Leo Strauss Quotes

Doubt is not below knowledge, but above it.

Wisdom sets bounds even to knowledge.

We are born to inquire into truth; it belongs to a greater to possess it

Understanding someone, and loving him despite that understanding, is a trait more often found in angels than in mankind.

Philosophy cannot be taught; it is the application of the sciences to truth.

Only fools and philosophers waste time on the unknowable.

Was not this ... what we spoke of as the great advantage of wisdom -- to know what is known and what is unknown to us?

The way towards 'wisdom' or towards 'freedom' is the way towards your inner being. This is the simplest definition of metaphysics.

We're forever teetering on the brink of the unknowable, and trying to understand what can't be understood.

It is important to realize that our inability to answer a question says nothing about whether the question itself has an answer.

The history of science shows that great mysteries get solved. It may be that there's an answer that humans are too stupid to understand. I'm intrigued by that possibility.

You know that you know nothing. Find out that knowledge.

I don't think it's meant for man to know everything at once.

We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.

Why dispute what we shall be, when we know not even what we are.

What, after all, is heaven, but a transition from dim guesses and blind struggling with a mysterious and adverse fate to the fullness of all wisdom--from ignorance, in a word, to knowledge, but knowledge of what order?

All parts of knowledge have their origin in metaphysics, and finally, perhaps, revolve into it.

Scepticism, like wisdom, springs out in full panoply only from the brain of a god, and it is little profit to see an idea in its growth, unless we track its seed to the power which sowed it.

For there is no higher religion than the Truth.

The highest of all is not to understand the highest but to act upon it.

The wise skeptic does not teach doubt but how] to look for the permanent in the mutable and fleeting.

It is precisely in knowing its limits that philosophy consists.

Philosophy dwells aloft in the Temple of Science, the divinity of its inmost shrine; her dictates descend among men, but she herself descends not : whoso would behold her must climb with long and laborious effort, nay, still linger in the forecourt, till manifold trial have proved him worthy of admission into the interior solemnities.

I pray for meaning. I pray for the limits of reality to become clear. For a world – and a type of being – that makes sense. I pray for a life after death that is not like this life. I pray for the end of mystery. What would a life be like with all the mysteries solved? If there were no questions, there’d be no stories. If there were no stories, there’d be no language. If there was no language there’d be no . . . What?