Michel de Montaigne Quotes

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.

The basic stimulus to the intelligence is doubt, a feeling that the meaning of an experience is not self-evident.

A mind that questions everything, unless strong enough to bear the weight of its ignorance, risks questioning itself and being engulfed in doubt.

To philosophize is to doubt.

Another error is an impatience of doubt and haste to assertion without due and mature suspension of judgment. For the two ways of contemplation are not unlike the two ways of action commonly spoken of by the ancients; the one plain and smooth in the beginning, and in the end impassable; the other rough and troublesome in the entrance, but after a while fair and even. So it is in contemplation; if a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.

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

I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn't wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine.

To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.

That's something I learned as a philosophy major: The philosophy ethos is, always question, never rest.

The greater the knowledge, the greater the doubt.

It is not proof that I sought. I, of all men, know that proof is but a fallacy invented by man to justify to himself and his fellows his own crass lust and folly.

They had applied their doubts to the very head that had introduced doubt as a tool for advancing knowledge. And in the end they gave the head a nod.

I am a philosopher, not a scientist, and we philosophers are better at questions than answers.

When a doubt is once received, men labour rather how to keep it a doubt still, than how to solve it; and accordingly bend their wits.

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.

I did not imitate the skeptics who doubt only for doubting's sake, and pretend to be always undecided; on the contrary, my whole intention was to arrive at a certainty, and to dig away the drift and the sand until I reached the rock or the clay beneath.

He who replies to words of doubt doth put the light of knowledge out.

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

But without doubts, without a standpoint reached through questionings, human beings can't acquire knowledge.

A picture can be an answer as well as a question but if you can't answer your question try to question your question... There can be questions without answers but no answers without questions.

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

Never believe what you cannot doubt.

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

The first beginnings of wisdom...is to ask questions but never to answer any.

Doubt was much more energy efficient than conviction.