Salman Rushdie Quotes

Our reason may prove what it will: our reason is only a feeble ray that has issued from Nature.

We're trapped on this very thin slice of perception ... But even at that slice of reality that we call home, we're not seeing most of what's going on.

How few things can a man measure with the tape of his understanding ; How many greater things might he be seeing in the meanwhile.

I don't mistrust reality, of which I know next to nothing. I mistrust the picture of reality conveyed to us by our senses, which is imperfect and circumscribed.

(As human beings) We see everything everything in a glass, darkly. Sometimes we can peer through the glass and catch a glimpse of what is on the other side. If we were to polish the glass clean, we'd see much more. But then we would no longer see ourselves.

We live but for a short time, we see but very little, and we know almost nothing; so, at least, let's do some dreaming. Have yourself a very good Sunday, my dear readers.

The judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth.

For even the very wise cannot see all ends.

Man is fed with fables through life, and leaves it in the belief he knows something of what has been passing, when in truth he knows nothing but what has passed under his own eyes.

Our senses enable us to perceive only a minute portion of the outside world.

The lens is a tyranny.

Many are the things that man seeing must understand. Not seeing, how shall he know what lies in the hand of time to come?

A little knowledge can go a long way.

How little we know of what there is to know.

a meaningless phrase repeated again and again begins to resemble truth.

Within infinite myths lies the Eternal Truth Who sees it all? Varuna has but a thousand eyes Indra, a hundred And I, only two

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. . . .

For, until the wisdom of men bear some proportion to the wisdom of God, their attempts to find out the structure of his works, by the force of their wit and genius, will be vain.

The dice cannot read their own spots.

I am more stupid about some things than others; not equally stupid in all directions; I am not a well-rounded person.

I needed to change the lens through which I viewed everything familiar.

Men see things late, and it may be that at times an evil fate drives them on.

You're only infallible about your own nervous system. You know what's going on in your own nervous system, whatever realities you're creating out of the infinite flux of being. You don't know anything about anybody else's reality unless they tell you about it. You gotta listen very sympathetically in order to understand them. So it's a limited infallibility.

But by far the greatest hindrance and aberration of the human understanding proceeds from the dullness, incompetency, and deceptions of the senses; in that things which strike the sense outweigh things which do not immediately strike it, though they be more important. Hence it is that speculation commonly ceases where sight ceases; insomuch that of things invisible there is little or no observation.