Steven Weinberg Quotes

I found I wasn't asking good enough questions because I assumed I knew something.

Begin challenging your assumptions. Your assumptions are the windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in awhile or the light won't come in.

The most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of wrong answers. The true dangerous thing is asking the wrong question.

I'd ask people to keep in mind the idea that if you really understand something, it's even more important for you to consider the possibility of your wrongness. Even if it takes someone dumber than you to point that out.

I don't consider myself a funny girl, but I do have a sense of humor because I don't take myself too seriously. Taking yourself too seriously, I think, is not right. Life is supposed to be funny. Because if you can laugh about yourself when you made a mistake or when you did something wrong, you can learn from it.

The more readily we admit the possibility of our own cherished convictions being mixed with error, the more vital and helpful whatever is right in them will become; and no error is so conclusively fatal as the idea that God will not allow us to err, though He has allowed all other men to do so.

Theories then are dangerous things.

There's always a hole in theories somewhere if you look close enough.

Assumptions are dangerous things to make, and like all dangerous things to make - bombs, for instance, or strawberry shortcake - if you make even the tiniest mistake you can find yourself in terrible trouble.

Always consider your intellect to be lacking; otherwise too much faith in it surely leads to error.

The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy.

Be very slow to believe that you are wiser than all others; it is a fatal but common error. Where one has been saved by a true estimation of another's weakness, thousands have been destroyed by a false appreciation of their own strength.

Learn to control ego. Humans hold their dogmas and biases too tightly, and we only think that our opponents are dogmatic! But we all need criticism. Criticism is the only known antidote to error.

Be very slow to believe that you are wiser than all others; it is a fatal but common error.

Never presume that just because you disagree with an idea that you must be correct.

We know well that mistakes are more easily detected in the works of others than in one's own.

The man who can own up to his error is greater than he who merely knows how to avoid making it.

Often the greatest act of courage is admitting that one has made a mistake...Follow your hearts. Protect one another, trust one another, because, at the end of the day, all of these people want something from you, or want you to do something for them, or be something that you are not. Your own responsibility is to one another.

Progress is a set of assumptions.

I give culture this meaning: exercise of thought, acquisition of general ideas, habit of connecting causes and effects ... I believe that it means thinking well, whatever one thinks, and therefore acting well, whatever one does.

The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.

If there is something very slightly wrong in our definition of the theories, then the full mathematical rigor may convert these errors into ridiculous conclusions.

I've learned so much from all my mistakes. I just wish I had gotten my education.

I enjoy growing older and wiser and learning from my mistakes every single day.

As it was, we always misunderstood ourselves and rarely understood others. Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes.