Knowledge Is Like A Candle When

This saying is attributed to Johannes Gutenberg but is apocryphal — no writings by Gutenberg himself survive. The idea that knowledge, unlike a candle's flame, is not diminished by being shared was a common metaphor in humanist and Enlightenment thought; Thomas Jefferson expressed a nearly identical sentiment in a letter of 1813. The metaphor is particularly fitting for printing: each copy of a book shares the same knowledge as the original without reducing it, a property that made the press transformative for the spread of ideas in a way that manuscript copying could never achieve at scale.