Sam Harris Quotes

Doubt is not below knowledge, but above it.

It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand, and what those things are

A mind that questions everything, unless strong enough to bear the weight of its ignorance, risks questioning itself and being engulfed in doubt.

I am a philosopher, not a scientist, and we philosophers are better at questions than answers.

As human beings, don't we need questions without answers as well as questions with answers, questions that we might someday answer and questions that we can never answer?

For an answer which cannot be expressed the question too cannot be expressed. The riddle does not exist. If a question can be put at all, then it can also be answered.

Que sçais-je?" (What do I know?)

There will always be more questions. Every answer leads to more questions. The only way to survive is to let some of them go.

Never believe what you cannot doubt.

Live free, child of the mist,- and with respect to knowledge we are allchildren of the mist.

Where doubt there truth is - 'tis her shadow.

It is not possible to know what you need to learn.

There are two sorts of ignorance: we philosophize to escape ignorance; we start from the one, we repose in the other; they are the goals from which and to which we tend; and the pursuit of knowledge is but a course between two ignorances, as human life is only a traveling from grave to grave.

but if I've learned anything, it's that we don't know half of what we think we do. And we know ourselves least of all.

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.

When a scientist doesn't know the answer to a problem, he is ignorant. When he has a hunch as to what the result is, he is uncertain. And when he is pretty darn sure of what the result is going to be, he is in some doubt.

What is truth? I don't know and I'm sorry I brought it up.

To philosophize is to doubt.

My path to wisdom began when I stopped pretending to know things I didn't know. When I explicitly admitted to the limits of my knowledge, stopped building on ambiguity and ignorance, and instead realized that I knew nothing, not even the things I thought I knew.

It is precisely in knowing its limits that philosophy consists.

I'm interested in making films that ask questions and don't particularly provide answers.