Bertrand Russell Quotes

Who would dare assert that we know all there is to be known?

Maybe we're the fools, for thinking we know things. Maybe humans are the only ones who can deal with the fact that nothing can ever be known at all.

We know accurately only when we know little, with knowledge doubt increases.

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

To know, is to know that you know nothing. That is the meaning of true knowledge.

I know nothing, except the fact of my ignorance.

The humblest person in this world is the astrophysicist. Because we are face to face with our ignorance every single day.

Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.

Who knows most, doubts most.

Our ignorance will always remain greater than our knowledge.

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.

But I know that all the things I do know are very small compared with the things that I don't know.

We must know, if only in order to learn not to know. The supreme lesson of human consciousness is to learn how not to know. That is, how not to interfere.

Of course, I don't know everything. Considering the infinite amount of knowledge that one could acquire in a virtually innumerable array of intellectual disciplines, it's probably more accurate to say that I don't know anything.

Science is not just a topic we can step around or ignore.

Science is the topography of ignorance.

Science tells us what we can know but what we can know is little and if we forget how much we cannot know we become insensitive of many things of very great importance. Theology, on the other hand induces a dogmatic belief that we have knowledge where in fact we have ignorance and by doing so generates a kind of impertinent insolence towards the universe. Uncertainty in the presence of vivid hopes and fears is painful, but must be endured if we wish to live without the support of comforting fairy tales.

We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.

The wise man is one who knows what he does not know.

... all that that I learn just teaches me that I know nothing.

The greatest and saddest defect is not credulity, but an habitual forgetfulness that our science is ignorance.

How little we know of what there is to know.

[When a young person loses faith in his religion because he begins to study science and its methodology] it isn't that [through the obtaining of real knowledge that] he knows it all, but he suddenly realizes that he doesn't know it all.

All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance.