Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes

No human being is constituted to know the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth; and even the best of men must be content with fragments, with partial glimpses, never the full fruition.

... the besetting danger is not so much of embracing falsehood for truth, as of mistaking a part of the truth for the whole.

Uncertainty means that we do not have a complete description of the world which we fully believe to be true.

We don't claim to be infallible. I don't claim to be giving you truths from on high.

Even the most broad-minded of us can embrace only that part of truth into which our own snout has blundered.

It will never be possible by pure reason to arrive at some absolute truth.

Live free, child of the mist,- and with respect to knowledge we are allchildren of the mist.

If you would swim on the bosom of the ocean of Truth, you must reduce yourself to a zero.

The world is not a solid continent of facts sprinkled by a few lakes of uncertainties, but a vast ocean of uncertainties speckled by a few islands of calibrated and stabilized forms

You know that you know nothing. Find out that knowledge.

Hegel said that 'truth' is subjective, thus rejecting the existence of any 'truth' above or beyond human reason. All knowledge is human knowledge.

Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man's only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth.

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

I ain't one of those who believe that a half knowledge of a subject is useless, but it has been my experience that when a fellow has that half knowledge he finds it's the other half which would really come in handy.

I have one request: may I never use my reason against truth.

What is truth? I don't know and I'm sorry I brought it up.

You must not talk about 'ain't and can't' when you speak of this great wonderful world round you, of which the wisest man knows only the very smallest corner, and is, as the great Sir Isaac Newton said, only a child picking up pebbles on the shore of a boundless ocean.

Born and nurtured when the human being first asked questions about the reason for things and their purpose, philosophy shows in different modes and forms that the desire for truth is part of human nature itself.

To take what you know for what you know, and what you do not know for what you do not know, that is knowledge indeed.

It is not so bad being ignorant if you are totally ignorant; the hard thing is knowing in some detail the reality of ignorance.

Learn this from water: loud splashes the brook but the oceans depth are calm.

One of the main reasons for the existence of philosophy is not that it enables you to find truth (it can never do that) but that it does provide you a refuge for definitions.

Shall I tell you what knowledge is? It is to know both what one knows and what one does not know.

All reasoning ends in an appeal to self-evidence.