What are some inspirational quotes about learning or sharing knowledge?

Originally answered Apr 12, 2017

Knowledge shared is knowledge squared.

Knowledge management doesn’t happen until somebody reuses something.

Carl Sandburg: “Everybody is smarter than anybody.”

Michael Polanyi: “We know more than we can tell.”

Karl Popper: “All life is problem solving.”

Bernard Lonergan: “One cannot play fast and loose with what one knows to be true.”

Imre Lakatos: “No degree of commitment to beliefs makes them knowledge.”

Thomas Kuhn: “The answers you get depend upon the questions you ask.”

Dave Snowden:

• “Knowledge can only be volunteered it cannot be conscripted.”
• “We only know what we know when we need to know it.”
• “In the context of real need few people will withhold their knowledge.”
• “Tolerated failure imprints learning better than success.”
• “The way we know things is not the way we report we know things.”
• “We always know more than we can say, and we will always say more than we can write down.”

Lew Platt: “If only HP knew what HP knows, we would be three times more productive.”

Larry Prusak: “If you have one dollar to invest in knowledge management, put one cent into information management and 99 cents into human interaction.”

Carla O’Dell:

• “Put knowledge where people trip over it.”
• “KM is there at the teachable moment.”

Bob Buckman: “Don’t be afraid to share what you know, because you know it better than anyone else!”

Chris Collison and Geoff Parcell: “You can’t manage knowledge — nobody can. What you can do is to manage the environment in which knowledge can be created, discovered, captured, shared, distilled, validated, transferred, adopted, adapted, and applied.”

Kaye Vivian: Good KM Quotes

Verna Allee:

• 12 guiding principles

1. Knowledge is messy. Because knowledge is connected to everything else, you can’t isolate the knowledge aspect of anything neatly. In the knowledge universe, you can’t pay attention to just one factor.
2. Knowledge is self-organizing. The self that knowledge organizes around is organizational or group identity and purpose.
3. Knowledge seeks community. Knowledge wants to happen, just as life wants to happen. Both want to happen as community. Nothing illustrates this principle more than the Internet.
4. Knowledge travels via language. Without a language to describe our experience, we can’t communicate what we know. Expanding organizational knowledge means that we must develop the languages we use to describe our work experience.
5. The more you try to pin knowledge down, the more it slips away. It’s tempting to try to tie up knowledge as codified knowledge-documents, patents, libraries, databases, and so forth. But too much rigidity and formality regarding knowledge lead to the stultification of creativity.
6. Looser is probably better. Highly adaptable systems look sloppy. The survival rate of diverse, decentralized systems is higher. That means we can waste resources and energy trying to control knowledge too tightly.
7. There is no one solution. Knowledge is always changing. For the moment, the best approach to managing it is one that keeps things moving along while keeping options open.
8. Knowledge doesn’t grow forever. Eventually, some knowledge is lost or dies, just as things in nature. Unlearning and letting go of old ways of thinking, even retiring whole blocks of knowledge, contribute to the vitality and evolution of knowledge.
9. No one is in charge. Knowledge is a social process. That means no one person can take responsibility for collective knowledge.
10. You can’t impose rules and systems. If knowledge is truly self-organizing, the most important way to advance it is to remove the barriers to self-organization. In a supportive environment, knowledge will take care of itself.
11. There is no silver bullet. There is no single leverage point or best practice to advance knowledge. It must be supported at multiple levels and in a variety of ways.
12. How you define knowledge determines how you manage it. The “knowledge question” can present itself many ways. For example, concern about the ownership of knowledge leads to acquiring codified knowledge that is protected by copyrights and patents.

• If you don’t have a way to tell your story other people will make it up for you.
• Transformation happens one darn person at a time.
• Conversation is the cellular level of knowledge creation — and the most ignored.
• You cannot administer a network you can only serve it.
• Meg Wheatley said, “You cannot fight a network with a hierarchy.”
• Larry Prusak said, “Knowledge is in groups — not individuals.”
• Winston Churchill said, “The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.”
• Tom Peters said, “Heavy lifting is out; brains are in.”
• Steve Denning and his colleagues Michel Pommier and Lesley Shneier:

1. Knowledge sharing is essential to economic survival
2. Communities of practice are the heart and soul of knowledge sharing
3. Virtual community members also need physical interactions
4. Storytelling ignites knowledge sharing

Dennis Pearce:

1. Practice the philosophy of making it easy to correct mistakes, rather than making it difficult to make them. — Jimmy Wales
2. You can lead a firm to knowledge but you can’t make it think. — Dennis Pearce
3. No amount of sophistication is going to allay the fact that all your knowledge is about the past and all your decisions are about the future. — Ian E. Wilson (National Archivist of Canada)
4. Hunt, don’t just gather. Disseminate, don’t just aggregate. — Maureen Baginski (Executive Assistant Director, FBI Office of Intelligence)
5. Knowledge is of two kinds: We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it. — Samuel Johnson
6. Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterwards. — Vernon Law (Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher)
7. Once you have discovered what is happening, you can’t pretend not to know; you can’t abdicate responsibility. — P. D. James (British mystery writer)
8. I not only use all the brains I have, but all I can borrow. — Woodrow Wilson
9. The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie — deliberate, contrived, and dishonest — but the myth — persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. — John F. Kennedy
10. We’re drowning in information and starving for knowledge. — Rutherford D. Rogers (Yale librarian)
11. Knowledge is the small part of ignorance that we arrange and classify. — Ambrose Bierce
12. In times of profound change, the learners inherit the earth while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists. — Eric Hoffer
13. Indeed he knows not how to know who knows not how to unknow. — Sir Richard Francis Burton
14. It is not computers that make the difference, but what people do with them. — Paul Strassman
15. An immense and ever-increasing wealth of knowledge is scattered about the world today; knowledge that would probably suffice to solve all the mighty difficulties of our age, but it is dispersed and unorganized. We need a sort of mental clearing house for the mind: a depot where knowledge and ideas are received, sorted, summarized, digested, clarified and compared. — H. G. Wells
16. The conceptual structures we construct today are too complicated to be specified accurately in advance, and too complex to be built faultlessly … I find that teams can grow much more complex entities than they can build. — F. P. Brooks
17. Successful knowledge transfer involves neither computers nor documents but rather interactions between people. — Thomas Davenport
18. Unlike capital, knowledge is most valuable when it is controlled and used by those on the front lines of the organization. — Bartlett, C.A. & Ghoshal, S. “Changing the Role of the Top Management: Beyond Systems to People,” Harvard Business Review, May-June 1995
19. The best information environments will take advantage of the ability of IT to overcome geography but will also acknowledge that the highest bandwidth network of all is found between the water fountain and the coffee machine. — Thomas Davenport
20. The real problem is not whether machines think, but whether people do. — B. F. Skinner
21. We must not confuse the thrill of acquiring or distributing information quickly with the more daunting task of converting it into knowledge and wisdom. — Principles of Technorealism — Principle 4
22. To know the world, one must construct it. — Pavese
23. How can I tell what I think until I see what I say? — E.M. Forster
24. Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former. — Albert Einstein
25. Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than the one where they sprang up. — Oliver Wendell Holmes
26. If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas. — George Bernard Shaw
27. I have always thought that the best way to find out what is right and what is not right, what should be done and what should not be done, is not to give a sermon, but to talk and discuss, and out of discussion sometimes a little bit of truth comes out. — Jawaharlal Nehru, Indian statesman (1889–1964)
28. If the past has been an obstacle and a burden, knowledge of the past is the safest and the surest emancipation. — John Acton
29. If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest. — Benjamin Franklin
30. The soft stuff is always harder than the hard stuff. — Roger Enrico, Vice Chairman of PepsiCo
31. There is less to fear from outside competition than from inside inefficiency, miscalculation, lack of knowledge. — Anonymous
32. The only irreplaceable capital an organization possesses is the knowledge and ability of its people. The productivity of that capital depends on how effectively people share their competence with those who can use it. — Andrew Carnegie
33. The more extensive a man’s knowledge of what has been done, the greater will be his power of knowing what to do. — Benjamin Disraeli
34. Sharing knowledge is not about giving people something, or getting something from them. That is only valid for information sharing. Sharing knowledge occurs when people are genuinely interested in helping one another develop new capacities for action; it is about creating learning processes. — Peter Senge
35. All of us are exposed to huge amounts of material, consisting of data, ideas, and conclusions — much of it is wrong or misunderstood or just plain confused… Humanity will be much better off when the reward structure is altered so that selection pressures on careers favor the sorting out of information as well as its acquisition. — Murray Gell-Mann
36. Alchemists turned into chemists when they stopped keeping secrets. — Eric Raymond
37. In a knowledge-driven economy, talk is real work. — Thomas H. Davenport and Laurence Prusak
38. It isn’t what you know that counts; it’s what you think of in time. — Benjamin Franklin
39. Knowledge is like money: to be of value it must circulate, and in circulating it can increase in quantity and, hopefully, in value. — Louis L’Amour
40. As we gain more knowledge we do not become certain, we become certain of more. — Ayn Rand
41. A little knowledge that acts is worth infinitely more than much knowledge that is idle. — Kahlil Gibran
42. What information consumes is rather obvious: It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. — Herbert Simon
43. They copied all that they could follow but they could not copy my mind,
    And I left ’em sweating and stealing and a year and a half behind. — Rudyard Kipling
44. A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep. — Saul Bellow
45. Good judgment comes from experience, and experience often comes from bad judgment. — Rita Mae Brown
46. Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge. — Alfred North Whitehead
47. Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty. — Frank Herbert
48. It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change. — Charles Darwin
49. I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated. — Poul Anderson
50. Some are born with knowledge, some derive it from study, and some acquire it only after a painful realization of their ignorance. But the knowledge being possessed, it comes to the same thing. — Confucius
51. An ignorant person is one who doesn’t know what you have just found out. — Will Rogers
52. Meetings are indispensable when you don’t want to do anything. — John Kenneth Galbraith
53. To know what everyone knows is to know nothing. — Remy de Gourmont
54. Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn’t the work he is supposed to be doing at the moment. — Robert Benchley
55. We live, unluckily perhaps, in a world where a good deal of public and private business has to be done in print or in typescript. Nearly everybody must “write.” And in most of these routine matters the one virtue that is important, and seldom shown, is to be understood. — Lyman Bryson
56. The mind commands the body and the body obeys. The mind commands itself and finds resistance. — St. Augustine
57. I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity. — Oliver Wendell Holmes
58. Never mistake motion for action. — Ernest Hemingway
59. As gold which he cannot spend will make no man rich, so knowledge which he cannot apply will make no man wise. — Samuel Johnson
60. It is much better to know something about everything than to know everything about one thing. — Blaise Pascal
61. All men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education. — Sir Walter Scott
62. If money is your hope for independence you will never have it. The only real security that a man will have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience and ability. — Henry Ford
63. Words are the tools of thought, and you will often find that you are thinking badly because you are using the wrong tools, trying to bore a hole with a screw-driver, or draw a cork with a coal-hammer. — A. P. Herbert
64. Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think. — Niels Bohr
65. The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn. — Alvin Toffler
66. Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in. But as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents. — Arthur Schopenhauer
67. We often think that when we have completed our study of one we know all about two, because ‘two’ is ‘one and one.’ We forget that we have still to make a study of “and.” — A. S. Eddington
68. Wonder rather than doubt is the root of all knowledge. — Abraham Joshua Heschel
69. [There] are two things, indeed, knowledge and opinion, of which the one makes the possessor really to know, the other to be ignorant. — Hippocrates
70. Men occasionally stumble on the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened. — Winston Churchill
71. The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think. — Edwin Schlossberg
72. Notice the difference between what happens when a man says to himself, “I have failed three times,” and what happens when he says, “I am a failure.” — S. I. Hayakawa
73. Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. — Aldous Huxley
74. The strongest human instinct is to impart information. The second strongest is to resist it. — Kenneth Grahame
75. If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don’t bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking. — Buckminster Fuller
76. Don’t worry about people stealing an idea. If it’s original, you will have to ram it down their throats. — Howard Aiken
77. Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought. — John F. Kennedy
78. Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please. — Mark Twain
79. The age of reason has ended, and now we must organize around chaos. — Watts Wacker
80. Most conversations are simply monologues delivered in the presence of a witness. — Margaret Millar
81. The plural of ‘anecdote’ is not ‘data.’ — Anonymous
82. The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. — Marcel Proust
83. Mankind has a great aversion to intellectual labor; but even supposing knowledge to be easily attainable, more people would be content to be ignorant than would take even a little trouble to acquire it. — Samuel Johnson
84. People like to imagine that because all our equipment moves so much faster, that we are thinking faster, too. — Christopher Morley
85. If you have the same ideas as everybody else but have them one week earlier than everyone else then you will be hailed as a visionary. But if you have them five years earlier you will be named a lunatic. — Barry Jones
86. Some people change when they see the light, others when they feel the heat. –Caroline Schoeder
87. Truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it. — Flannery O’Connor
88. By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third, by experience, which is the bitterest. — Confucius
89. A couple of months in the laboratory can save a couple of hours in the library. — Frank H. Westheimer
90. An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field. — Niels Bohr
91. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not to their own facts. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan
92. Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
93. In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed. — Charles Darwin
94. Learning without thinking is useless. Thinking without learning is dangerous. — Confucius)
95. - Ted: “Socrates! I’ve heard that name before, look him up, dude. I think it’s under So-crates.”
    - Bill: “So-crates — ‘The only true wisdom consists of knowing that you know nothing.’”
    - Ted: “That’s us, dude!”
96. The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has limits. — Albert Einstein
97. Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.
    — Philip K. Dick
98. If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it? — Albert Einstein
99. - Captain Renault: “And what in Heaven’s name brought you to Casablanca?”
    - Rick: “My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters.”
    - Captain Renault: “But this is a desert — there are no waters.”
    - Rick: “I was misinformed.”
100. In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe .— Carl Sagan
101. Only the educated are free. — Epictetus, philosopher (c. 60–120)
102. The progress of mankind depends in large measure upon new ideas, and the rate of this progress in turn depends largely upon the speed with which the ideas are disseminated. — George Gallup
103. Email is such a funny thing. People hand you these single little messages that are no heavier than a river pebble. But it doesn’t take long until you have acquired a pile of pebbles that’s taller than you and heavier than you could ever hope to move, even if you wanted to do it over a few dozen trips. But for the person who took the time to hand you their pebble, it seems outrageous that you can’t handle that one tiny thing. “What ‘pile’? It’s just a pebble!” — Merlin Mann
104. Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about. — Cory Doctorow
105. We are used to a world where little things happen for love and big things happen for money. Love motivates people to bake a cake and money motivates people to make an encyclopedia. Now, though, we can do big things for love. — Clay Shirky
106. Communication tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring. — Clay Shirky
107. Social tools do not create collective action — they merely remove the obstacles to it. — Clay Shirky
108. Revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new technologies — it happens when society adopts new behaviors. — Clay Shirky
109. Email is where knowledge goes to die. — Bill French
110. Experience comprises illusions lost, rather than wisdom gained. — Joseph Roux
111. It is far better to do the right thing wrong than the wrong thing right. — Russell Ackoff
112. In everyone’s life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit. — Albert Schweitzer
113. The more extensive the knowledge of what has been done, the greater the power of knowing what to do. — Benjamin Disraeli
114. Organizations need to accept people practicing and doing certain things like crap for awhile. This may be even harder to accept than failure. With behavior change you cannot fail fast because there is no failure, there is just crappy attempts until you become better. — Rachel Happe
115. Information wants to be free, but value wants to be paid for. — Doc Searls
116. Nowadays, everyone is an air traffic controller. — Douglas Rushkoff
117. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. — Thomas Jefferson, letter to Isaac McPherson 1813
118. By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest. — Confucius
119. The power of the leader to address adaptive challenges does not lie in inventing solutions, rather it lies in using leadership authority to convene the conversations. — Ron Heifetz
120. Even at the largest and most successful companies on the planet, so much of what employees come to know about how the organization functions is left to the lottery of seating charts. — Noah Brier and James Gross, Learn Where You Work
121. A conference is a gathering of people who singly can do nothing, but together can decide that nothing can be done. — Fred Allen
122. When you talk, you are only repeating what you already know. But if you listen, you may learn something new. — Dalai Lama
123. If you know it’s going to work, it’s not innovation. — Jeff Bezos
124. Every man is a damned fool for at least five minutes every day. Wisdom consists in not exceeding the limit. — Elbert Hubbard
125. It is more fun to talk with someone who doesn’t use long, difficult words but rather short, easy words like “What about lunch?” — A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh
126. When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it. — A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh
127. If we knew what we were doing, we wouldn’t call it research. — Albert Einstein
128. We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements — transportation, communications, and all other industries; agriculture, medicine, education, entertainment, protecting the environment; and even the key democratic institution of voting — profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces. — Carl Sagan
129. Never bring statistics to a story fight. — Peter Dodds
130. The process you use to get the future is the future you get. — Myron Rogers
131. [A] quotation is a handy thing to have about, saving one the trouble of thinking for oneself, always a laborious business. (The Record Lie) — A.A. Milne, If I May
132. A witty saying proves nothing. — Voltaire

See also:

• 100 Maxims for Innovation, Leadership, and Knowledge
• Maxims