This post is a collection of essential epistemology quotes for this blog from 2017 to 2018. There are 100
quotes listed below alphabetically by last name.
Alhazen (965-1040 CE, philosopher)
1. "...if learning the truth is the goal, one is to make themselves an enemy of all that they read, and applying their mind to the core and margins of its content, attack it from every side." (Quoted in Bridging Cultures Bookshelf: Muslim Journeys)
J. L. Austin (1911-1960, philosopher)
2. "Faced with the nonsense question, 'what is the meaning of a word?' and perhaps dimly recognizing it to be nonsense, we are nevertheless not inclined to give it up." (Philosophical Papers, 1979)
Francis Bacon (1561-1626, philosopher)
3. "Those who have handled sciences have been either men of experiment or men of dogmas. The men of experiment are like the ant, they only collect and use; the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes a middle course: it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own. " (Novum Organum, 1620)
Francis Bacon (1561-1626, philosopher)
4. "Truth will sooner come out from error than from confusion." (Novum Organum, 1620)
Gregory Bateson (1904-1980, anthropologist)
5. "As I see it, the advances in scientific thought come from a combination of loose and strict thinking, and this combination is the most precious tool of science." (Culture Contact and Schismogensis, 1935)
Charles Beard (1874-1948, historian)
6. "When it is dark enough, you can see the stars." (BrainyQuote.com)
Niels Bohr (1885-1962, physicist)
7. "But I myself find the division of the world into an objective and subjective side much too arbitrary. The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images and parables and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer." (Remarks after the Solvay Conference, 1927)
George Boole (1815-1864, mathematician)
8. "The design of the following treatise is to investigate the fundamental laws of those operations of the mind by which reasoning is performed; to give expression to them in symbolical language of a calculus, and upon this foundation to establish the science of logic and construct its method..." (An Investigation into the Laws of Thought, 1854)
Louis de Broglie (1892-1987, physicist)
9. "Two seemingly incompatible conceptions can each represent an aspect of the truth... They may serve in turn to represent the facts without ever entering into direct conflict." (Dialectica Volume 2, 1948)
Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970, philosopher)
10. "One of the principal tasks of the logical analysis of a given proposition is to find out the method of verification for that proposition." (Philosophy and Logical Syntax, 1935)
Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970, philosopher)
11. "Verification in science is not, however, of single statements but of the entire system or a sub-system of statements." (The Unity of Science, 1934)
Rachel Carson (1907-1964, biologist)
12. "If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry." (National Book Award for Nonfiction speech, 1952)
William Cobbet (1763-1835, journalist)
13. "Grammar, perfectly understood enables us, not only to express our meaning fully and clearly, but so to express it as to enable us to defy the ingenuity of man to give to our words any other meaning than that which we ourselves intend them to express." (A Grammar of the English Language, 1818)
Tobias Dantzig (1884-1956, mathematician)
14. "The mathematician may be compared to a designer of garments, who is utterly oblivious of the creatures whom his garments may fit." (Number: The Language of Science, 1930)
Augustus De Morgan (1806-1871, mathematician)
15. "All the men who are now called discoverers, in every matter ruled by thought, have been men versed in the minds of their predecessors and learned in what had been before them. There is not one exception." (A Budget of Paradoxes, 1872)
Rene Descartes (1596-1650, philosopher)
16. "Each problem that I solved became a rule, which served afterwards to solve other problems." (Discourse on Method, 1637)
Rene Descartes (1596-1650, philosopher)
17. "In order to seek truth, it is necessary once in the course of our life, to doubt, as far as possible, of all things." (Principles of Philosophy, 1644)
Rene Descartes (1596-1650, philosopher)
18. "We ought to give the whole of our attention to the most insignificant and most easily mastered facts and remain a long time in contemplation of them until we are accustomed to behold the truth clearly and distinctly." (Rules for the Direction of the Mind, 1628)
Denis Diderot (1713-1790, writer)
19. "In order to shake a hypothesis, it is sometimes not necessary to do anything more than push it as far as it will go." (On the Interpretation of Nature, 1753)
Paul Dirac (1902-1994, physicist)
20. "The interpretation of quantum mechanics has been dealt with by many authors, and I do not want to discuss it here. I want to deal with more fundamental things." (The inadequacies of quantum field theory)
Albert Einstein (1879-1955, physicist)
21. "By means of such concepts and mental relations between them, we are able to orient ourselves in the labyrinth of sense impressions." (Physics and Reality, 1936)
Albert Einstein (1879-1955, physicist)
22. "There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them." (On the Method of Theoretical Physics, 1933)
Albert Einstein (1879-1955, physicist)
23. "When I think about the ablest students whom I have encountered in my teaching - that is, those who distinguish themselves by their independence of judgment and not just their quick-wittedness - I can affirm that they had a vigorous interest in epistemology." (Obituary for physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach, 1916)
Paul Feyerabend (1924-1994, philosopher)
24. "Combining this observation with the insight that science has no special method, we arrive at the result that the separation of science and non-science is not only artificial but also detrimental to the advancement of knowledge. If we want to understand nature, if we want to master our physical surroundings, then we must use all ideas, all methods, and not just a small selection of them." (Against Method, 1975)
Paul Feyerabend (1924-1994, philosopher)
25. "The best way of presenting such knowledge is the list - and the oldest scientific works were indeed lists of facts, parts, coincidences, problems in several specialized domains." (Farewell to Reason, 1987)
Richard Feynman (1918-1988, physicist)
26. "...if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid." (Adapted from a 1974 Caltech commencement address)
Felix Frankfurter (1882-1965, lawyer)
27. "All our work, our whole life is a matter of semantics, because words are the tools with which we work, the material of which laws are made, out of which the constitution was written. Everything depends on our understanding of them." (Quoted in Readers' Digest, 1964)
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939, psychologist)
28. "I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador - an adventurer, if you want it translated with - all the curiosity, daring and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort." (Letter to Wilhelm Fliess, 1900)
Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855, mathematician)
29. "By explanation the scientist understands nothing except the reduction of the least and simplest basic laws possible, beyond which he cannot go, but must plainly demand them; from them however he deduces the phenomena absolutely completely as necessary." (Quoted in Carl Friedrich Gauss: Titan of Science by Guy Waldo Dunnington)
Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855, mathematician)
30. "Dark are the paths which a higher hand allows us to traverse here... let us hold fast to the faith that a finer, more sublime solution of enigmas of earthly life will be present, will become part of us." (Quoted in Carl Friedrich Gauss: Titan of Science by Guy Waldo Dunnington)
Jane Goodall (1934-now, primatologist)
31. "Especially now when views are becoming more polarized, we must work to understand each other across political, religious and national boundaries." (Quoted in Verge Magazine, 2010)
Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002, biologist)
32. "The nature of true genius must lie in the elusive capacity to construct these new modes from apparent darkness." (The Flamingo's Smile, 1985)
Ian Hacking (1936-2023, philosopher)
33. "Probability fractions arise from our knowledge and from our ignorance." (The Emergence of Probability, 1975)
George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831, philosopher)
34. "The enquiry into the essential destiny of Reason as far as it is considered in reference to the World is identical with the question, what is the ultimate design of the World?" (Lectures on the Philosophy of History, 1832)
Hesiod (around 700 BC, poet)
35. "It is best to do things systematically, since we are only human and disorder is our worst enemy." (AZQuotes.com)
David Hume (1711-1776, philosopher)
36. "I weigh one miracle against the other; and according to the superiority, which I discover, I pronounce my decision and always reject the greater miracle." (An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 1748)
David Hume (1711-1776, philosopher)
37. "In our reasonings concerning matter of fact, there are all imaginable degrees of assurance, from the highest certainty to the lowest species of moral evidence... A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence." (An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 1748)
David Hume (1711-1776, philosopher)
38. "We must therefore glean up our experiments in this science from a cautious observation of human life... Where experiments of this kind are judiciously collected and compared, we may hope to establish on them a science." (A Treatise of Human Nature, 1739)
Edmund Husserl (1859-1938, philosopher)
39. "To begin with, we put the proposition: pure phenomenology is the science of pure consciousness." (AZQuotes.com)
Christian Huygens (1629-1695, mathematician)
40. "There are many degrees of Probable, some nearer Truth than others, in the determining of which lies the chief exercise of our Judgement." (Cosmotheoros, 1695)
William James (1842-1910, philosopher)
41. "The most violent revolutions in an individual's belief leave most of his old order standing. Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and one's own biography remain untouched." (What Pragmatism Means. Lectures at the Lowell Institute and Columbia University, 1931)
William Stanley Jevons (1835-1882, economist)
42. "In a certain sense all knowledge is inductive. We can only learn the laws and relations of things in nature by observing those things." (The Principles of Science, 1874)
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804, philosopher)
43. "Human reason is by nature architectonic." (Critique of Pure Reason, 1781)
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804, philosopher)
44. "Reason... requires trial, practice, and instruction in order gradually to progress from one level of insight to another." (Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View, 1784)
Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996, philosopher)
45. "Scientific revolutions are inaugurated by a growing sense... that an existing paradigm has ceased to function adequately in the exploration of an aspect of nature to which that paradigm itself had previously led the way." (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962)
Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827, mathematician)
46. "Life's most important questions... are indeed for the most part only problems of probability." (Théorie Analytique des Probabilités, 1802)
Bruno Latour (1947-now, philosopher)
47. "If one looks at the works of Newton to Einstein, they were never scientists in the way modernity understands the term." (AZQuotes.com)
Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1794, chemist)
48. "The art of concluding from experience and observation consists in evaluating probabilities, in estimating if they are high or numerous enough to constitute proof." (Rapport des commissaires charges par le roi de l'exemen du magnetism animal, 1784)
Georges Lemaitre (1849-1934, astronomer)
49. "Scientific progress is the discovery of a more and more comprehensive simplicity... The previous successes give us confidence in the future of science: we become more and more conscious of the fact that the universe is cognizable." (AZQuotes.com)
John Locke (1632-1704, philosopher)
50. "No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience." (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1689)
John Locke (1632-1704, philosopher)
51. "We are the ruminating kind, and it is not enough to cram ourselves with a great load of collections; unless we chew them over again, they will not give us strength and nourishment." (Hand Book: Caution and Counsels)
Ernst Mach (1838-1916, physicist)
52. "I know of nothing more terrible than the poor creatures who have learned too much... What they have acquired is a spider's web of thoughts too weak to furnish sure supports, but complicated enough to provide confusion." (Popular Scientific Lectures, 1898)
James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879, physicist)
53. "It is of great advantage to the student of any subject to read the original memoirs on that subject, for science is always most completely assimilated when it is in the nascent state..." (A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, 1873)
Sallie McFague (1933-now, theologian)
54. "A metaphor is a word used in an unfamiliar context to give us a new insight; a good metaphor moves us to see our world in an extraordinary way." (Speaking in Parables, 1975)
Dmitri Mendeleev (1834-1907, chemist)
55. "I wish to establish some sort of system not guided by chance, but by some sort of definite and exact principle." (Wikiquote.org)
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873, philosopher)
56. "He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion." (On Liberty, 1859)
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873, economist)
57. "Whatever is known to us by consciousness, is known beyond possibility of question. What one sees or feels, whether bodily or mentally, one cannot but be sure that one sees or feels." (A System of Logic, 1843)
Richard von Mises (1883-1953, mathematician)
58. "No contradiction exists, if the events are correctly interpreted." (Probability, Statistics and Truth, 1957)
G. E. Moore (1873-1958, philosopher)
59. “I can prove now, for instance that two human hands exist. How? By holding up my two hands and saying, as I make a certain gesture with the right hand, 'here is one hand' and adding, as I make a certain gesture with the left, 'and here is the another'." (Proof of an External World, 1939)
Marianne Moore (1887-1972, poet)
60. "I've always felt that if a thing had been said the best way, how can you say it better?" (Paris Review Interview, 1960)
John von Neumann (1903-1957, mathematician)
61. "Truth... is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations." (Quoted in The Works of the Mind by R. B. Heywood)
Otto Neurath (1882-1945, philosopher)
62. "Every new statement is to be confronted with existing ones, already brought to a state of harmony between themselves. A statement will be considered correct if it can be joined to them." (Soziologie im Physikalismus, 1931)
Isaac Newton (1642-1727, physicist)
63. "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." (Quoted in Memoirs of the Life, Writings and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton)
Isaac Newton (1642-1726, physicist)
64. "I keep the subject constantly before me, and wait until the first dawnings open slowly, by little and little, into a full and clear light." (Quoted in Biographia Britannica)
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900, philosopher)
65. "Philosophers' error - The philosopher supposes that the value of his philosophy lies in the whole, in the structure; but posterity finds its value in the stone which he used for building, and which is used many more times after that for building - better. Thus it finds the value in the fact that the structure can be destroyed and nevertheless retain value as building material." (Mixed Opinions and Maxims, 1879)
Linus Pauling (1901-1994, biochemist)
66. "Life is too complicated to permit a complete understanding through the study of whole organisms. Only by simplifying a biological problem - breaking it down into a multitude of individual problems - can you get the answers." (Interview with Neil A. Campbell, 1986)
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914, philosopher)
67. "That artist's observational power is what is most wanted in the study of phenomenology." (Pragmatism and Pragmaticism, 1903)
Max Planck (1858-1947, physicist)
68. "New scientific ideas never spring from a communal body, however organized, but rather from the head of an individually inspired researcher who struggles with his problems in lonely thought and united all his thought on one single point which is his whole world for the moment." (Address on the 25th anniversary of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gesellschaft, 1936)
Plato (428-347 BC, philosopher)
69. "All that is said by us can only be imitation and representation." (Critas)
Plato (428-347 BC, philosopher)
70. "Rhetoric, it seems, is a producer of persuasion for belief, not for instruction in the matter of right and wrong... and so the rhetorician's business is not to instruct a law court or a public meeting in matters of right and wrong but only to make them believe." (Menexenus)
Henri Poincaré (1854-1912, mathematician)
71. "If we study the history of science, we see happen two inverse phenomena... sometimes simplicity hides under complex appearances; sometimes it is the simplicity which is apparent, and which disguises extremely complicated realities." (Science and Hypothesis, 1901)
Karl Popper (1902-1994, philosopher)
72. "Science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths." (Conjectures and Refutations, 1963)
Willard van Orman Quine (1908-2000, philosopher)
73. "A curious thing about the ontological problem is its simplicity. It can be put into three Anglo-Saxon monosyllables: 'What is there?' It can be answered, moreover, in a word - 'Everything' - and everyone will accept this answer as true." (On What There Is, 1948)
Willard van Orman Quine (1908-2000, philosopher)
74. "Implication is thus the very texture of our web of belief, and logic is the theory that traces it." (The Web of Belief, 1970)
Frank Ramsey (1903-1930, mathematician)
75."It is worth pausing for a moment to consider how far our conclusions are affected by considerations which our simplifying assumptions have forced us to neglect." (A Mathematical Theory of Saving, 1928)
Rembrandt (1606-1669, artist)
76. "Try to put well in practice what you already know; and in so doing, you will in good time discover the hidden things which you now inquire about. Practice what you know, and it will help to make clear what now you do not know." (Quoted in A Dictionary of Thoughts by Tyron Edwards)
I. A. Richards (1893-1979, literary critic)
77. "Rhetoric, I shall urge, should be a study of misunderstanding and its remedies." (Philosophy of Rhetoric, 1964)
Francois de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680, philosopher)
78. "True eloquence consists in saying all that need be said and no more." (Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims, 1665-1678)
Philip Roth (1933-2018, novelist)
79. "Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts." (The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography, 1988)
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970, philosopher)
80. "Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one." (Our Knowledge of the External World, 1914)
L. K. Samuels (1951-now, philosopher)
81. "Order is not universal. In fact, many chaologists and physicists posit that universal laws are more flexible than first realized, and less rigid - operating in spurts, jumps and leaps, instead of like clockwork. Chaos prevails over rules and systems..." (In Defense of Chaos, 2013)
George Sarton (1844-1956, chemist)
82. "In a sense, this is still true today; the real pioneers are so far ahead of the crowd (even a very literate crowd) that they remain almost alone..." (A History of Science, Volume 2, 1959 posthumous)
Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913, linguist)
83. "Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula. There are not pre-existing ideas, and nothing is distinct before the appearance of language." (Cours de Linguistique Generale, 1916)
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860, philosopher)
84. "From every page and every line, there speaks an endeavor to beguile and deceive the reader, first by producing an effort to dumbfound him, then by incomprehensible phrases and even sheer nonsense to stun and stupefy him, and again by audacity of assertion to puzzle him, in short, to throw dust in his eyes and mystify him as much as possible." (Sketch of a History of the Doctrine of the Ideal and the Real)
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860, philosopher)
85. "Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see." (1819, The World as Will and Representation)
Laurent Schwartz (1915-2002, mathematician)
86. "At the end of the eleventh grade, I took the measure of the situation and came to the conclusion that rapidity doesn't have a precise relation to intelligence. What is important is to deeply understand things and their relations to each other. This is where intelligence lies." (A Mathematician Grappling with his Century, 2001)
John Searle (1932-now, philosopher)
87. "Where questions of style and exposition are concerned I try to follow a simple maxim: if you can't say it clearly you don't understand it yourself." (Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind, 1993)
Socrates (470-399 BC, philosopher)
88. "Everything is plainer when spoken than when unspoken." (Quoted in Phaedrus by Plato)
Socrates (470-399 BC, philosopher)
89. "The beginning of wisdom is a definition of terms." (AZQuotes.com)
Laurence Sterne (1713-1768, novelist)
90. "Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; and they are the life, the soul of reading; take them out of this book for instance, you might as well take the book along with them." (The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentlemen)
Edward Teller (1908-2003, physicist)
91. "We must learn to live with contradictions, because they lead to deeper and more effective understanding." (Science and Morality, 1998)
Edward Titchener (1867-1934, psychologist)
92. "Knowledge is the product of leisure. The members of a very primitive society have no time to amass knowledge; their days are fully occupied with the provision of the bare necessities of life." (An Outline of Psychology, 1916)
Simone Weil (1909-1943, philosopher)
93. "Although people seem to be unaware of it today, the development of the faculty of attention forms the real object and almost the sole interest of studies." (Reflections on the right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God)
Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947, philosopher)
94. "Systems, scientific and philosophic come and go. Each method of limited understanding is at length exhausted. In its prime, each system is a triumphant success: in its decay it is an obstructive nuisance." (Adventures of Ideas, 1933)
Benjamin Whorf (1897-1941, linguist)
95. "We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way." (Language, Thought and Reality, 1956)
E. O. Wilson (1909-now, biologist)
96. "The ideal scientist thinks like a poet and only later works like a bookkeeper." (Letters to a Young Scientist, 2013)
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951, philosopher)
97. "For remember that in general we don't use language according to strict rules; it hasn't been taught to us by means of strict rules either." (The Blue Book, 1958 posthumous)
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951, philosopher)
98. "If a false thought is so much as expressed boldly and clearly, a great deal has already been gained." (Culture and Value, 1980 posthumous)
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951, philosopher)
99. "The child learns to believe a host of things, i.e. it learns to act according to those beliefs. Bit by bit there forms a system of what is believed, and in that system, some things stand unshakably fast and some are more or less liable to shift. What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it." (On Certainty, 1969 posthumous)
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951, philosopher)
100. "To convince someone of the truth, it is not enough to state it, but rather one must find the path from error to truth." (Philosophical Occasions, 1993 posthumous)
