Saul Bellow Quotes

We don't know all the answers. If we knew all the answers we'd be bored, wouldn't we? We keep looking, searching, trying to get more knowledge.

If you don't know what makes green, you're going to try every color combination.

If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?

You will have to experiment and try things out for yourself and you will not be sure of what you are doing. That's all right, you are feeling your way into the thing.

I like the idea of finding parts that I know I can do but I don't totally understand them right away.

We learn more by looking for the answer to a question and not finding it than we do from learning the answer itself.

I realised years ago that no one really knows what they're doing and you kind of just learn by observing.

I'm very inquisitive, and I always have questions and need to touch things to see how it works or why it works.

If I experiment enough, I get a deeper understanding.

You try a lot of things and you don't know what the hell you're doing. If you're actually inventing something you shouldn't know what you're doing.

All great discoveries...are products as much of doubt as of certainty, and the two in opposition clear the air for marvelous accidents.

There is no map, and charting a path ahead will not be easy. We will need to invent, which means we will need to experiment.

To be an inventor, you have to be willing to live with a sense of uncertainty, to work in this darkness and grope towards an answer, to put up with anxiety about whether there is an answer.

I start off but I don't know where I'm going; I try this avenue and that avenue, that turns out to be a dead end, this is a dead end, and so on. The search takes a long time and I have to back-track often.

Uncertainty is the prerequisite to gaining knowledge and frequently the result as well.

There is no knowledge without risk taking.

I'm lost in a transition. The old is dead, and I don't know what the new is. The only way to find the new is to start different things and see if there's something that can come out of experimentation. It's somewhat unsettling, but it's a hopeful thing in a way. I've been here before, lots of times.

...I was a young man. I hardly knew what I knew, let alone what I was going to know.

Our knowledge is a little island in a great ocean of nonknowledge.

I'm sort of an experimenter; I thought it'd be interesting to play around and see what's there.

I had expected that at some point during the first draft a light would go on, and I would understand, finally, how to write a book. This never happened. The process was akin to blindly walking in the dark, feeling my way only by touch, and only recognising dead ends when I smacked into them.

Kids should be allowed to break stuff more often. That's a consequence of exploration. Exploration is what you do when you don't know what you're doing. That's what scientists do every day.

The greater our knowledge increases the more our ignorance unfolds.

You never know with these things when you're trying something new what can happen. This is all experimental.

Indeed, the most important product of knowledge is ignorance.