Forgotten Knowledge Quotes

Life is surely given us for higher purposes than to gather what our ancestors have wisely thrown away, and to learn what is of no value but because it has been forgotten.

There is nothing new except what has been forgotten.

I don't know why my brain has kept all the words to the Gilligan's Island theme song and has deleted everything about triangles.

I had read Plato and Kant, but I had forgotten it.

There's a place in the brain for knowing what cannot be remembered.

Many years ago a very wise man named Bernard Baruch took me aside and put his arm around my shoulder. "Harpo my boy," he said, "I'm going to give you three pieces of advice, three things you should always remember." My heart jumped and I glowed with expectation. I was going to hear the magic password to a rich, full life from the master himself. "Yes sir?" I said. And he told me the three things. I regret that I've forgotten what they were.

Knowledge is soon changed, then lost in the mist, an echo half-heard.

He is no true reader who has not experienced the reproachful fascination of the great shelves of unread books, of the libraries at night of which Borges is the fabulist. He is no reader who has not heard, in his inward ear, the call of the hundreds of thousands, of the millions of volumes which stand in the stacks of the British Library asking to be read. For there is in each book a gamble against oblivion, a wager against silence, which can be won only when the book is opened again (but in contrast to man, the book can wait centuries for the hazard of resurrection.)

We don't even know our friends' phone numbers anymore.

We know, for instance, of "The Book of the Wars of the Lord." It is mentioned in the text [Numbers 21:14]. There was a book: Where is it? One day you will dig and you will maybe find it. [Laughter]

A truth discovered always seems so plain and simple that we wonder why the discovery was so long delayed.

Way over yonder is a place I have seen In a garden of wisdom from some long ago dream.

No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library; for who can see the wall crowded on every side by mighty volumes, the works of laborious meditations and accurate inquiry, now scarcely known but by the catalogue.

Life has obliged him to remember so much useful knowledge that he has lost not only his history, but his whole original cargo of useless knowledge; history, languages, literatures, the higher mathematics, or what you will - are all gone.

In writing one draws in the rest, the forgotten parts.

If the Book of the Law could be forgotten for so many years, who knows what was done to it during those years? Maybe it was lost later, too. And another one replaced it, and that one is no longer the original text. These are questions that perturb me much more than whether it's history or not history.

God planted the seeds of all the trees," continued Hetty, after a moment's pause, "and you see to what a height and shade they have grown! So it is with the Bible. You may read a verse this year, and forget it, and it will come back to you a year hence, when you least expect to remember it.

As historians write more and more histories, it's a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy that other historians read their histories and then make synthesis, and certain things just get forgotten and left out and neglected.

Deserted libraries hold the shades of writers who worked within, and are haunted by their absence.

Let us look for secret things somewhere in the world on the blue shore of silence or where the storm has passed rampaging like a train. There the faint signs are left, coins of time and water, debris ,celestial ash and the irreplaceable rapture of sharing in the labour of soitude in the sand.

However alert we are, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy.

And you read your emily dickinson, And I my robert frost. And we note our place with bookmarkers That measure what weve lost.

When you counsel someone, you should appear to be reminding him of something he had forgotten, not of the light he was unable to see.

Knowledge is sometimes superfluous: when we need it, we have it not.

Let us study things that are no more. It is necessary to understand them, if only to avoid them.