Emile Durkheim Quotes

In philosophy you're never 100% sure. You're always undermining what you think you know. That's always been my philosophy and my intellectual ethos.

I know that I don’t know.

Intellectual modesty is humility as to what I know; intellectual humility is modesty as to what I do not know

Only the fools are certain and assured.

Whatever we think about and question a lot becomes questionable.

It would make life much easier if I could have total faith and not question everything all the time, but I can't do it and I won't do it.

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.

I am the skeptic of skeptics.

Doubt is the middle position between knowledge and ignorance. It encompasses cynicism but also genuine questioning.

I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn't wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine.

Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.

To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.

Doubt is not below knowledge, but above it.

Who knows most, doubts most.

We'd all like to be certain of what we know, but I think the most important question is to ask yourself do you really know what you know?

When did ignorance become a point of view?

When a doubt is once received, men labour rather how to keep it a doubt still, than how to solve it; and accordingly bend their wits.

Question everything. Your love, your religion, your passion. If you don't have questions, you'll never find answers.

All that belongs to human understanding, in this deep ignorance and obscurity, is to be sceptical, or at least cautious, and not to admit of any hypothesis whatever, much less of any which is supported by no appearance of probability.

He who replies to words of doubt doth put the light of knowledge out.

But without doubts, without a standpoint reached through questionings, human beings can't acquire knowledge.

If you haven't doubted, you probably haven't thought very hard about what you believe.

I could be wrong. Not being certain is what being a philosopher is all about.

On the one hand, philosophy is to keep us thinking about things that we may come to know, and on the other hand to keep us modestly aware of how much that seems like knowledge isn't knowledge

I determine nothing; I do not comprehend things; I suspend judgment; I examine.