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Guard against the prestige of great names;
see that your judgments are your own; and do not shrink from disagreement;
no trusting without testing.
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-John Dalberg, Lord Acton
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*The acceptance of a fact as
a fact is the starting point, and if this is sufficiently clear, there will
be no further need to ask why it is so. A man with this kind of background
has or can easily acquire the foundations from which he must start. But if
he neither has nor can acquire them, let him lend an ear to Hesiod's words:
The man is all-best who himself works out every problem. . . .
That man, too, is admirable who follows one who speaks well.
He who cannot see the truth for himself, nor, hearing it from
others,
Store it away in his mind, that man is utterly useless.
(archê gar to hoti, kai ei touto phainoito arkountôs, ouden prosdeêsei tou
dioti: ho de toioutos echei ê laboi an archas rhaidiôs. hôi de mêdeteron
huparchei toutôn, akousatô tôn Hêsiodou:
houtos men panaristos hos autos panta noêsêi, esthlos d' au
kakeinos hos eu eiponti pithêtai. hos de ke mêt' autos noeêi
mêt'
allou akouôn en thumôi ballêtai, ho d' aut' achrêios anêr.)
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-Artistotle
Nicomachean Ethics, 350 BC
1095b 7-15
Martin Oswald, trans., 1962
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It will contribute towards one's object,
who wishes to acquire a facility in the gaining of knowledge, to doubt
judiciously.
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-Aristotle
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Truth arises more readily from error than
from confusion.
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-Francis Bacon
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*Some Pharisees who were
with him heard him say this and asked, "What? Are we blind too?"
Jesus said, "If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin; but now
that you claim you can see, your guilt remains.
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-John 9:40-41
NIV
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*[I]f there is anyone
among you who fancies himself wise. . .he must become a fool if he is to
be truly wise.
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-I Cornithians, 3:18
Oxford Study Bible, 1992
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*The man who thinks he
knows something does not yet know as he ought to know.
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-I Corinthians, 8:2
NIV
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~PHILOSOPHY, n. A route
of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.
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-Ambrose Bierce
The Devil's Dictionary, 1906
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I am one of the people who love the why of
things.
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-Catherine II of Russia
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Men occasionally stumble on the truth, but
most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had
happened.
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-Winston Churchill
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It is a shameful thing to be weary of
inquiry when what we search for is excellent.
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-Marcus Tullius Cicero
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*Philosophy is like waking
up in a strange, dark room. At first, you question your thoughts and attempt
to gain a sense of yourself and your situation. You don't know where you
are, and sometimes, even how you got there. As you search, you begin to
discover your surroundings. Occasionally, you may touch upon an object that
you can identify immediately. But more often, you must feel around it,
listen to it, and test it, before you can decide what it is and its
usefulness to you. Once in a while though, you will discover a tool, a
lamp, for instance, and once you discover its meaning and use, this tool
will allow you to see more clearly the other objects in the room. As you
discover more about your environment, you build upon the objects you've
uncovered. Your knowledge and awareness grow at ever faster rates until,
ultimately, you grasp the meaning of the room. Then what do you do? You
leave it. But you have not really left the room at all. You have only
made it bigger.
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-Michael Conover
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In seeking truth you have to get both sides
of the story.
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-Walter Kronkite
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False views. . .do very little harm, for
everyone takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness; and when
this is done, one path towards error is closed and the road to truth is
often at the same time opened.
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-Charles Darwin
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If you would be a real seeker after truth,
it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as
possible, all things.
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-Rene Descartes
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. . . the conviction persists - though
history has shown it to be a hallucination - that all the questions that
the human mind has asked are questions that can be answered in terms of
the alternatives that the questions themselves present. But in fact
intellectual progress usually occurs through sheer abandonment of
questions together with both of the alternatives they assume - an
abandonment that results from their decreasing vitality and change of
urgent interest. We do not solve them: we get over them. Old questions
are solved by disappearing, evaporating, while new questions corresponding
to the changed attitude of endeavor and preference take their place.
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-John Dewey
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Take nothing on its looks: take everything
on evidence. There's no better rule.
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-Charles Dickens
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The fool wonders, the wise man asks.
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-Benjamin Disraeli
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When you have excluded the impossible,
whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
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-Arthur Conan Doyle
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The important thing is to not stop
questioning.
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-Albert Einstein
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The search for truth is more precious than
its possession.
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-Albert Einstein
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The factual correction of error may be the
most sublime event in intellectual life, the ultimate sign of our necessary
obedience to a larger reality and our inability to construct the world
according to our desires. For science, in particular, factual correction
holds a specially revered place for two reasons: first, because we define
the enterprise as learning more and more about an external reality; second,
because we know in our hearts that we can be as stubborn and resistant to
change as petty bureaucrats and fundamentalist preachers--and undeniable
factual correction therefore becomes a kind of salvation from our own
emotional transgressions against a shared ideal.
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-Stephen Jay Gould
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Doubt 'til thou canst doubt no more. . .
doubt is thought, and thought is life. Systems which end doubt are
devices for drugging thought.
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-Albert Guerard
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Seek the company of those who were looking
for the truth, but run from those who have found it.
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-Vaclav Havel
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Sit down before every fact as a little
child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly
wherever and to whatever abyss nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.
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-Thomas Henry Huxley
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We have to live today by what truth we can
get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.
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-William James
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I keep six honest serving men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names were What and Why and When
and How and Where and Who.
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-Rudyard Kipling
"I Keep Six Honest. . ."
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*When truths are once
known to us, though by tradition, we are apt to be favorable to our own
parts and ascribe to our own understandings the discovery of what, in
reality, we borrowed from others-or, at least, finding we can prove what
at first we learn from others, we are forward to conclude it an obvious
truth, which, if we had sought, we could not have missed. Nothing seems
hard to our understandings that is once known; and because what we see, we
see with our own eyes, we are apt to overlook or forget the help we had
from others who showed it us and first made us see it, as if we were not
at all beholden to them for those truths they opened the way to and led us
into. For knowledge being only of truths that are perceived to be so, we
are favorable enough to our own faculties to conclude, that they of their
own strength would have attained those discoveries, without any foreign
assistance, and that we know those truths by the strength and native light
of our own minds, as they did from whom we received them by theirs, only
they had the luck to be before us. Thus the whole stock of human knowledge
is claimed by everyone as his private possession, as soon as he (profiting
by other's discoveries) has got it into this own mind-and so it is-but not
properly by his own single industry nor of his own acquisition.
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-John Locke
The Reasonableness of Christianity as
Delivered in the Scriptures, 1695
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One of the greatest joys known to man is to
take a flight into ignorance in search of knowledge.
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-Robert Lynd
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Always question. Always analyze. But in
the end, suspend judgement until you've been there. Live it to learn
it.
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-Mark McClinchie
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I respect faith but doubt is what gets you
an education.
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-Wilson Mizner
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The road to truth is long, and lined the
entire way with annoying bastards.
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-Alexander Nabakov
The Place of No Shadows
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To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin
to understand.
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-Jose Ortega y Gasset
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Contradiction is not the sign of falsity,
nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.
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-Blaise Pascal
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*Is it not rather the
case that the man who prepares himself most carefully to apprehend by
his intellect the essence of each thing which he examines will come
nearest to the knowledge of it?
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-The character Socrates, in Plato's
Phaedo
65e
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Not to know is bad, not to wish to know is
worse.
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-Nigerian proverb
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*A man who is honestly
convinced that he can find no answers, would not feel the need to
pretend that he is looking for them.
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-Ayn Rand
Philosophy: Who Needs It?, 1982
"Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World", 1960
Leonard Peikoff, ed.
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I have come to the conclusion that a person
should never accept any statement or even fact as being the absolute truth
. . .No statement should be believed merely because it has been made by
an authority.
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-Hans Reichenbach
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If error is corrected whenever it is
recognized as such, the path of error is the path of truth.
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-Hans Reichenbach
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*We make our world
significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our
answers.
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-Carl Sagan
Cosmos, 1980
Chapter VII, "The Backbone of the Night"
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At the heart of science is an essential
tension between two seemingly contradictory attitudes--an openness to new
ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the most
ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep
truths are winnowed from deep nonsense. Of course, scientists make
mistakes in trying to understand the world, but there is a built-in error-
correcting mechanism: The collective enterprise of creative thinking and
skeptical thinking together keeps the field on track.
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-Carl Sagan
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~[M]odest doubt is call'd
the beacon of the wise.
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-Hector, a character in William Shakespeare's
The History of Troilus and Cressida,
1602
Act 2, scene ii
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The first step to knowledge is to know that
we are ignorant.
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-Socrates
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There is a principle which is a bar against
all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot
fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance -- that principle is contempt
prior to investigation.
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-Herbert Spencer
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The authoritarian sets up some book, or man,
or tradition to establish the truth. The freethinker sets up reason and
private judgement to discover the truth.
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-Herbert Spencer
Freedom and Its Foundations
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I know that most men, including those at
ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the
simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to
admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining
to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they
have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.
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-Leo Tolstoy
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One who presumes to know the truth stops
looking for it.
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-Unknown
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Observation, and not old age, brings wisdom.
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-Unknown
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Any progress in knowledge, any worthwhile
achievement, depends on our attempts to transcend one particular
viewpoint and develop an expanded consciousness that takes in the world
more fully.
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-Unknown
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*[H]omo sapiens is
human in the full sense of the word only when his grammar is entirely free
of question marks, when it has nothing but exclamation points, periods,
and commas.
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- D-503, the hero in Yevgeny Zamyatin's
We, 1920-1921
Twenty-First Entry
Mirra Ginsburg, trans., 1972
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