Epistemology Quotes (169 Quotes)

• “Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans. . . If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn't we really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe it's as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours that he can't explain his to us, and we can't explain ours to him. The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too differently, there occurs a breakdown in communication ... and there is the real illness.”

  Philip K. Dick

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  “Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.”

  T.S. Eliot

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  “The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”

  Ursula K. Le Guin

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  “How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?” Instead they say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.” A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.”

  Carl Sagan

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  “Why should things be easy to understand?”

  Thomas Pynchon

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  “The pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Parmenides taught that the only things that are real are things which never change... and the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus taught that everything changes. If you superimpose their two views, you get this result: Nothing is real.”

  Philip K. Dick

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  “They won't listen. Do you know why? Because they have certain fixed notions about the past. Any change would be blasphemy in their eyes, even if it were the truth. They don't want the truth; they want their traditions.”

  Isaac Asimov

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  “Knowledge would be fatal. It is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful.”

  Oscar Wilde

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  “You can prove anything you want by coldly logical reason---if you pick the proper postulates.”

  Isaac Asimov

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  “Where both reason and experience fall short, there occurs a vacuum that can be filled by faith.”

  Jostein Gaarder

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  “They don't have intelligence. They have what I call 'thintelligence.' They see the immediate situation. They think narrowly and they call it 'being focused.' They don't see the surround. They don't see the consequences.”

  Michael Crichton

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  “What is the point? We assume that every time we do anything we know what the consequences will be, i.e., more or less what we intend them to be. This is not only not always correct. It is wildly, crazily, stupidly, cross-eyed-blithering-insectly wrong!”

  Douglas Adams

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  “And although I have seen nothing but black crows in my life, it doesn't mean that there's no such thing as a white crow. Both for a philosopher and for a scientist it can be important not to reject the possibility of finding a white crow. You might almost say that hunting for 'the white crow' is science's principal task.”

  Jostein Gaarder

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  “Foreknowledge cannot be gotten from ghosts and spirits, cannot be had by analogy, cannot be found out by calculation. It must be obtained from people, people who know the conditions of the enemy.”

  Sun Tzu

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  “Show me slowly what I only
  know the limits of
  Dance me to the end of love”

  Leonard Cohen

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• “Habe nun, ach! Philosophie,
  Juristerei und Medizin,
  Und leider auch Theologie
  Durchaus studiert, mit heißem Bemühn.
  Da steh ich nun, ich armer Tor!
  Und bin so klug als wie zuvor;
  Heiße Magister, heiße Doktor gar
  Und ziehe schon an die zehen Jahr
  Herauf, herab und quer und krumm
  Meine Schüler an der Nase herum-
  Und sehe, daß wir nichts wissen können!
  Das will mir schier das Herz verbrennen.
  Zwar bin ich gescheiter als all die Laffen,
  Doktoren, Magister, Schreiber und Pfaffen;
  Mich plagen keine Skrupel noch Zweifel,
  Fürchte mich weder vor Hölle noch Teufel-
  Dafür ist mir auch alle Freud entrissen,
  Bilde mir nicht ein, was Rechts zu wissen,
  Bilde mir nicht ein, ich könnte was lehren,
  Die Menschen zu bessern und zu bekehren.”

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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  “Postulates are based on assumption and adhered to by faith. Nothing in the Universe can shake them.”

  Isaac Asimov

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  “It must be recognized that in any culture the source of law is the god of that society.”

  Rousas John Rushdoony

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  “Science is often misrepresented as ‘the body of knowledge acquired by performing replicated controlled experiments in the laboratory.’ Actually, science is something broader: the acquisition of reliable knowledge about the world.”

  Jared Diamond

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  “The ancient dialogue between reason and the senses is almost always more interestingly and passionately resolved in favor of the senses.”

  Kay Redfield Jamison

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• “There is nothing wrong with entertainment. As some psychiatrist once put it, we all build castles in the air. The problems come when we try to live in them. The communications media of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with telegraphy and photography at their center, called the peek-a-boo world into existence, but we did not come to live there until television. Television gave the epistemological biases of the telegraph and the photograph their most potent expression, raising the interplay of image and instancy to an exquisite and dangerous perfection. And it brought them into the home. We are by now well into a second generation of children for whom television has been their first and most accessible teacher and, for many, their most reliable companion and friend. To put it plainly, television is the command center of the new epistemology. There is no audience so young that it is barred from television. There is no poverty so abject that it must forgo television. There is no education so exalted that it is not modified by television. And most important of all, there is no subject of public interest—politics, news, education, religion, science, sports—that does not find its way to television. Which means that all public understanding of these subjects is shaped by the biases of television.”

  Neil Postman

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• “فكرة الحداثة والعلمانية والتنوير فكرة متأخرة عن الثورة العلمية بقرنيين على الأقل وهي نتيجة الثورة العلمية ومعلولهاوليست شرطها وعلتها”

  أبو يعرب المرزوقي

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  “The obvious can sometimes be illuminating when perceived in an unhabitual way.”

  Daniel Quinn

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  “Scientist alone is true poet.”

  Allen Ginsberg

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  “…every feeling is the perception of a truth...”

  Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

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