Quotes About Knowledge

The more we learn about the world, and the deeper our learning, the more conscious, specific, and articulate will be our knowledge of what we do not know; our knowledge of our ignorance. For this indeed, is the main source of our ignorance - the fact that our knowledge can be only finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.

I would rather find a single causal law than be the king of Persia!

Science is most significant as one of the greatest spiritual adventures that man has yet known.

The simple truth is that truth is hard to come by, and that once found may easily be lost again.

An argument which appeals to the fact that we possess knowledge or that we can learn from experience, and which concludes from this fact that knowledge or learning from experience must be possible, and further, that every theory which entails the impossibility of knowledge, or of learning from experience, must be false, may be called a 'transcendental argument'.

Adev?rata ignoran?? nu este absen?a cunoa?terii, ci refuzul de a o dobândi.

Popper was already working towards his 'fallibilist' view that theories can never be proved, although they can be decisively disproved—but it had survived a severe test, and had emerged as a theory worth embracing.

In the empirical sciences, which alone can furnish us with information about the world we live in, proofs do not occur, if we mean by 'proof' an argument which establishes once and for ever the truth of a theory.

But the approach to truth is not easy. There is only one way towards it, the way through error. Only through our errors can we learn; and only he will learn who is ready to appreciate and even to cherish the errors of others as stepping stones towards truth, and who searches for his own errors: who tries to find them, since only when he has become aware of them can he free himself from them.

The wrong view of science betrays itself in the craving to be right; for it is not his possession of knowledge, of irrefutable truth, that makes the man of science, but his persistent and recklessly critical quest for truth.

La vera ignoranza non è la manca di cultura, ma il rifiuto di acquisirla.

Anything worth reading is not only worth reading twice, but worth reading again and again. If a book is worthwhile, then you will always be able to make new discoveries in it and find things in it that you didn't notice before, even though you have read it many times.

The history of science is everywhere speculative. It is a marvelous hiatory. It makes you proud to be a human being.

True ignorance is not the absence of knowledge, but the refusal to acquire it.

While differing widely in the various little bits we know, in our infinite ignorance we are all equal.

Our aim as scientists is objective truth; more truth, more interesting truth, more intelligible truth. We cannot reasonably aim at certainty. Once we realize that human knowledge is fallible, we realize also that we can never be completely certain that we have not made a mistake.

Science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths.

And it implies that if we respect truth, we must search for it by persistently searching for our errors: by indefatigable rational criticism, and self-criticism.

The more we learn about the world, and the deeper our learning, the more conscious, specific, and articulate will be our knowledge of what we do not know, our knowledge of our ignorance.

The quest for precision is analogous to the quest for certainty, and both should be abandoned.

What I criticize under the name Utopian engineering recommends the reconstruction of society as a whole, i.e. very sweeping changes whose practical consequences are hard to calculate, owing to our limited experiences. It claims to plan rationally for the whole of society, although we do not possess anything like the factual knowledge which would be necessary to make good such an ambitious claim.

Conjecture or hypothesis must come before observation or perception: we have inborn expectations; we have latent inborn knowledge, in the form of latent expectations, to be activated by a stimuli to which we react as a rule while engaged in active exploration. All learning is a modification (it may be a refutation)of some prior knowledge and thus, in the last analysis, of some inborn knowledge.

I wish to make it clear that 'history' in the sense in which most people speak of it simply does not exist; and this is at least one reason why I say that it has no meaning.

For Aristotle's essentialist definitions are the principles from which all our knowledge is derived; they thus contain all our knowledge; and they serve to substitute a long formula for a short one. As opposed to this, the scientific or nominalist definitions do not contain any knowledge whatever, not even any 'opinion'; they do nothing but introduce new arbitrary shorthand labels; they cut a long story short.