Zora Neale Hurston Quotes

People talk about how wonderful the world seems to children, and that's true enough. But children think they will grow into it and understand it, and I know very well that I will not, and would not if I had a dozen lives.

I lose sleep at night wondering whether we are intelligent enough to figure out the universe. I don't know.

Knowledge is invariably a matter of degree: you cannot put your finger upon even the simplest datum and say this we know.

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.

Philosophy goes no further than probabilities, and in every assertion keeps a doubt in reserve.

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

Descartes, the father of modern philosophy ... would never-so he assures us-have been led to construct his philosophy if he had had only one teacher, for then he would have believed what he had been told; but, finding that his professors disagreed with each other, he was forced to conclude that no existing doctrine was certain.

Don't imagine that you'll discover {the truth} by accumulating more knowledge. Knowledge creates doubt, and doubt makes you ravenous for more knowledge. You can't get full eating this way.

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

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

Science is a way to teach how something gets to be known, what is not known, to what extent things are known (for nothing is known absolutely), how to handle doubt and uncertainty, what the rules of evidence are, how to think about things so that judgments can be made, how to distinguish truth from fraud, and from show.

I think maybe it is better to believe than not to believe. But I couldn't tell you why.

I don't know whether I could visit a new neighborhood now and have a kid's set of observations about a place. I no longer can really think like a child, though I can remember thinking like one.

On the one hand, philosophy is to keep us thinking about things that we may come to know, and on the other hand to keep us modestly aware of how much that seems like knowledge isn't knowledge

Have you come over time to think that you know more now than you did when you were young, know less now than when young, know now there is so much more to know than you knew there was to know when young that it is moot whether you think you knew more then than now or less, or do you now know that you never knew anything at all and never will and only the bluster of youth persuaded you that you did or would?

You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.

The origin of thinking is some perplexity, confusion or doubt.

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

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.

I try to steer away from high metaphysical belief because I think we humans do best when we realize that we don't know all that much.

I'm suspicious of too much certainty in the pursuit of understanding just because I think people are limited in their understanding.

Adults always wonder what to say and how to say it when they're talking to a child. You want to be wise, but all you are is a child yourself in a larger body. Nothing is ever what it seems. The things that you think you know are never certain. I know that now. I wish that I didn't, but I do.