John Locke Quotes

I've gone through most of my life not believing anything. Either I know or I don't know, or I think.

Belief is in ignorance. If you know, you know. And it is good that if you don’t know, know that you don’t know — the belief can deceive you. The belief can create an atmosphere in your mind, where, without knowing, you start thinking that you know. Belief is not trust, and the more strongly you say that you believe totally, the more you are afraid of the doubt within you.

You should be convinced of the authenticity of what you have, but you must also be humble enough to say that we don't know everything. And since we don't know everything, we must accept that another person may believe something else.

I respect faith, but doubt is what gives you an education.

I don't pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about.

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.

True belief is not about blind submission. It is about open-eyed acceptance, and acceptance requires persistent distance from the truth, and that distance is doubt. Doubt, in other words, can feed faith, rather than destroy it. And it forces us, even while believing, to recognize our fundamental duty with respect to God's truth: humility. We do not know. Which is why we believe.

Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in their readiness to doubt.

I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not.

It is not by believing but by doubting that one can attain to the truth, which is ever changing form and condition.

I have throughout been curious about how much we can be said to know and with what degree of certainty or doubtfulness.

William James used to preach the "will-to-believe." For my part, I should wish to preach the "will-to-doubt." None of our beliefs are quite true; all at least have a penumbra of vagueness and error. What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.

I ask the fundamental question of rationality: Why do you believe what you believe? What do you think you know and how do you think you know it?

Doubting charms me not less than knowledge.

This notion [skepticism] is more clearly understood by asking "What do I know?"

If we become increasingly humble about how little we know, we may be more eager to search.

Doubt is the vestibule through which all must pass before they can enter into the temple of wisdom.

Inquiry is fatal to certainty.

To know yet to think that one does not know is best; Not to know yet to think that one knows will lead to difficulty.

With science and reason throughout history, what people believed turned out to be false. So I like to keep an open mind to all perspectives and learn and become more fully realised as a person. I just feel we're never going to know what the full picture is.

It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.

Uncertainty is a very good thing: it's the beginning of an investigation, and the investigation should never end.

Indeed, the most important product of knowledge is ignorance.

I know too much to be a sceptic and too little to be a dogmatist.

Try to keep your mind open to possibilities and your mouth closed on matters that you don't know about. Limit your 'always' and your 'nevers.'