Don't join the book burners... Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book.
There is nothing more exciting than having a life devoted to fundamental knowledge and to contributing to advance the borders of knowledge.
Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market alow you to put there.
Write about what you don't know about what you know.
One thing I've learned: you can know anything, it's all there, you just have to find it.
Writing is a process of discovery of what you really do know. You can't limit yourself in advance to what you know, because you don't know everything you know.
But epistemology is always and inevitably personal. The point of the probe is always in the heart of the explorer: What is my answer to the question of the nature of knowing?
"Knowledge is the frontier of tomorrow."
Freedom [is] the first-born daughter of science
Looking back, I realize that nurturing curiosity and the instinct to seek solutions are perhaps the most important contributions education can make.
The free access to information is not a privilege, but a necessity for any free society. One of my favorite things to do as a young man was wander through the stacks of my hometown library. I'd just browse until I found something interesting. Libraries have definitely changed my life.
Science is, in the best and strictest sense, glorious entertainment
New constellations of truth are daily discovered in the firmament of knowledge, and new stars are daily shining forth in each constellation.
Browsing for books with a mouse and screen is not nearly as joyful an act as wandering the stacks and getting lost in the labyrinthine corridors of knowledge. The best libraries are places of imagination, education and community. The best libraries have mystery to them.
I really write to find out what I know about something and what is to be known about something.
I write to discover what I know.
Is Knowledge knowable? If not, how do we know?
As the true object of education is not to render the pupil the mere copy of his preceptor, it is rather to be rejoiced in, than lamented, that various reading should lead him into new trains of thinking.
Why should the government subsidize intellectual curiosity?
Books gratify and excite our curiosity in innumerable ways.
I shall reconsider human knowledge by starting from the fact that we can know more than we can tell.
Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found?
[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point. Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
The intellectual takes as a starting point his self and relates the world to his own sensibilities; the scientist accepts an existing field of knowledge and seeks to map out the unexplored terrain.
No scientist ever believes that he has the final answer or the ultimate truth on anything.
