Douglas Hofstadter Quotes

True science teaches, above all, to doubt

I see men ordinarily more eager to discover a reason for things than to find out whether the things are so.

There is not a single truth of science upon which we ought to bet more than about a million of millions to one.

Belief is not the beginning of knowledge - it is the end.

We must not let go manifest truths because we cannot answer all questions about them.

We cannot infer that because sciences of things divine and human are full of controversies and quarrels, therefore their whole subject-matter is uncertain ; for there have been many persons so enamoured of contradiction, as to turn into ridicule geometrical axioms.

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

The doubter is a true man of science: he doubts only himself and his interpretations, but he believes in science.

Belief sometimes precedes understanding; faith sometimes precedes scientific evidence.

Truth is something that we can attempt to doubt, and then perhaps, after much exertion, discover that part of the doubt is not justified.

God forbid that Truth should be confined to Mathematical Demonstration!

Every science in a certain degree starts from faith, and, on the contrary, faith, which does not lead to science, is mistaken faith or superstition, but real, genuine faith it is not.

By doubting we are led to question, by questioning we arrive at the truth.

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

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?

The public has a distorted view of science because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries.

Let not men think there is no truth, but in the sciences that they study, or the books that they read.

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

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.

The typical person has no trouble believing without knowing. What people need to realize is simply that you do not need to believe to know.

Science is not wisdom.

But scientists, who ought to know Assure us that it must be so. Oh, let us never, never doubt What nobody is sure about.

Maybe scientists are fundamentalist when it comes to defining in some abstract way what is meant by 'truth'. But so is everybody else. I am no more fundamentalist when I say evolution is true than when I say it is true that New Zealand is in the southern hemisphere. We believe in evolution because the evidence supports it, and we would abandon it overnight if new evidence arose to disprove it.

Another of the qualities of science is that it teaches the value of rational thought, as well as the importance of freedom of thought; the positive results that come from doubting that all the lessons are true... Learn from science that you must doubt the experts. As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.

There is no single truth, but each of the scholarly disciplines has methods which lead one ever closer to the truth.