Robert Fulghum Quotes

I say this all the time: All I know is I know nothing at all.

Someone asked me once what my philosophy of life was, and I said some crazy thing. I should have said, how the hell do I know?

Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question.

What's an expert? I read somewhere, that the more a man knows, the more he knows he doesn't know. So I suppose one definition of an expert would be someone who doesn't admit out loud that he knows enough about a subject to know he doesn't really know how much.

I think the philosophy that we don't know as much as we think we know resonates throughout my work.

My secret for success? I don't know what the hell success means.

The older I get, the less I know. By that I mean the less I am sure of. I view people with strong opinions on the big stuff with distrust. I don't think we should have certain certainties on faith and politics; I think we should be open-minded.

All thing I thought I knew; but now confess, the more I know I know, I know the less.

To know anything well involves a profound sensation of ignorance.

My personal philosophy is, you can be sure of nothing.

In order to have wisdom we must have ignorance.

We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand.

Philosophy goes no further than probabilities, and in every assertion keeps a doubt in reserve.

Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.

My goal is to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not about God alone, but agnosticism about everything.

It is unwise to wish everything explained.

I know that I don’t know.

If you come to the conclusion that there is no conclusion, well, that's a conclusion, too.

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.

The greater the knowledge, the greater the doubt.

No one has the answer: we are answer and question.

You don’t have to be brave or a saint, a martyr, or even very smart to be an atheist. All you have to be able to say is “I don’t know”.

I was a terrible believer in things,but I was also a terrible nonbeliever in things. I was as searching as I was skeptical. I didn't know where to put my faith,or if there was such a place,or even what the word faith meant, in all of it's complexity. Everything seemed to be possibly potent and possibly fake.

The goal is to know how not-to-know.

I wonder why. I wonder why. I wonder why I wonder.