Augustus De Morgan - Knowledge Quotes

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I... subjoin references to those parts of the work for which I have not been indebted to my knowledge of what has been written before me: much of what is cited is probably not new, indeed it is dangerous for any one at the present day to claim anything as belonging to himself; several things which I once thought to have entered in this list have been since found (either by myself, or by a friend to whom I referred it) in preceding writers.

Augustus De Morgan
All the men who are now called discoverers, in every matter ruled by thought, have been men versed in the minds of their predecessors, and learned in what had been before them. There is not one exception. I do not say that every man has made direct acquaintance with the whole of his mental ancestry... But... it is remarkable how many of the greatest names in all departments of knowledge have been real antiquaries in their several subjects.
I may cite among those... in science, Aristotle, Plato, Ptolemy, Euclid, Archimedes, Roger Bacon, Copernicus, Francis Bacon, Ramus, Tycho Brahe, Galileo, Napier, Descartes, Leibnitz, Newton, Locke.

Augustus De Morgan
Aspiring to lead others, they have never given themselves the fair chance of being first led by other others into something better than they can start for themselves; and that they should first do this is what both those classes of others have a fair right to expect. New knowledge... must come by contemplation of old knowledge... mechanical contrivance sometimes, not very often, escapes this rule.

Augustus De Morgan
The manner in which a paradoxer will show himself, as to sense or nonsense, will not depend upon what he maintains, but upon whether he has or has not made a sufficient knowledge of what has been done by others, especially as to the mode of doing it, a preliminary to inventing knowledge for himself.

Augustus De Morgan
All existing things upon this earth, which have knowledge of their own existence, possess, some in one degree and some in another, the power of thought, accompanied by perception, which is the awakening of thought by the effects of external objects upon the senses.

Augustus De Morgan
During the last two centuries and a half, physical knowledge has been gradually made to rest upon a basis which it had not before. It has become mathematical.

Augustus De Morgan
The absolute requisites for the study of this work... are a knowledge of algebra to the binomial at least, plane and solid geometry, plane trigonometry, and the most simple part of the usual applications of algebra to geometry.

Augustus De Morgan
We divide the visible universe into earth and heavens, just as an insect who is bred in a tree would, if it could, speak of the things within its knowledge as consisting of its native branch and all the rest of the forest.

Augustus De Morgan
Every kind of human knowledge has unanswerable questions at its end: and until the insoluble problems are revealed, we plume ourselves upon our progress.

Augustus De Morgan
A person of small knowledge is in danger of trying to make his little do the work of more; but a person without any is in more danger of making his no knowledge do the work of some.

Augustus De Morgan
Belief is but another name for imperfect knowledge...

Augustus De Morgan