Sermon quotes on knowledge
Maya Angelou
I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.
Thomas Aquinas
This is the ultimate in human knowledge of God: to know that we do not know Him.
Thomas Aquinas (Attributed)
We can’t have full knowledge all at once. We must start by believing; then afterwards we may be led on to master the evidence for ourselves.
Thomas Aquinas
Love takes up where knowledge leaves off.
Summa Theologica II-II, 27, 4.
Aristotle
All men by nature desire knowledge.
On Man in the Universe
Francis Bacon
Knowledge is power.
A version of this quote first pub. in Meditationes Sacrae (1597)
John Calvin
Faith consists, not in ignorance, but in knowledge, and that, not only of God, but also of the divine will.
Richard Cecil
The first step towards knowledge is to know that we are ignorant.
Stephen Charnock
A presence by knowledge is to be granted, but to say such a presence fills a place is an improper speech: knowledge is not enough to constitute a presence. A man in London knows there is such a city as Paris, and knows many things in it; can he be concluded, therefore, to be present in Paris, or fill and place there, or be present with the things he knows there?
William Cowper
Knowledge is proud that she knows so much; wisdom is humble that she knows no more.
Alexandre Dumas
“Learning does not make one learned: there are those who have knowledge and those who have understanding. The first requires memory and the second philosophy.”
The Count of Monte Cristo
T.S. Eliot
Where is all the knowledge we lost with information?
Thomas Fuller
If you have knowledge, let others light their candles at it.
George Herbert
Knowledge is but folly unless it is guided by grace.
A.A. Hodge
He is wise who knows the sources of knowledge – who knows who has written and where it is to be found.
Helen Keller
Knowledge is love and light and vision.
The Story of My Life (1903)
Thomas á Kempis
Every man naturally desires knowledge; but what good is knowledge without fear of God? Indeed a humble rustic who serves God is better than a proud intellectual who neglects his soul to study the course of the stars.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Science investigates – religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge which is power. Religion gives man wisdom which is control.
C.S. Lewis
Ramandu’s daughter: “You can’t know, you can only believe – or not.”
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
Audre Lorde
Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge.
*for contrast
Watchman Nee
When one tries to increase his knowledge by doing mental gymnastics over books without waiting upon God and looking to the guidance of the Holy Spirit, his soul is plainly in full swing. This will deplete his spiritual life. Because the fall of man was occasioned by seeking knowledge, God uses the foolishness of the cross to “destroy the wisdom of the wise.
Isaac Newton
I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies but not the madness of people.
John Newton
Zeal without knowledge is like expedition to a man in the dark.
Blaise Pascal
The knowledge of God is very far from the love of Him.
Pensées (1670)
Walker Percy
Fiction doesn’t tell us something we don’t know, it tells us something we know but don’t know that we know.
Alexander Pope
A little Learning is a dangerous Thing.
An Essay on Criticism (1713)
Leonard Ravenhill
A man may study because his brain is hungry for knowledge, even Bible knowledge. But he prays because his soul is hungry for God.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, and yet a little way beyond the outworks of our divining, perhaps we would endure our sadnesses with greater confidence than our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us withdraws, a stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it and is silent.
Theodore Roosevelt (attributed)
People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.
J.C. Ryle
Knowledge, not improved and well employed, will only increase our condemnation at the last day.
Charles Spurgeon
Wisdom is the right use of knowledge. To know is not to be wise. Many men know a great deal, and are all the greater fools for it. There is no fool so great a fool as a knowing fool. But to know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom.
John Stott
Knowledge is indispensable to Christian life and service. If we do not use the mind that God has given us, we condemn ourselves to spiritual superficiality and cut ourselves off from many of the riches of God’s grace.
Mark Twain
I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn’t know.
Life on the Mississippi (1833)
John Wesley
Beware you are not swallowed up in books! An ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have known since long.
N. T. Wright
Knowledge has to do with the interrelation of humans and the created world. This brings it within the sphere of the biblical belief that humans are made in the image of the creator, and that in consequence they are entrusted with the task of exercising wise responsibility within the created order. They are neither detached observers of, nor predators upon, creation. From this point of view, knowledge can be a form of redeeming stewardship; it can be, in one sense, a form of love…To know is to be in a relation with the known, which means that the ‘knower’ must be open to the possibility of the ‘known’ being other than had been expected or even desired, and must be prepared to respond accordingly, not merely to observe from a distance.
The New Testament and the People of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992)
John Of The Cross
Learn to understand more by not understanding than by understanding.
Barbara Brown Taylor
The last thing any of us needs is more information about God. We need the practice of incarnation, by which God saves the lives of those whose intellectual assent has turned them dry as dust, who have run frighteningly low on the bread of life, who are dying to know more God in their bodies. Not more about God. More God.
An Altar in the World, HarperOne.
John Calvin
We shall now have a full definition of faith if we say that it is a firm and sure knowledge of the divine favor toward us, founded on the truth of a free promise in Christ, and revealed to our minds, and sealed on our hearts, by the Holy Spirit.
Institutes of the Christian Religion 3.2.7
Alvin Plantinga
Now faith is not just a cognitive affair: its being “sealed upon our hearts” is a matter of will and affect; it is a repair of the madness of the will that is at the heart of sin. Still, it is at least a cognitive matter. In giving us faith, the Holy Spirit enables us to see the truth of the main lines of the Christian gospel as set forth in Scripture. The internal invitation of the Holy Spirit is therefore a source of belief, a cognitive process that produces in us belief in the main lines of the Christian story… if they are held with sufficient firmness, these beliefs qualify as knowledge, just as Calvin’s definition of faith has it.
Warranted Christian Belief, 206
St. Augustine
God, always the same, let me know myself, let me know You.
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