Reggie Watts Quotes

Science is not wisdom.

I know nothing, because I know too much, and understand not nearly enough and never will.

It is not enough to say that we cannot know or judge because all the information is not in. The process of gathering knowledge does not lead to knowing. A child's world spreads only a little beyond his understanding while that of a great scientist thrusts outward immeasurably. An answer is invariably the parent of a great family of new questions. So we draw worlds and fit them like tracings against the world about us, and crumple them when we find they do not fit and draw new ones.

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.

The obscurest epoch is today.

To attempt this would be like seeing without eyes or directing the gaze of knowledge behind one's own eye. Modern science can acknowledge no other than this epistemological stand-point.

The remarkable position in which we find ourselves is that we don't actually know what we actually know.

The knowledge of anything, since all things have causes, is not acquired or complete unless it is known by its causes.

We must revisit the idea that science is a methodology and not an ontology.

Science is nothing but perception.

It is science, and not religion, which has taught men that things are complex and difficult to understand.

While it is true that science cannot decide questions of value, that is because they cannot be intellectually decided at all, and lie outside the realm of truth and falsehood. Whatever knowledge is attainable, must be attained by scientific methods; and what science cannot discover, mankind cannot know.

It is clear that while science provides insights into the complexity of the world around us, those insights...present a fractured mosaic rather than a seamless whole. There are profound limits to science that must be recognized if we are to minimize the destructive consequences of using the powers provided by scientific discovery.

Science robs men of wisdom and usually converts them into phantom beings loaded up with facts.

Let not men think there is no truth, but in the sciences that they study, or the books that they read.

The greater the knowledge, the greater the doubt.

I shall reconsider human knowledge by starting from the fact that we can know more than we can tell.

The things best to know are first principles and causes, but these things are perhaps the most difficult for men to grasp, for they are farthest removed from the senses.

Science talks about very simple things, and asks hard questions about them. As soon as things become too complex, science can't deal with them... But it's a complicated matter: Science studies what's at the edge of understanding, and what's at the edge of understanding is usually fairly simple. And it rarely reaches human affairs. Human affairs are way too complicated.

Fundamentally, I have no idea how the world works, though I am trying to figure it out.

I have often wondered and even laughed at those who fancied that everything had been so consummately and absolutely investigated by an Aristotle or a Galen or some other mighty name, that nothing could by any possibility be added to their knowledge.

Whenever we proceed from the known to the unkown we may hope to understand, but we may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word 'understanding'

But let a man know that there are things to be known, of which he is ignorant, and it is so much carved out of his domain of universal knowledge.

Science is a tribute to what we can know, although we are fallible.

Belief sometimes precedes understanding; faith sometimes precedes scientific evidence.