Home > Work > Of All Things!: A Nibley Quote Book
1 " True knowledge never shuts the door on more knowledge, but zeal often does. "
― Hugh Nibley , Of All Things!: A Nibley Quote Book
2 " Being self-taught is no disgrace; but being self-certified is another matter. "
3 " All scholarship, like all science, is an ongoing, open-ended discussion in which all conclusions are tentative forever, the principal value and charm of the game being the discovery of the totally unexpected. "
4 " Knowledge can be heady stuff, but it easily leads to an excess of zeal! -- to illusions of grandeur and a desire to impress others and achieve eminence . . . Our search for knowledge should be ceaseless, which means that it is open-ended, never resting on laurels, degrees, or past achievements. "
5 " The very helplessness of the public which makes it necessary for them to consult the experts also makes it impossible for them to judge how expert they are. "
6 " Doctors and trainers often see perfectly developed bodies, but nobody can even begin to imagine what a perfect *mind* would be like; that is where the whole range of progress and growth must take place. "
7 " Things that appear unlikely, impossible, or paradoxical from one point of view often make perfectly good sense from another. "
8 " As knowledge increases, the verdict of yesterday must be reversed today, and in the long run the most positive authority is the least to be trusted. "
9 " Blindness to larger contexts is a constitutional defect of human thinking imposed by the painful necessity of being able to concentrate on only one thing at a time. We forget as we virtuously concentrate on that one thing that hundreds of other things are going on at the same time and on every side of us, things that are just as important as the object of our study and that are all interconnected in ways that we cannot even guess. Sad to say, our picture of the world to the degree to which it has that neatness, precision, and finality so coveted by scholarship is a false one.I once studied with a famous professor who declared that he deliberately avoided the study of any literature east of Greece lest the new vision destroy the architectonic perfection of his own celebrated construction of the Greek mind. His picture of that mind was immensely impressive but, I strongly suspect, completely misleading. "
10 " The gas-law of learning: . . . any amount of information no matter how small will fill any intellectual void no matter how large. "
11 " In the business of scholarship, evidence is far more flexible than opinion. The prevailing view of the past is controlled not by evidence but by opinion. "
