Word
Gems
What is a
man but the sum of his thoughts?
Knowledge
"We don't
see things as they
are,
we see them as we
are."
Anais Nin
KNOWLEDGE IN A SEA OF IGNORANCE
- "The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually
- we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of
- inexplicability. Our business in every generation
- is to reclaim a little more land." T.H. Huxley
- Oliver
Wendell Holmes:
"A mind stretched by a new idea can never go back to its original dimensions."
- Daniel Boorstin, Living Philosophies: "Artists and
writers, I believe, have a special role, creating new questions for which they
offer experimental answers. We are tested, enriched, and fulfilled by the
varieties of experience. And as the years pass there are increasing advantages to being a
questioner. Answers can trouble us by their inconsistency, but there is no such
problem with questions. I am not obliged to hang on to earlier questions, and
there can be no discord -- only growth -- between then and now. Learning, I have found, is
a way of becoming inconsistent with my past self. I believe in vocation, a calling for
reasons we do not understand to do whatever we discover we can do... I have
observed that the world has suffered far less from ignorance than from pretensions to
knowledge. It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency
and progress. No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or
tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever... If our knowledge
is, as I believe, only an island in an infinite sea of ignorance, how can we in our short
lifetime find satisfaction in exploring our little island? How can we persuade
ourselves to be exhilarated by our meager knowledge and yet not be discouraged by the
ocean vistas?..I am, then, a short-term pessimist but a long-term optimist. If our
mission is an endless search, how can we fail? In the short run, institutions and
professions and even language keep us in the discouraging ruts. But in the long run the
ruts wear away and adventuring amateur reward us by a wonderful vagrancy into the
unexpected."
- Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965): "Where is the Life we
have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge
we have lost in information?"
- Ralph Gomary, President, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, quoted in Forbes,
Jan. 11, 1999: "Instead of accepting information as fact, we ought to be
taught that it is only a fragment on the edge of the unknown. That pushes us to look
further."
- Adolf Hitler: "A violently active, intrepid, brutal youth -
that is what I am after... I will have no intellectual training. Knowledge is ruin
for my young men."
- Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan: "Everyone is entitled to
his own opinion but not his own facts."
- René Descartes, Meditation II: "Archimedes, that
he might transport the entire globe ... demanded only a point that was firm and immovable;
so also, I shall be entitled to entertain the highest expectations, if I am fortunate
enough to discover only one thing that is certain and indubitable."
- Francis Bacon: "Knowledge is power."
- Clarence Darrow (1857-1938): "I do not pretend to know what many
ignorant men are sure of."
- Picasso: "Computers
are useless. They can only give you answers."
- Oscar
Wilde: "Education is an admirable thing, but it is
well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught."
- Laurence
Sterne:
“The desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever with the
acquisition of it.”
- Roger Bacon: "There are two modes of acquiring knowledge,
namely by reasoning and experience. Reasoning draws a conclusion and makes us grant the
conclusion, but does not make the conclusion certain, nor does it remove doubt so that the
mind may rest on the intuition of truth, unless the mind discovers it by the path of
experience."
- Albert Einstein: "The difference between what the most and the
least learned people know is inexpressibly trivial in relation to that which is
unknown."
- Thomas Sowell: "Physicists have determined that even the most
solid and heavy mass of matter we see is mostly empty space. But at the submicroscopic
level, specks of matter scattered through a vast emptiness have such incredible density
and weight, and are linked to one another by such powerful forces, that together they
produce all the properties of concrete, cast iron and solid rock. In much the same way,
specks of knowledge are scattered through a vast emptiness of ignorance, and everything
depends upon how solid the individual specks of knowledge are, and on how powerfully
linked and coordinated they are with one another."
- John Stuart Mill: "The peculiar evil of silencing the
expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the
existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold
it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for
truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and
livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error."
- Dr. Mortimer Adler, Syntopicon essay,
"Truth": "But the ancient controversy in which Socrates
engages with the sophists of his day, who were willing to regard as true whatever anyone
wished to think, seems to differ not at all from Freud's quarrel with those whom he calls intellectual
nihilists. They are the persons who say there is no such thing as truth or that it is
only the product of our own needs and desires. They make it 'absolutely immaterial,' Freud
writes, 'what views we accept. All of them are equally true and false. And no one has a
right to accuse anyone else of error.' ... If all opinions are equally true or false, then
why, Aristotle asks, does not the denier of truth walk 'into a well or over a precipice'
instead of avoiding such things. 'If it were really a matter of indifference what we
believed,' Freud similarly argues, 'then we might just as well build our bridges of
cardboard as of stone, or inject a tenth of a gramme of morphia into a patient instead of
a hundredth, or take tear-gas as a narcotic instead of ether. But,' he adds, 'the
intellectual anarchists themselves would strongly repudiate such practical applications of
their theory.'"
- Albert Einstein: "My religion consists of a humble
admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we
are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind."
- John Adams, argument in defense of the soldiers in the Boston Massacre
Trials, December 1770: "Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be
our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state
of facts and evidence."
- Margaret Fuller: "If you have knowledge, let others light
their candles at it."
- Galileo, quoted by Stillman Drake, Galileo at Work: His
Scientific Biography: "I do not think it is necessary to
believe that the same God who has given us our senses, reason, and intelligence wished us
to abandon their use, giving us by some other means the information that we could gain
through them."
- Andrew Russell Forsyth, Mathematics, in Life and Thought:
"... fuller knowledge through patient labour... for the acquisition of mathematical
knowledge: for he will find, as Euclid told a bored and discontented pupil in words that
have lived for more than two thousand years, There is no royal road to learning."
- Woody
Allen, Without
Feathers:
“What
if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for
my carpet.”
- Albert Einstein: "Reality
is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."
- Albert Einstein: "I
have no particular talent. I am merely inquisitive."
- Ian J. Davenport: "... common sense is only
based on a very small subset of the universe."
- Noam
Chomsky: "How
is it that we know so little, given that we have so much information."
- Confucius:
"Real
knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance."
- Dr. Gary E. Schwartz, U. of Arizona, The AfterLife
Experiments: "I was trained to look at the world as an
intellectual, a scientist. In science we hypothesize; we do not believe. And
science does not establish 'proof' so much as provide evidence for or against a hypothesis."
- Editor's note (9-17-02): "Faith" is
often deemed an exclusive attribute of religious people, something unfamiliar to the world
of science. But this is illusion. Faith is our admission, the reasonable person's
concession, that complete knowledge -- truth -- in this world, is a most rare species.
Evidence, that little we might apprehend; evidence, that delicate creature, like last
month's butterfly, waiting to be breathed upon and then to die; evidence, that entity of
uncertain future, in danger of being superseded, as surely it will be, by more auspicious
testimony -- our best evidence, be it of the religious or scientific sort, must be marked,
in bold red letters, "tentative." Evidence takes us only a short way down the
dimly lighted road of truth-discovery; and then, as some have stated, we must leap into
the unknown with our best guess. It is a leap of faith, and will remain so, until greater
light verifies the truth or falsity of our position. And, in this process -- a fitful
blend of faith and discovery, evidence and best-guess -- men and women, of both science
and religion, grope for truth in the darkness of incomplete knowledge, building
civilization, almost inadvertently, as they go.
- Sir Oliver Lodge, Raymond: "... the Christian
conception; not of a God apart from His creatures, looking on, taking no personal interest
in their behaviour, sitting aloof only to judge them; but One who anxiously takes measures
for their betterment, takes trouble, takes pains--a pregnant phrase, takes pains--One who
suffers when they go wrong, One who feels painfully the miseries and wrongdoings and sins
and cruelties of the creatures whom He has endowed with free will; One who actively enters
into the storm and the conflict; One who actually took flesh and dwelt among us, to save
us from the slough into which we might have fallen, to show us what the beauty and
dignity of man might be.
Well, it is a great idea, a great and simple idea, so simple as to be incredible to some
minds... To sum up: Let us not be discouraged by simplicity. Real things are simple. Human
conceptions are not altogether misleading. Our view of the Universe is a partial one but
is not an untrue one. Our knowledge of the conditions of existence is not altogether
false--only inadequate."
- Professor Daniel N. Robinson, Georgetown University: "In
answer to the question What kind of stuff is there really? the materialist will
answer material stuff. And if you then say to the ontological materialist How
do you know that? -- that is, epistemologically, Defend that claim --
usually you will find a mode of inquiry that presupposes that the ultimate stuff of
reality is material. But if you say I can think of all sorts of things that have no
moving parts [seemingly, no material essence: dreams, thoughts, etc.], the
materialist will say Well, they don't exist. And if you say, But how do you
know they don't exist? he will answer: My methods of inquiry don't turn up any
evidence for any of it. Well, there's a certain circularity [of reasoning
here], even a viciousness, between the ontological position we take and the methodology we
adopt to confirm [our propositions]."
- Professor Daniel N. Robinson, Georgetown University: "What
is there? -- the common answer is Look around!... but ancient man engaged in
spear-fishing and learned early that where you think the fish is in the water is not quite
where the fish is, and you've got to learn to adjust to the fact
that your senses might deceive you. Might they always deceive you? And
might all these things we take for granted as having real being be merely apparitions? or
manifestations of a peculiar sort -- behind which we can find a reality worthy of the
title reality... the subject of ontology is to ask the question What
is there? -- it is the subject of what has real existence. Are there minds and
thoughts, do they really exist? ... What is the right mode of inquiry? Should we answer
the question What is there? by making observations? that is, what "is"
is anything I can see, hear, taste or smell. If we do that, then surely there can be no
quarks, or neutrons, or electrons... and it will turn out that the only thing that has
real existence is that which can make contact with our sense organs. But as we know, the
maximum visual sensitivity of the honey bee is in a region of the spectrum, that is called
ultra-violet, where we can't see anything; so the ontology of the honey bee is radically
different from the ontology of Homo Sapiens. What a strange turn of events if it
turns out that the right answer to the question What is there? depends on what
your sense organs are -- we surely don't want to think that things
go in and out of being depending upon which sensory apparatus is brought to bear on
them... the deep implication of What is there? is there may well be more
than meets the eye -- that's why we're raising the question! If it were
obvious that all there is is what I see, the question would never arise ... because I am
often deceived by what I see, or often discover that something is going on though I
couldn't sense any of it at all..."
- Professor Daniel N. Robinson, Georgetown University: "The
only way we can make the claim that the senses deceive us is if we have some non-deceptive
mode of discovery against which we can weigh the claims of the senses and say, Aha!
the senses got it wrong! ... epistemology is the study of our modes
of knowing, the study of knowledge claims, a critical perspective of what we take to be
the right forms of inquiry, the inquiries by which we avoid error."
- Professor C.J. Ducasse: "Assertions of impossibility are
based on the metaphysical creeds of the scientists of the day."
- Bernard of Clairvaux: "There are those who seek knowledge
for the sake of knowing; that is curiosity. There are those
who seek knowledge to be known by others; that is vanity.
There are those who seek knowledge in order to serve; that is love.”
- Alvin Toffler, Rethinking the Future:
"The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and
write but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn."
-
Edmund Burke:
"
Facts are to the mind,
what food is to the body.
On the due digestion of the
former depend the strength and wisdom of the one, just as vigour
and health depend on the other.
The wisest in council, the ablest in debate,
and the most agreeable companion in the commerce of human life, is
that man who has assimilated to his understanding the greatest
number of facts."
- "All men by nature desire to know. An indication of this
is the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved
for themselves."
Aristotle, METAPHYSICS
|