Nathan Wolfe Quotes

The secret to discovery is to never believe existing facts.

I read things like theology, and I read about science, 'Scientific American' and publications like that, because they stimulate again and again my sense of the almost arbitrary given-ness of experience, the fact that nothing can be taken for granted.

People go on exploration; they're trying to find places that weren't known before. But it is an inevitable fact of research, as is in any other form of exploration of the unknown, that some people find they go down a dead end.

So we all embark wondering what lies over the horizon, what’s around the next bend. And isn’t that, in the end, what drives us?

Embrace what you don't know

Opening a door to the mysteries, hoping to shed a little dark on all the stuff we think we know.

The search for the lessons of the new science is still in progress, really in its infancy. In this realm, three is a new kind of freedom, where it is more rewarding to explore than to reach conclusions, more satisfying to wonder than to know, and more exciting to search than to stay put. Curiosity, not certainty, becomes the saving grace.

Replace fear of the unknown with curiosity.

Man's greatest asset is the unsettled mind.

An educated man must have a "curiosity in exploring the unfamiliar and unexpected, an open-mindedness in entertaining opposing points of view, tolerance for the ambiguity that surrounds so many important issues, and a willingness to make the best decisions he can in the face of uncertainty and doubt".

What I'm proposing, to myself and other people, is what I often call the tourist attitude - that you act as though you've never been there before. So that you're not supposed to know anything about it. If you really get down to brass tacks, we have never been anywhere before.

You have to know how to look even if you don't know what you're looking for.

That's, of course, the beautiful thing about science - that it's all about things we don't understand, not just the things we do understand.

Do not hate what you do not know, for the greater part of knowledge consists of what you do not know.

Whatever it was, my mom said, I'm going to seek out more. And so I was constantly confused, which is sometimes a little bit, you know, disorienting. But I feel like it leads to a way more colorful life.

If we know exactly where we're going, exactly how to get there, and exactly what we'll see along the way, we won't learn anything.

It is really quite amazing by what margins competent but conservative scientists and engineers can miss the mark, when they start with the preconceived idea that what they are investigating is impossible.

If we have too much clarity, we might not be compelled to continue searching for new ideas.

That's the beautiful thing about science - that it's all about things we don't understand, not just the things we do understand.

I'm very musically curious and I love new experience. I'm an adventurer. Some people want to sort of stay in a safe zone and repeat the same things and give them more depth, and I want to do new things all the time

My direction? Anywhere. Because one is always nearer by not keeping still.

Don't be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen.

I never knew what I wanted, except that it was something I hadn't seen before.

I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.

In a world where you are constantly asked to be 'committed,' it is liberating to give yourself the license to be a dilettante. Commit to nothing. Try everything.