Echoes

Stubborn and ardent clinging to one's opinion is the best proof of stupidity.

The most dangerous worldview is the worldview of those who have not viewed the world.

There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.

I know that I know nothing.

Anyone who holds a true opinion without understanding is like a blind man on the right road.

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

Whenever one tries to suppress doubt, there is tyranny.

They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.

The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.

Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.

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

It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.

If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything, it is open to everything.

You are neither right nor wrong because people agree with you.

Man knows much more than he understands.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.

Without courage, wisdom bears no fruit.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them.

Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.

The mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting.

Every generation has the obligation to free men's minds for a look at new worlds… to look out from a higher plateau than the last generation.

Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.

Wonder is the beginning of wisdom.

One of the best ways of enslaving a people is to keep them from education... The second way of enslaving a people is to suppress the sources of information, not only by burning books but by controlling all the other ways in which ideas are transmitted. (11 May 1943)

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