Echoes

He who knows all the answers has not been asked all the questions.

Not-knowing is true knowledge. Presuming to know is a disease.

The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.

The world will hardly admit of an excuse for a man leaving a coast unexplored he has once discovered.

Man knows much more than he understands.

To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age. 'Tis much better to do a little with certainty, & leave the rest for others that come after you, than to explain all things by conjecture without making sure of any thing.

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Wonder is the beginning of wisdom.

I know that I know nothing.

Learning never exhausts the mind.

Life is an unfoldment, and the further we travel the more truth we can comprehend.

Learning will be cast into the mire and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.

I do not think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.

The mere formulation of a problem is far more often essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle requires creative imagination and makes real advances in science

All our scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods.

In every systematic inquiry where there are first principles, or causes, or elements, knowledge and science result from acquiring knowledge of these.

All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.

All men by nature desire to know.

Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristicks of a vigorous intellect. Every advance into knowledge opens new prospects, and produces new incitements to farther progress.

Of all the frictional resistances, the one that most retards human movement is ignorance, what Buddha called 'the greatest evil in the world.' The friction which results from ignorance ... can be reduced only by the spread of knowledge and the unification of the heterogeneous elements of humanity. No effort could be better spent.

The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's true. We have a method, and that method helps us to reach not absolute truth, only asymptotic approaches to the truth — never there, just closer and closer, always finding vast new oceans of undiscovered possibilities. Cleverly designed experiments are the key.

In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's there are few.

The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism.

The Tao is like a bellows: it is empty yet infinitely capable. The more you use it, the more it produces; the more you talk of it, the less you understand.