The first man of science was he who looked into a thing, not to learn whether it furnished him with food, or shelter, or weapons, or tools, armaments, or playwiths but who sought to know it for the gratification of knowing.
I'm considered wise, and sometimes I see myself as knowing. Most of the time, I see myself as wanting to know. And I see myself as a very interested person. I've never been bored in my life.
Perfect life is a contradiction in terms. Therefore we must always expect to find things not up to our highest ideal. Knowing this, we are bound to make the best of everything.
A witnessing consciousness lives in life but with tremendous non-attachment, with great non-possessiveness; it possesses nothing. It lives totally, it lives passionately, but still knowing that I don't possess anything.
The physician himself, if sick, actually calls in another physician, knowing that he cannot reason correctly if required to judge his own condition while suffering.
This is the case with thousands: they appear desirous of knowing the truth, but have not patience to wait in a proper way to receive an answer to their question.
The search of our future being is but a needless, anxious, and haste to be knowing, sooner than we can, what, without all this solicitude, we shall know a little later.
Virtue knowing no base repulse, shines with untarnished honour; nor does she assume or resign her emblems of honour by the will of some popular breeze.
[Lat., Virtus repulse nescia sordidae,
Intaminatis fulget honoribus;
Nec sumit aut ponit secures
Arbitrio popularis aurae.]
What intrigued me more than anything else was finding out the way in which everything, all of creation - all of it! - was held together by invisible chemical bonds, and I found a strange, inexplicable comfort in knowing that somewhere, even though we couldn't see it in our own world, there was a real stability.
The instruction of children should aim gradually to combine knowing and doing. Among all sciences mathematics seems to be the only one of a kind to satisfy this aim most completely.