Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

The greater the knowledge, the greater the doubt.

In the world we live in, what we know and what we don't know are like Siamese twins, inseparable, existing in a state of confusion.

To know anything well involves a profound sensation of ignorance.

Every man has a right to his opinion, but no man has the right to be wrong in his facts.

Only a blind man can easily define what light is. When you do not know, you are bold. Ignorance is always bold; knowledge hesitates. And the more you know, the more you feel that the ground underneath is dissolving. The more you know, the more you feel how ignorant you are.

For only when I err do I get away from what I know and what I understand. If "truth" were what I can understand, it would end up being but a small truth, my-sized. Truth must reside precisely in what I shall never understand.

Contradiction itself, far from always being a criterion of error, is sometimes a sign of truth.

Il n'est pas certain que tout soit incertain. (Translation: It is not certain that everything is uncertain.)

The world is not a solid continent of facts sprinkled by a few lakes of uncertainties, but a vast ocean of uncertainties speckled by a few islands of calibrated and stabilized forms

When you start talking about the known knowns and the unknown unknowns, you're thrown into a crazy meta-level discussion. Do I know what I know, do I know what I don't know, do I know what I don't know I don't know. It becomes a strange, Lewis Carroll - like nursery rhyme.

I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not.

Everything is true and not true about everything. That’s one thing I’ve learned.

I find the more you analyze, the less you really know.

With knowledge comes more doubt.

Chaos of thought and passion, all confused; Still by himself abused or disabused; Created half to rise, and half to fall; Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all; Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled,- The glory, jest, and riddle of the world.

With knowledge grows doubt.

As we acquire knowledge, things do not become more comprehensible, but more mysterious.

The reality of a question is inevitably more complicated than we would like to suppose.

The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth.

The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.

I think the phrase that resonates from 'Just One Year' is something I sort of live by: 'The truth and its opposite are flip sides of the same coin.'

Every clarification breeds new questions.

It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.

The most solid piece of scientific truth I know of is that we are profoundly ignorant about nature.