Quotes About First principles

We need bold leadership to bring America back to its first principles of diversity inclusion and opportunity for everyone in every ZIP Code, and music is that vehicle to summon our better angels. Music is that vehicle and always has been a vehicle to challenge us to build a better America.

Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principles to trifles.

The shortest and surest way of arriving at real knowledge is to unlearn the lessons we have been taught, to mount the first principles, and take nobody's word about them.

It is only charlatans who are certain. We know nothing of first principles. It is truly extravagant to define God, angels, and minds, and to know precisely why God formed the world, when we do not know why we move our arms at will. Doubt is not a very agreeable state, but certainty is a ridiculous one.

The further I go, the more I am confirmed in the idea that systems of metaphysics are for philosophers what novels are for women."59 "It is only charlatans who are certain. We know nothing of first principles. It is truly extravagant to define God, angels, and minds, and to know precisely why God formed the world, when we do not know why we move our arms at will. Doubt is not a very agreeable state, but certainty is a ridiculous one.

The shortest and surest way of arriving at real knowledge is to unlearn the lessons we have been taught, to mount the first principles, and take nobody's word about them.

That is why we must come back to our first principles. And the most basic of these is the fact that God is there and that he is objective to us. He is not there to conform to us; we must conform to him. He summons us from outside of ourselves to know him. We do not go inside of ourselves to find him. We are summoned to know him only on his terms. He is not known on our terms. This summons is heard in and through his Word. It is not heard through our intuitions.

Aristotle defined a first principle as "the first basis from which a thing is known." First principles thinking is therefore the art of breaking a problem down to the fundamental parts that you know are true and building up from there.