“Learned men fall into error oftenest by mistaking knowledge for wisdom.”
“The most that any of us know, is the least of that which is to be known.”
Source: Moral and religious aphorisms collected from the manuscript papers of the reverend and learned Doctor Whichcote; and published in 1703, by Dr. Jeffery. Now re-published, with very large additions, ... by Samuel Salter, ... To which are added, Eight letter
“Men are more readily contented with no intellectual light than with a little; and wherever they have been taught to acquire some knowledge in order to please others, they have most generally gone on to acquire more, to please themselves.”
Source: Lacon, Or, Many Things in a Few Words: Addressed to Those who Think
“Mathematicians have sought knowledge in figures, Philosophers in systems, Logicians in subtleties, and Metaphysicians in sounds. It is not in any nor in all of these. He that studies only men, will get the body of knowledge without the soul, and he that studies only books, the soul without the body.”
Source: Lacon: Or Many Things in Few Words Addressed to Those who Think
“The further we advance in knowledge, the more simplicity shall we discover in those primary rules that regulate all the apparently endless, complicated, and multiform operations of the Godhead.”
Source: Lacon, Or, Many Things in a Few Words: Addressed to Those who Think
“A man who knows the world will not only make the most of everything he does know, but of many things he does not know, and will gain more credit by his adroit mode of hiding his ignorance than the pedant by his awkward attempt to exhibit his erudition.”
Source: Lacon, Or, Many Things in a Few Words: Addressed to Those who Think
“In the pursuit of knowledge, follow it wherever it is to be found; like fern, it is the produce of all climates, and like coin, its circulation is not restricted to any particular class.”
Source: Lacon, Or, Many Things in a Few Words: Addressed to Those who Think
“The highest knowledge can be nothing more than the shortest and clearest road to truth; all the rest is pretension, not performance, mere verbiage and grandiloquence, from which we can learn nothing.”
Source: Lacon: Or, Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think
“It has been observed that a dwarf standing on the shoulders of a giant will see farther than the giant himself; and the moderns, standing as they do on the vantage ground of former discoveries and uniting all the fruits of the experience of their forefathers, with their own actual observation, may be admitted to enjoy a more enlarged and comprehensive view of things than the ancients themselves.”
Source: Lacon, Or, Many Things in a Few Words: Addressed to Those who Think
“Man is an ignoramus athirst for knowledge.”
Source: Justice