessary, and which are completely unnecessary to know.

Besides language and music, it [mathematics] is one of the primary manifestations of the free creative power of the human mind, and it is the universal organ for world understanding through theoretical construction. Mathematics must therefore remain an essential element of the knowledge and abilities which we have to teach, of the culture we have to transmit, to the next generation.

A good teacher does not get lost in the details, but points to what is essential so that the child or student can find meaning and joy in life.

The great philosophers and the great works are standards for the selection of what is essential. Everything that we do in studying the history of philosophy ultimately serves their better understanding.