That Knowledge Tree Quotes & Sayings

Few would argue that a simpler consciousness, no matter how harmonious, is preferable to a more complex one. While we might admire the serenity of the lion in repose, the tribesman's untroubled acceptance of his fate, or the child's wholehearted involvement in the present, they cannot offer a model for resolving our predicament. The order based on innocence is now beyond our grasp. Once the fruit is plucked from the tree of knowledge, the way back to Eden is barred forever. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

The partitions of knowledge are not like several lines that meet in one angle, and so touch not in a point; but are like branches of a tree, that meet in a stem, which hath a dimension and quantity of entireness and continuance, before it come to discontinue and break itself into arms and boughs. — Francis Bacon

But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat it; for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die. — Anonymous

Seems to me," said Cap'n Bill, as he sat beside Trot under the big acacia tree, looking out over the blue ocean, "seems to me, Trot, as how the more we know, the more we find we don't know." "I can't quite make that out, Cap'n Bill," answered the little girl in a serious voice, after a moment's thought, during which her eyes followed those of the old sailor-man across the glassy surface of the sea. "Seems to me that all we learn is jus' so much gained." "I know; it looks that way at first sight," said the sailor, nodding his head; "but those as knows the least have a habit of thinkin' they know all there is to know, while them as knows the most admits what a turr'ble big world this is. It's the knowing ones that realize one lifetime ain't long enough to git more'n a few dips o' the oars of knowledge. — L. Frank Baum

Original sin itself comes straight from the Old Testament myth of Adam and Eve. Their sin - eating the fruit of a forbidden tree - seems mild enough to merit a mere reprimand. But the symbolic nature of the fruit (knowledge of good and evil, which in practice turned out to be knowledge that they were naked) was enough to turn their scrumping escapade into the mother and father of all sins. They and all their descendants were banished forever from the Garden of Eden, deprived of the gift of eternal life, and condemned to generations of painful labour, in the field and in childbirth respectively. — Richard Dawkins

The voice that says, "That's the way I am," is the voice of knowledge. It's the voice of the liar living in the Tree of Knowledge in your head. The Toltec consider it a mental disease that is highly contagious because it's transmitted from human to human through knowledge. The symptoms of the disease are fear, anger, hatred, sadness, jealousy, conflict, and separation between humans. Again, these lies are controlling the dream of our life. I think this is obvious. — Miguel Ruiz

Why?' He kept asking in his sweetly belling voice, its tone as pure as marbles swirled around a crystal pail. Why him wun up the tree? Why him nest up theah? Why him gadder nuts? Why? Why? Why? And Billy answering every question to the best of his ability, as if anything less would disrespect the deep and maybe even divine force that drove his little nephew toward universal knowledge. — Ben Fountain

Before eating from the tree of knowledge, Adam and Eve had no notion of Good and evil.

They were kicked out of paradise, because the supposed Creator was unable to reason that giving someone free will to choose between two things while having no notion of either, would be the Himalaya of nonsense. — Haroutioun Bochnakian

BAD PEOPLE
A man told me once that all the bad people
Were needed. Maybe not all, but your fingernails
You need; they are really claws, and we know
Claws. The sharks - what about them?
They make other fish swim faster. The hard-faced men
In black coats who chase you for hours
In dreams - that's the only way to get you
To the shore. Sometimes those hard women
Who abandon you get you to say, "You."
A lazy part of us is like a tumbleweed.
It doesn't move on its own. Sometimes it takes
A lot of Depression to get tumbleweeds moving.
Then they blow across three or four States.
This man told me that things work together.
Bad handwriting sometimes leads to new ideas;
And a careless god - who refuses to let people
Eat from the Tree of Knowledge - can lead
To books, and eventually to us. We write
Poems with lies in them, but they help a little. — Robert Bly

God gave Adam and Eve that free will and choice. He gave them one warning: eat of any tree that is here, including the wonderful tree of life, but don't eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil ... I wish Adam and Eve had thought more about what knowledge meant. Eve saw it as a good thing, to know more. But how do you really know something? You experience it — Dee Henderson

I want it so that every minister will be not a parrot, not an owl sitting upon a dead limb of the tree of knowledge and hooting the hoots that have been hooted for eighteen hundred years. But I want it so that each one can be an investigator, a thinker; and I want to make his congregation grand enough so that they will not only allow him to think, but will demand that he shall think, and give to them the honest truth of his thought. — Robert Green Ingersoll

Does that mean", I said in some bewilderment, "that we must eat again of the tree of knowledge in order to return to the state of innocence?"
"Of course", he said, "but that's the final chapter in the history of the world. — Heinrich Von Kleist

As was the case for Nobel's own invention of dynamite, the uses that are made of increased knowledge can serve both beneficial and potentially harmful ends. Increased knowledge clearly implies increased responsibility. We reject the notion advocated in some quarters that man should stop eating from the tree of knowledge, as if that were humanly possible. — Nicolaas Bloembergen

This is perhaps what has made some suspect that the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was really a banana. — Jane Grigson

The fate of an epoch that has eaten of the tree of knowledge is that it must ... recognize that general views of life and the universe can never be the products of increasing empirical knowledge, and that the highest ideals, which move us most forcefully, are always formed only in the struggle with other ideals which are just as sacred to others as ours are to us. — Max Weber

The concept of marketing is almost as old as humanity itself ... suffice it to say here that it took almost no time for a wily serpent to sell Adam and Eve on a shiny apple from the Tree of Knowledge, at which point they became not only the first humans but also the first marketing demographic, and God expelled them from the Garden of Eden for being total consumerist dupes. (p. 40) — BikeSnobNYC

O youth ... be assured that knowledge alone does not strengthen the hand ... Though a man read a hundred thousand scientific questions and understood them or learned them, but did not work with them
They do not benefit him except by working ... Knowledge is the tree, and working is its fruit; and though you studied a hundred years and assembled a thousand books, you would not be prepared for the mercy of Allah the Exalted except by working. — Al-Ghazali

The ants Geiser recently observed under a dripping fir tree are not concerned with what anyone might know about them; nor were the dinosaurs, which died out before a human being set eyes on them. All the papers, whether on the wall or on the carpet, can go. Who cares about the Holocene? Nature needs no names. Geiser knows that. The rocks do not need his memory. — Max Frisch

pride, as merely wanting to "eat from the tree of knowledge", when Adam already has knowledge of everything useful to know, even to the point of "naming" (that is to say, to have a controlling knowledge over) all the creatures of the earth? Accordingly, we must look for a deeper pride - the prideful ambition of wanting to be "as gods", equal to the Creator. As psychologist Eric Fromm pointed out — Richard W. Kropf

I should say that, in addition to my tree - love (it was originally called The Tree), it arose from my own pre-occupation with the Lord of the Rings , the knowledge that it would be finished in great detail or not at all, and the fear (near certainty ) that it would be 'not at all'. The war had arisen to darken all horizons. But no such analyses are a complete explanation even of a short story ... — J.R.R. Tolkien

Probability but no truth, facility but no freedom
it is owing to these two fruits that the tree of knowledge cannot be confused with the tree of life. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Since everyone around you agrees ever since there were people on earth that land is value, or labor is value, or learning is value, or title, degree, necklaces, murex shells, the ownership of slaves. Everyone knows bees sting and ghosts haunt and giving your robes away humiliates your rivals. That the enemies are barbarians. That wise men swim through the rock of the earth; that houses breed filth, airstrips attract airplanes, tornadoes punish, ancestors watch, and you can buy a shorter stay in purgatory. The black rock is holy, or the scroll; or the pangolin is holy, the quetzal is holy, this tree, water, rock, stone, cow, cross, or mountain--and it's all true. The Red Sox. Or nothing at all is holy, as everyone intelligent knows. — Annie Dillard

I trace the letters on the tree behind us in the picture. No one knows what's churning inside of me. Crushing guilt...Pain...Relief. All mixed with knowledge that Trip is never coming back. — Jennifer Shaw Wolf

Fall leaves are brilliant with gold and red. You can cup them in your hand and wonder at them, be amazed at their uniqueness and glory. But eventually they are gone, brown, crumbling, scattered on the wind. But the tree remains. The tree is what is important. The tree lives on. That was a difficult knowledge to bear, and an even more difficult life to live. Of course, being the leaf wasn't exactly desirable either. — Rob Thurman

Madam, a circulating library in a town is as an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge; it blossoms through the year. And depend on it that they who are so fond of handling the leaves, will long for the fruit at last. — Richard Brinsley Sheridan

We never see anything completely. We never see a tree, we see the tree through the image that we have of it, the concept of that tree; but the concept, the knowledge, the experience, is entirely different from the actual tree. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

Sorrow is knowledge, those that know the most must mourn the deepest, the tree of knowledge is not the tree of life. — George Gordon Byron

Every kind of knowledge, every science, is as a tree: if the fruit of it be the love of God, then is it a blessed tree, but if not, that tree is but dried-up wood, and shall only feed the fire — Abdu'l- Baha

If a man seeks to change the world, he should first understand it.' The apprentice trotted the words out as if by rote, evidently relieved to be asked a question he knew the answer to. 'The smith must learn the ways of metals, the carpenter the ways of wood, or their work will be of but little worth. Base magic is wild and dangerous, for it comes from the Other Side, and to draw from the world below is fraught with peril. The Magus tempers magic with knowledge, and thus produces High Art, but like the smith or the carpenter, he should only seek to change that which he understands. With each thing he learns, his power is increased. So must the Magus strive to learn all, to understand the world entire. The tree is only as strong as its root, and knowledge is the root of power. — Joe Abercrombie

The history of man proves that religion perverts man's concept of life and the universe, and has made him a cringing coward before the blind forces of nature.
If you believe that there is a God; that man was 'created'; that he was forbidden to eat of the fruit of the 'tree of knowledge'; that he disobeyed; that he is a 'fallen angel'; that he is paying the penalty for his 'sins,' then you devote your time praying to appease an angry and jealous God.
If, on the other hand, you believe that the universe is a great mystery; that man is the product of evolution; that he is born without knowledge; that intelligence comes from experience, then you devote your time and energies to improving his condition with the hope of securing a little happiness here for yourself and your fellow man.
That is the difference.
If man was 'created,' then someone made a grievous mistake. — Joseph Lewis

There is a legend about a bird which sings only once in it's life, more beautifully than any other creature on the face of the earth. From the moment it leaves it's nest, it searches for a thorn tree, and does not rest until it has found one. Then, it impales it's breast on the longest, sharpest thorn. But as it is dying, it rises above it's own agony to outsing the Lark and the Nightingale. The Thornbird pays it's life for that one song, and the whole world stills to listen, and God in his heaven smiles, as it's best is brought only at the cost of great pain; Driven to the thorn with no knowledge of the dying to come. But when we press the thorn to our breast, we know, we understand.... and still, we do it." ~ Colleen McCullough — Colleen McCullough

A farmer friend of mine told me recently about a busload of middle school children who came to his farm for a tour. The first two boys off the bus asked, "Where is the salsa tree?" They thought they could go pick salsa, like apples and peaches. Oh my. What do they put on SAT tests to measure this? Does anybody care? How little can a person know about food and still make educated decisions about it? Is this knowledge going to change before they enter the voting booth? Now that's a scary thought. — Joel Salatin

The disciples, under the influence of a natural, religious concept, asked Him, "Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he should be born blind?" (v. 2). Listen to the Lord's answer. "Neither has this man sinned nor his parents, but that the works of God might be manifested in him" (John 9:3). Here is the significance of the Lord's reply: people always appraise situations according to yes or no, right or wrong, which are the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, but the Lord Jesus always brings people back to the tree of life, which is God Himself. — Witness Lee

If we represent knowledge as a tree, we know that things that are divided are yet connected. We know that to observe the divisions and ignore the connections is to destroy the tree. — Wendell Berry

There are no problems without consciousness ... , in what way does consciousness arise? Nobody can say with certainty; but we can observe small children in the process of becoming conscious. Every parent can see ; if they pay attention. And this is what we are able to observe: when the child recognizes someone or something - when [they] "know" a person or a thing - then we feel that child has consciousness. That, no doubt, is also why in Paradise it was the tree of knowledge which bore such fateful fruit."
Carl Jung
Modern Man in Search of a soul
1933 — C. G. Jung

It is a sunny fall afternoon and I'm engaged in one of my favorite pastimes - picking chestnuts. I'm playing alone under the spreading, leafy, protective tree. My mother is sitting on a bench nearby, rocking the buggy in which my sister is asleep. The city, beyond the lacy wall of trees, is humming with gentle noises. The sun has just passed its highest point and is warming me with intense, oblique rays. I pick up a reddish brown chestnut, and suddenly, through its warm skin, I feel the beat as if of a heart. But the beat is also in everything around me, and everything pulsates and shimmers as if it were coursing with the blood of life. Stooping under the tree, I'm holding life in my hand, and I am in the center of a harmonious, vibrating transparency. For that moment, I know everything there is to know. I have stumbled into the very center of plenitude, and I hold myself still with fulfillment, before the knowledge of my knowledge escapes me. — Eva Hoffman

Misconceptions are unavoidable now that we've eaten of the Tree of Knowledge. But Paradise is locked and bolted, and the cherubim stands behind us. We have to go on and make the journey round the world to see if it is perhaps open somewhere at the back. — Heinrich Von Kleist

The beasts and the trees will one day share with us a new creation and we will see them as God sees them and know that they are very good. Meanwhile, if we embrace them for themselves, we discover both them and ourselves as evil. This is the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil - disgust with the things we have misused and hatred of ourselves for misusing them. — Thomas Merton

I handed them a script and they turned it down. It was too controversial. It talked about concepts like, 'Who is God?' The Enterprise meets God in space; God is a life form, and I wanted to suggest that there may have been, at one time in the human beginning, an alien entity that early man believed was God, and kept those legends. But I also wanted to suggest that it might have been as much the Devil as it was God. After all, what kind of god would throw humans out of Paradise for eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. One of the Vulcans on board, in a very logical way, says, 'If this is your God, he's not very impressive. He's got so many psychological problems; he's so insecure. He demands worship every seven days. He goes out and creates faulty humans and then blames them for his own mistakes. He's a pretty poor excuse for a supreme being. — Gene Roddenberry

Do you know that even when you look at a tree and say, 'That is an oak tree', or 'that is a banyan tree', the naming of the tree, which is botanical knowledge, has so conditioned your mind that the word comes between you and actually seeing the tree? To come in contact with the tree you have to put your hand on it and the word will not help you to touch it. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

I used to wonder why God used a prop like the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil to inflict guilt on Adam&Eve, until I realized it could have been a steak or a plate of fries or a bagel. Anything. Making people feel guilty is a staple of religion and society in general. It works. And if you can transfer guilt from a real criminal to an innocent bystander, you've really got something going. It's a magic stage trick that can make a career. — Jon Rappoport

There are two important trees in the Garden of Eden: the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life. We chose the wrong one. The fruit of the Tree of Life would have given us immortality. The fruit of the Tree of Knowledge informed us that we were nude, which, as knowledge goes, is pretty low down the list of amazing facts. — Mark Forsyth

Those who take knowledge to be a whole zoo of sub-disciplines will react to my giving metaphysics a privileged position in that zoo or to my thinking of knowledge as a tree, with more and less fundamental parts. — Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra

They meet, as we shall meet tomorrow, to murder one another; they kill and maim tens of thousands, and then have thanksgiving services for having killed so many people (they even exaggerate the number), and they announce a victory, supposing that the more people they have killed the greater their achievement. How does God above look at them and hear them?" exclaimed Prince Andrew in a shrill, piercing voice. "Ah, my friend, it has of late become hard for me to live. I see that I have begun to understand too much. And it doesn't do for man to taste of the tree of knowledge of good and evil ... Ah, well, it's not for long!" he added. — Leo Tolstoy

The world is full of folly and confusion, the lack of freedom has deep roots, the hope for justice and equality is dwindling, the odds against us are too great, it seems. We should be glad to be as well off as we are, people say, most people are worse off. Then they take a pill for insomnia. Or depression. Or life. When will a new generation come, one that understands the importance of equality, a generation of gardeners and foresters who can fell the big trees that block the light for all the lesser ones, and who can remove the suckers from the tree of knowledge. — Kjell Askildsen

Sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most must mourn the deepest o'er the fatal truth, the Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life. — George Gordon Byron

That man, the unsubmissive and first, stands in the opening chapter of every legend mankind has recorded about its beginning. Prometheus was chained to a rock and torn by vultures - because he had stolen the fire of the gods. Adam was condemned to suffer - because he had eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Whatever the legend, somewhere in the shadows of its memory mankind knew that its glory began with one and that that one paid for his courage. — Ayn Rand

The whole foundation of Christianity is based on the idea that intellectualism is the work of the Devil. Remember the apple on the tree? Okay, it was the Tree of Knowledge. You eat this apple, you're going to be as smart as God. We can't have that. — Frank Zappa

One fatal tree there stands of knowledge call'd
Forbidden them to taste. Knowledge forbidden?
Suspicious, reasonless. Why should their Lord
Envy them that? Can it be sin to know?
Can it be death? And do they only stand
By ignorance? Is that their happy state,
The proof of their obedience and their faith? — John Milton

I was the only person in an infinite exploding universe who knew that this powder was made of opal. In a wide, wide world, full of unimaginable numbers of people, I was - in addition to being small and insufficient - special. I was not only a quirky bundle of genes, but I was also unique existentially, because of the tiny detail that I knew about Creation, because of what I had seen and then understood. Until I phoned someone, the concrete knowledge that opal was the mineral that fortified each seed on each hackberry tree was mine alone. Whether or not this was something worth knowing seemed another problem for another day. I stood and absorbed this revelation as my life turned a page, and my first scientific discovery shone, as even the cheapest plastic toy does when it is new. I — Hope Jahren

Life managed without males for its first billion years, much of which was passed as single cells in a series of warm ponds. Then, in some ancient and neutral Eden, the fruit of the tree of sexual knowledge - a new mutation - persuaded members of a particular clone to fuse with cells from another, and then to divide. That ingenious idea is good news for the novel gene, as it doubles its rate of spread, but is a lot less so for those who receive it, who are obliged to copy the extra DNA. At once, two factions emerge, one keen to force itself upon the other. Thus sex was invented.
Soon one contestant began to cheat. Large cells are expensive, but are better at dividing because they have more food reserves. Small cells are cheaper to make, but cannot afford to split. Their sole chance of success hence lies in fusion with a large cell. The first males had appeared on the scene. — Steve Jones

No longer is science asked to understand the world, or to improve any part of it. It is asked instead to immediately justify everything that happens ... spectacular domination has cut down the vast tree of scientific knowledge in order to make itself a truncheon. — Guy Debord

It seems that there is never to be any perfect rest. Even in Eden the snake rears its head among the laden boughs of the Tree of Knowledge. The silence of the dreamless night is broken by the roar of the avalanche; the hissing of sudden floods; the clanging of the engine bell marking its sweep through a sleeping American town; the clanking of distant paddles over the sea ... — Bram Stoker

15The LORD God took the man k and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. 16And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, 17but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil l you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat [4] of it you m shall surely die. — Anonymous

Do you, good people, believe that Adam and Eve were created in the Garden of Eden and that they were forbidden to eat from the tree of knowledge? I do. The church has always been afraid of that tree. It still is afraid of knowledge. Some of you say religion makes people happy. So does laughing gas. So does whiskey. I believe in the brain of man. — Clarence Darrow

It was a shame that Allah, Jehovah, God - it didn't matter what name you gave him - did not live in the world today, because if he did, we would still be in paradise, while he would be mired in appeals, requests, demands, injunctions, preliminary verdicts, and would have to justify to innumerable tribunals his decision to expel Adam and Eve from paradise for breaking an arbitrary rule with no foundation in law: Of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat. — Paulo Coelho

Note the significant fact that we always hear of the "fall of man," not the fall of woman, showing that the consensus of human thought has been more unerring than masculine interpretation. Reading this narrative carefully, it is amazing that any set of men ever claimed that the dogma of the inferiority of woman is here set forth. The conduct of Eve from the beginning to the end is so superior to that of Adam. The command not to eat of the fruit of the tree of Knowledge was given to the man alone before woman was formed. Genesis ii, 17. Therefore the injunction was not brought to Eve with the impressive solemnity of a Divine Voice, but whispered to her by her husband and equal. It was a serpent supernaturally endowed, a seraphim as Scott and other commentators have claimed, who talked with Eve, and whose words might reasonably seem superior to the second-hand story of her — Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Or consider a story in the Jewish Talmud left out of the Book of Genesis. (It is in doubtful accord with the account of the apple, the Tree of Knowledge, the Fall, and the expulsion from Eden.) In The Garden, God tells Eve and Adam that He has intentionally left the Universe unfinished. It is the responsibility of humans, over countless generations, to participate with God in a "glorious" experiment - the "completing of the Creation."
The burden of such a responsibility is heavy, especially on so weak and imperfect a species as ours, one with so unhappy a history. Nothing remotely like "completion" can be attempted without vastly more knowledge than we have today. But, perhaps, if our very existence is at stake, we will find ourselves able to rise to this supreme challenge. — Carl Sagan

I think the roots of this antagonism to science run very deep. They're ancient. We see them in Genesis, this first story, this founding myth of ours, in which the first humans are doomed and cursed eternally for asking a question, for partaking of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. It's puzzling that Eden is synonymous with paradise when, if you think about it at all, it's more like a maximum-security prison with twenty-four hour surveillance. It's a horrible place. Adam and Eve have no childhood. They awaken full-grown. What is a human being without a childhood? Our long childhood is a critical feature of our species. It differentiates us, to a degree, from most other species. We take a longer time to mature. We depend upon these formative years and the social fabric to learn many of the things we need to know. — Ann Druyan

I'd like to briefly state the accomplishment that we expect from a photographer. He must make the person being photographed forget that he has eaten from the tree of knowledge. — Albert Renger-Patzsch

We are in our own dark Eden where the snake is not selling the Tree of Knowledge. He is selling love, and if you take a bite of that apple, you will go the way of Abel when this is clearly the land of Cain. — Shane Kuhn

What is the nature of the guilt that your teachers call his Original Sin? What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they consider perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge
he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil
he became a moral being. He was sentenced to earn his bread by his labor
he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desire
he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness, joy
all the cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of man's fall is desired to explain and condemn, it is not his errors that they hold as his guilt, but the essence of his nature as man. Whatever he was
that robot of the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love
he was not man. — Ayn Rand

If you had a yard as a child, you probably remember it with a startling intimacy. You knew that yard: every inch, every bush, each step on the tree you could climb, the whorls and knots in the branches, the bare dirt spots, the sandy gravel, the soft grass. It was deep, profound, intimate local knowledge. You intuitively knew what was happening around you at all times. Primitive man would have felt that way about a much larger stretch of ground, but it was still "his" territory. This very ability is really what allowed Homo sapiens to expand and succeed the way he did. — Sam Sheridan

As we reread Genesis 2...we immediately understand WHAT is 'crafty' about the serpent's question in Genesis 3. God did NOT in fact say in Genesis 2, 'You MUST NOT EAT from any tree in the garden' (3:1). What God did say was almost exactly the opposite: 'You ARE FREE TO EAT from any tree in the garden' (except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, 2:16). The vocabulary of God in Genesis 2 indicates freedom and blessing. The vocabulary of the serpent in Genesis 3 indicates prohibition and restriction. The serpent's ploy is to suggest to the woman that God is really not so good after all. He shifts attention away from all that God in his generosity has provided for his creatures in creation and onto the one thing that God has for the moment explicitly withheld. — Iain W. Provan

The abbreviators of works do injury to knowledge and to love.Of what value is he who,in order to abbreviate the parts of those things of which he professes to give complete knowledge,leaves out the greater part of the things of which the whole is composed?Oh human stupidity!You don't see that you are falling into the same error as one who strips a tree of its adornment of branches full of leaves,intermingled with fragrant flowers or fruit in order to demonstrate that the tree is good for making planks — Leonardo Da Vinci

Karl Popper, in The Open Society and Its Enemies, made a comment that sounds almost prophetic now: that the happy, primitive society (which, by the way, never existed) is lost for all those who have eaten of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. The more we try to return to the heroic age of tribalism, Popper warns, the more certainly we will reach the Inquisition, the secret police, and a romanticized gangsterism. But once the existential problems of the individual, who is good by nature, can be blamed on the "evil" society, nothing stands in the way of sheer imagination. The definition of the benevolent society free of all power is only a question of fantasy. — Paul Watzlawick

Geology is part of that remarkable dynamic process of the human mind which is generally called science and to which man is driven by an inquisitive urge. By noticing relationships in the results of his observations, he attempts to order and to explain the infinite variety of phenomena that at first sight may appear to be chaotic. In the history of civilization this type of progressive scientist has been characterized by Prometheus stealing the heavenly fire, by Adam eating from the tree of knowledge, by the Faustian ache for wisdom. — Reinout Willem Van Bemmelen

Oftentimes have I heard you speak of one who commits a wrong as though he were not one of you, but a stranger unto you and an intruder upon your world.
But I say that even as the holy and the righteous cannot rise beyond the highest which is in each one of you,
So the wicked and the weak cannot fall lower than the lowest which is in you also.
And as a single leaf turns not yellow but with the silent knowledge of the whole tree,
So the wrong-doer cannot do wrong without the hidden will of you all.
Like a procession you walk together towards your god-self.
You are the way and the wayfarers.
And when one of you falls down he falls for those behind him, a caution against the stumbling stone. — Kahlil Gibran

If my duty to my parents is a superstition, then so is my duty to posterity. If justice is a superstition, then so is my duty to my country or my race. If the pursuit of scientific knowledge is a real value, then so is conjugal fidelity. The rebellion of new ideologies against the Tao is a rebellion of the branches against the tree: if the rebels could succeed they would find that they had destroyed themselves. — C.S. Lewis

The law of miracles is operable by any man who has realized that the essence of creation is light. A master is able to employ his divine knowledge of light phenomena to project instantly into perceptible manifestation the ubiquitous light atoms. The actual form of the projection (whatever it be: a tree, a medicine, a human body) is determined by the yogi's wish and by his power of will and of visualisation. At — Paramahansa Yogananda

There's a big difference between merely carrying the world inside you and knowing that you do! A madman can produce ideas that resemble Plato's, and a pious little schoolboy in a Herrnhut institute can creatively reconstruct profound mythological associations in his mind, ideas to be found in the Gnostics or Zoroaster. But he doesn't know he's doing it! He's a tree or a stone, at best an animal, just as long as he doesn't know that. But when the first spark of that knowledge glimmers, he becomes a human being. You certainly don't consider all the bipeds running around the street to be human beings merely because they walk upright and carry their young for nine months? After all, you see how many of them are fish or sheep, worms or leeches, how many are ants, how many are bees! Now, each one of them has the potentiality of becoming a human being, but only when he senses that potential, when he even learns to be conscious of it to some degree, does that potential belong to him. — Hermann Hesse

We humans, male and female, exist behind emotional barriers as lonely, autonomous souls longing for freedom and love. Our yearning or Sehnsucht is for release from isolation, rejection, and death. We are autonomous but not free. We nevertheless fear intimacy and its theological counterpart, holiness. If it breaks through to us, it may destroy us. If we fall into a sea of holiness, we may drown. We have eaten from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, have recognized our nakedness, and have clothed ourselves. We do not want to be found naked, and we know that if intimacy breaks through our barriers, our shame will be made visible. We cannot bear to let go of the false freedom of being an autonomous agent. — Duane Garrett

That free will was demonstrated in the placing of temptation before man with the command not to eat of the fruit of the tree which would give him a knowledge of good and evil, with the disturbing moral conflict to which that awareness would give rise. — Kenneth Scott Latourette

There is no stability in this world. Who is to say what meaning there is in anything? Who is to foretell the flight of a word? It is a balloon that sails over tree-tops. To speak of knowledge is futile. All is experiment and adventure. We are forever mixing ourselves with unknown quantities. What is to come? I know not. But, as I put down my glass I remember; I am engaged to be married. I am to dine with my friends tonight. I am Bernard. — Virginia Woolf

I had traveled far, had circled the planet and studied my Torah, and at the very end of my search I was standing, finally, in the place where everything begins: the tree in the garden, the tree of knowledge that, as I learned long ago, is something divided, something that because growth occurs only through the medium of time, brings both pleasure and, finally, sorrow. — Daniel Mendelsohn

Father, I make a decision today to walk in the counsel of the godly and not the ungodly. I want to live life according to Your wisdom and not the world's wisdom. I want to walk more and more in Your wisdom in every area of my life. Help me to keep my eyes on Jesus, in whom is hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. I know that as I meditate on Jesus and His grace, I shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water - always fruitful and prospering in all that I do. Thank You also for sending godly men and women full of Your wisdom into my life for me to learn of Your ways. — Joseph Prince

Men are going down to Hell like a flock, only because they hate God and Heaven. The carnal mind is enmity against God, and an unregenerate man would soon turn a Heaven into a Hell. Whoever goes down to the pit will have himself to blame for it, for no man will suffer damnation but for the one sin of rejecting the light of the knowledge of God which lighteth every man that cometh into the world. (See John 1:9; 3:18, 19; 1 John 5:9-12.) Jesus bore all the sins of the human race in His own body on the tree and the only sin which can now consign men to perdition is the sin of making God a liar and counting the blood of the covenant an unholy thing. — William Pettingill

Grampa took Mary Ellen inside away from the crowd. "Now, child, I am going to show you what my father showed me, and his father before," he said quietly. He spooned the honey onto the cover of one of her books. "Taste," he said, almost in a whisper ... "There is such sweetness inside of that book too!" he said thoughtfully. "Such things ... adventure, knowledge and wisdom. But these things do not come easily. You have to pursue them. Just like we ran after the bees to find their tree, so you must also chase these things through the pages of a book! — Patricia Polacco

There are times now, and my life has changed so completely, that I think back on the early years and I find myself thinking: It was not that bad. Perhaps it was not. But there are times, too - unexpected - when walking down a sunny sidewalk, or watching the top of a tree bend in the wind, or seeing a November sky close down over the East River, I am suddenly filled with the knowledge of darkness so deep that a sound might escape from my mouth, and I will step into the nearest clothing store and talk with a stranger about the shape of sweaters newly arrived. This must be the way most of us maneuver through the world, half knowing, half not, visited by memories that can't possibly be true. But when I see others walking with confidence down the sidewalk, as though they are free completely from terror, I realize I don't know how others are. So much of life seems speculation. — Elizabeth Strout

The essence of Christianity is told us in the Garden of Eden history. The fruit that was forbidden was on the tree of knowledge. The subtext is, 'All the suffering you have is because you wanted to find out what was going on. You could be in the Garden of Eden if you had just kept your fucking mouth shut and hadn't asked any questions. — Frank Zappa

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities. Think now
She gives when our attention is distracted
And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late
What's not believed in, or if still believed,
In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon
Into weak hands, what's thought can be dispensed with
Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think
Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices
Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues
Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.
These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree. — T. S. Eliot

As we have pointed out, the principle of the tree of knowledge is to be independent of God. It means that we make our decisions independently. Although Cain performed a good deed, it was independent of God. Everything that is good yet independent of God results in death. This is similar to insulation which severs the flow of electricity. Regardless of the substance that is used as insulation - it may even be diamond - electricity is cut off nonetheless. As long as it causes insulation, it does not matter whether the material is good or bad. Likewise, if a thing keeps us away from God, it brings death, regardless of how good it is. — Witness Lee