E. O. Wilson Quotes

He who knows all things and believes nothing is damned.

I had therefore to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief.

'Belief' means something that you do not know. You want to assume and bring a certainty to something that you do not know. That means you are concretising your ignorance. There is no need to believe anything.

Carl did not want to believe. He wanted to know.

Seeing, contrary to popular wisdom, isn't believing. It's where belief stops, because it isn't needed any more.

All proofs inevitably lead to propositions which have no proof! All things are known because we want to believe in them.

Seeing is believing and believing is knowing and knowing beats unknowing and the unknown.

Must faith be exactly that, the willingness and ability to believe in the face of a lack of evidence? If one could find the evidence, would then the faith be dead?

I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure - that is all that agnosticism means.

I am an agnostic; I do not pretend to know what many ignorant men are sure of.

I'm a strict, strict agnostic. It's very different from a casual, 'I don't know.' It's that you cannot present as knowledge something that is not knowledge. You can present it as faith, you can present it as belief, but you can't present it as fact.

Who never doubted, never half believed. Where doubt is, there truth is - it is her shadow.

I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure - that is all that agnosticism means.

Belief and knowledge are considered to be two different things. But they are not.

He doubts nothing who knows nothing.

Doubt is the offspring of knowledge: the savage never doubts at all.

We cannot infer that because sciences of things divine and human are full of controversies and quarrels, therefore their whole subject-matter is uncertain ; for there have been many persons so enamoured of contradiction, as to turn into ridicule geometrical axioms.

I don't believe anything till I have seen the proof. For anything without proof, I think we should believe the theory that gives us peace. It doesn't matter whether the theory is true or not.

Knowing is higher than believing. Knowing means that there is NO doubt.

The typical person has no trouble believing without knowing. What people need to realize is simply that you do not need to believe to know.

He that believes all misseth; he that believes nothing, hits not.

True belief is not about blind submission. It is about open-eyed acceptance, and acceptance requires persistent distance from the truth, and that distance is doubt. Doubt, in other words, can feed faith, rather than destroy it. And it forces us, even while believing, to recognize our fundamental duty with respect to God's truth: humility. We do not know. Which is why we believe.

Belief is the wound that knowledge heals.

You do not believe, you only believe that you believe.