Wise Acquisition of Knowledge - by Tolstoy et al.

Wisdom, the Wise Acquisition of Knowledge

by Leo Tolstoy and others *

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[Seneca: “The most important knowledge is that which guides the way you lead your life.”]

Leo Tolstoy:

- The difference between real material poison and intellectual poison is that most material poison is disgusting to the taste, but intellectual poison, which takes the form of cheap newspapers or bad books, can unfortunately sometimes be attractive.

- A thought can advance your life in the right direction only when it answers questions which were asked by your soul. A thought which was first borrowed from someone else and then accepted by your mind and memory does not really much influence your life, and sometimes leads you in the wrong direction. Read less, study less, but think more. Learn, both from your teachers and from the books which you read, only those things which you really need and which you really want to know.
- A scholar knows many books; a well-educated person has knowledge and skills; an enlightened person understands the meaning and purpose of his life.
- If you see that some aspect of your society is bad, and you want to improve it, there is only one way to do so: you have to improve people. And in order to improve people, you begin with only one thing: you can become better yourself.
- Beware of false knowledge. All evil comes from it.
- Ignorance in itself is neither shameful nor harmful. Nobody can know everything. But pretending that you know what you actually do not know is both shameful and harmful.
- It is better to know less than necessary than to know more than necessary. Do not fear the lack of knowledge, but truly fear unnecessary knowledge which is acquired only to please vanity.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

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

Henry David Thoreau:
 

- Read the best books first, otherwise you’ll find you do not have time.
- Knowledge is real knowledge only when it is acquired by the efforts of your intellect, not by memory. Only when we forget what we were taught do we start to have real knowledge.

Arthur Schopenhauer:
 

- A constant flow of thoughts expressed by other people can stop and deaden your own thought and your own initiative…. That is why constant learning softens your brain…. Stopping the creation of your own thoughts to give room for the thoughts from other books reminds me of Shakespeare’s remark about his contemporaries who sold their land in order to see other countries.

Jean Jacques Rousseau:
 

- 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. Among the most necessary knowledge is the knowledge of how to live well, that is, how to produce the least possible evil and the greatest goodness in one’s life. At present, people study useless sciences, but forget to study this, the most important knowledge.

Immanuel Kant:
 

- Science can be divided into an infinite number of disciplines, and the amount of knowledge that can be pursued in each discipline is limitless. The most critical piece of knowledge, then, is the knowledge of what is essential to learn and what isn’t …. A huge amount of knowledge is accumulated at present. Soon our abilities will be too weak, and our lives too short, to study this knowledge. We have vast treasures of knowledge at our disposal but after we study them, we often do not use them at all. It would be better not to have this burden, this unnecessary knowledge, which we do not really need.

Blaise Pascal:
 

- What is important is not the quantity of your knowledge, but its quality. You can know many things without knowing that which is most important …. There are two types of ignorance, the pure, natural ignorance into which all people are born, and the ignorance of the so-called wise. You will see that many among those who call themselves scholars do not know real life, and they despise simple people and simple things.

Vishnu Purina:
 

- There is only one real knowledge: that which helps us to be free. Every other type of knowledge is mere amusement.

Josh Ruskin:
 

- The way to true knowledge does not go through soft grass covered with flowers. To find it, a person must climb steep mountains.

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* Source: www.brainpickings.org