John Donne Quotes

One of the reasons people might be fallible, why we might fail to do what we try to do isignorance, that we have a limited understanding of the laws of the world - the physical laws that govern the world and of all the particulars of the world upon which those laws work. And then there's ineptitude, meaning that the knowledge is available, but individuals fail to apply it correctly. The third source is "necessary fallibility." That is, we're never going to be omniscient, there is some knowledge that we will simply never achieve, and there are limits to what we will be able to do.

That though we are certain of many things, yet that Certainty is no absolute Infallibility, there still remains the possibility of our being mistaken in all matters of humane Belief and Inquiry.

While some of us may know than others about certain things, it is the thinnest slice of all that is, or could be known. In that sense, we are all profoundly ignorant.

All that we know is still infinitely less than all that still remains unknown.

Our intelligence is always imperfect.

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

I start ... from a belief in individual freedom and that derives fundamentally from a belief in the limitations of our knowledge, from a belief ... that nobody can be sure that what he believes is right, is really right ... I'm an imperfect human being who cannot be certain of anything, so what position ... involved the least intolerance on my part? ... The most attractive position ... is putting individual freedom first.

None of us are going to have perfect lives. Our own vision of what we think is good maybe different from what He [God] thinks. And we forget that. We think we know what's best and we don't.

While differing widely in the various little bits we know, in our infinite ignorance we are all equal.

There's always something you missed or something you didn't notice or somehow you got wrong... I don't really have a beginning.

Everything we know is only some kind of approximation, because we know that we do not know all the laws yet. Therefore, things must be learned only to be unlearned again or, more likely, to be corrected.

The greatest of all the accomplishments of 20th century science has been the discovery of human ignorance

The pretensions of final truth are always partlyan effort to obscure a darkly felt consciousness of the limits of human knowledge.

Knowledge is the small part of ignorance that we arrange and classify.

I make a hundred mistakes a day. I am, and have been, and will continue to be, wrong about almost everything.

You know what, we don't know diddley squat about brains and no one has a clue how these things work, so don't believe what anyone tells you.

Sometimes, we just don't know enough about what we are trying to achieve.

I'm never absolutely sure of anything, and I don't want to be. You're either right and you'll pull through, or you're not. We're never going to be right about everything, and we've certainly been wrong.

The idea that you will make the right decision every time is very unlikely.

Absolute certainty will always elude us. We will always be mired in error. The most each generation can hope for is to reduce the error. . . .

Hee stands not surely, that never slips.

Can you predict the future with absolute certainty? Your answer must be no. You have two options: You can either decide to accept yourself as an imperfect human being with limited knowledge and realize that you will at times make mistakes, or you can hate yourself for it.

The case for individual freedom rests largely on the recognition of the inevitable and universal ignorance of all of us concerning a great many of the factors on which the achievements of our ends and welfare depend.

You'll never know everything about anything, especially something you love.