Bertrand Russell Quotes

All exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation.

Although this may seem a paradox, all exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation. When a man tells you that he knows the exact truth about anything, you are safe in inferring that he is an inexact man. Every careful measurement in science is always given with the probable error ... every observer admits that he is likely wrong, and knows about how much wrong he is likely to be.

Though analogy is often misleading, it is the least misleading thing we have.

There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about.

Vagueness is at times an indication of nearness to a perfect truth.

One thing that being a scientist has taught me is that you can never be certain about anything. You never know the truth. You can only approach it and hope to get a bit nearer to it each time. You iterate towards the truth. You don't know it.

It is better to be approximately right than to be precisely wrong.

Nobody really knows everything, and they can only assume.

That sometimes clear ... and sometimes vague stuff ... which is ... mathematics.

Science, my boy, is composed of errors, but errors that it is right to make, for they lead step by step to the truth.

For only when I err do I get away from what I know and what I understand. If "truth" were what I can understand, it would end up being but a small truth, my-sized. Truth must reside precisely in what I shall never understand.

Certainty is no guarantor of correctness.

Ignorance is a treasure of infinite price that most men squander, when they should cherish its least fragments; some ruin it by educating themselves, others, unable to so much as conceive of making use of it, let it waste away. Quite on the contrary, we should search for it assiduously in what we think we know best. Leaf through a dictionary or try to make one, and you will find that every word covers and masks a well so bottomless that the questions you toss into it arouse no more than an echo.

I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind.

A great deal more is known than has been proved.

An exact science is one that admits loss.

It is as certain as it is strange that truth and error come from one and the same source. Thus it is that we are often not at liberty to do violence to error, because at the same time we do violence to truth.

It is better to have no ideas than false ones.

Nearly' only counts in horseshoes and hand-grenades.

When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it.

Human reason can neither predict nor deliberately shape its own future. Its advances consist in finding out where it has been wrong.

You could try and understand people, you could read books and understand words and concepts and ideas, but you could never understand enough or have enough knowledge to keep away the surprises that both fate and human beings had in store.

I like Math because there's only one right answer.

It has been pointed out already that no knowledge of probabilities, less in degree than certainty, helps us to know what conclusions are true, and that there is no direct relation between the truth of a proposition and its probability. Probability begins and ends with probability.

As we acquire knowledge, things do not become more comprehensible, but more mysterious.