Derek Sivers Quotes

The people I go after are the false experts, those who do not accept the limits of their knowledge.

I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance.

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.

If I am fool, it is, at least, a doubting one; and I envy no one the certainty of his self-approved wisdom.

Idealism, alas, does not protect one from ignorance, dogmatism, and foolishness.

Question everything. Learn something. Answer nothing.

The foolish reject what they see and not what they think; the wise reject what they think and not what they see.

The more you think you know, the more closed-minded you'll be.

To think to be wise alone is a very great folly.

Only the fools are certain and assured.

We need wisdom the most when we believe in it the least.

Wake-up! Think for yourself, be yourself and return to what is real.

A foolish man thinks he knows everything. A wise man knows he doesn't.

The man who thinks he knows something does not yet know as he ought to know.

Belief is in ignorance. If you know, you know. And it is good that if you don’t know, know that you don’t know — the belief can deceive you. The belief can create an atmosphere in your mind, where, without knowing, you start thinking that you know. Belief is not trust, and the more strongly you say that you believe totally, the more you are afraid of the doubt within you.

There are genuine mysteries in the world that mark the limits of human knowing and thinking. Wisdom is fortified, not destroyed, by understanding its limitations. Ignorance does not make a fool as surely as self-deception.

He who thinks with difficulty believes with alacrity. A fool is a natural proselyte, but he must be caught young, for his convictions, unlike those of the wise, harden with age.

No man who worships education has got the best out of education... Without a gentle contempt for education no man's education is complete.

Only Socrates knew, after a lifetime of unceasing labor, that he was ignorant. Now every high-school student knows that. How did it become so easy?

To know yet to think that one does not know is best; Not to know yet to think that one knows will lead to difficulty.

I started realizing that I wasn't so dumb; rather, most people simply didn't know the answers to the questions that I was interested in-or they didn't care.

I know too much to be a sceptic and too little to be a dogmatist.

No man should escape our universities without knowing how little he knows.

Neither man nor woman can be worth anything until they have discovered that they are fools.

Men who know themselves are no longer fools. They stand on the threshold of the door of Wisdom.