Karl Jaspers Quotes

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

To know that we know what we know, and to know that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.

Know what you know and know that you don't know what you don't know — that is the characteristic of one who knows.

Ask yourself whether you have earned the right to have an opinion. Opinions are easy to produce, so bad ones abound. Knowing that you don't know something is nearly as valuable as knowing it. The worst situation is thinking you know something when you don't.

The remarkable position in which we find ourselves is that we don't actually know what we actually know.

But, in the name of the experimental method and out of our poor knowledge, are we really entitled to claim that everything happens by chance, to the exclusion of all other possibilities?

To know, is to know that you know nothing. That is the meaning of true knowledge.

The utmost extent of man's knowledge, is to know that he knows nothing.

True science teaches, above all, to doubt and to be ignorant.

The intellectual takes as a starting point his self and relates the world to his own sensibilities; the scientist accepts an existing field of knowledge and seeks to map out the unexplored terrain.

So far as hypotheses are concerned, let no one expect anything certain from astronomy, which cannot furnish it, lest he accept as the truth ideas conceived for another purpose, and depart from this study a greater fool than when he entered it.

Doubt is not below knowledge, but above it.

Who knows most, doubts most.

The goal is to know how not-to-know.

True science teaches us to doubt and, in ignorance, to refrain.

For me now, what I've come to is, we don't know anything.

That knowledge which stops at what it does not know, is the highest knowledge.

It is not possible to know what you need to learn.

I know nothing, because I know too much, and understand not nearly enough and never will.

but if I've learned anything, it's that we don't know half of what we think we do. And we know ourselves least of all.

I don't think it's meant for man to know everything at once.

We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.

Life's scientific, but we don't know, do we? Not certainly, I mean.

When a scientist doesn't know the answer to a problem, he is ignorant. When he has a hunch as to what the result is, he is uncertain. And when he is pretty darn sure of what the result is going to be, he is in some doubt.

The greatest of all the accomplishments of 20th century science has been the discovery of human ignorance