Jane Austen Quotes

If all you have is faith, then you never actually know anything.

I might as well doubt of my own being, as of the being of those things I actually see and feel.

A thing is not proved because no one has ever questioned it... Skepticism is the first step toward truth.

Every man is fully satisfied that there is such a thing as truth, or he would not ask any question.

The things of which we want the proof are those we know the best.

All proofs inevitably lead to propositions which have no proof! All things are known because we want to believe in them.

The word 'belief' is a difficult thing for me. I don't believe. I must have a reason for a certain hypothesis. Either I know a thing, and then I know it - I don't need to believe it.

I had therefore to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief.

Argument is conclusive, but it does not remove doubt, so that the mind may rest in the sure knowledge of the truth, unless it finds it by the method of experiment.

The first precept was never to accept a thing as true until I knew it as such without a single doubt.

I'm a strict, strict agnostic. It's very different from a casual, 'I don't know.' It's that you cannot present as knowledge something that is not knowledge. You can present it as faith, you can present it as belief, but you can't present it as fact.

A proof tells us where to concentrate our doubts.

A very great deal more truth can become known than can be proved.

We'd all like to be certain of what we know, but I think the most important question is to ask yourself do you really know what you know?

There is no such thing as absolute proof. There is only evidence.

A thing that nobody believes cannot be proved too often.

By doubting we come to questioning, and by questioning we perceive the truth.

[It's] troubling because it reminds us how difficult it is to prove anything. We like to pretend that our experiments define the truth for us. But that's often not the case. Just because an idea is true doesn't mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn't mean it's true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe.

I don't believe anything till I have seen the proof. For anything without proof, I think we should believe the theory that gives us peace. It doesn't matter whether the theory is true or not.

I would proclaim that the vast majority of what [say, Scientific American] is true-yet my ability to defend such a claim is weaker than I would like. And most likely the readers, authors, and editors of that magazine would be equally hard pressed to come up with cogent, non-technical arguments convincing a skeptic of this point, especially if pitted against a clever lawyer arguing the contrary. How come Truth is such a slippery beast?

Except in pure mathematics, nothing is known for certain (although much is certainly false).

Carl did not want to believe. He wanted to know.

The word of knowledge, strictly employed, implies three things: truth, proof, and conviction.

I hold that it is only when we can prove everything we assert that we understand perfectly the thing under consideration.

... I distrust manifest knowledge.