Simon Conway Morris Quotes

We have to stop and be humble enough to understand that there is something called mystery.

Anything that we think is incredible and beautiful and wonderful, we ascribe to something that we don't know what it is.

Wisdom is not the understanding of mystery. Wisdom is accepting that mystery is beyond understanding. That's what makes it mystery.

Everything is a mystery, ourselves, and all things both simple and humble.

Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.

Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.

The world is not always ours to understand.

I found it better for my soul to be humble before the mysteries o' God's dealings, and not be making a clatter about what I could never understand.

Our knowledge is a little island in a great ocean of nonknowledge.

When something exceeds your ability to understand how it works, it sort of becomes magical.

It's as simple as something that nobody knows.

Fullness of knowledge always means some understanding of the depths of our ignorance; and that is always conducive to humility and reverence.

Prayer is an august avowal of ignorance.

Science is not about control. It is about cultivating a perpetual condition of wonder in the face of something that forever grows one step richer and subtler than our latest theory about it. It is about reverence, not mastery.

The supreme function of reason is to show man that some things are beyond reason.

I think what a life in science really teaches you is the vastness of our ignorance.

Admiration is the daughter of ignorance.

All that we know is nothing, we are merely crammed wastepaper baskets, unless we are in touch with that which laughs at all our knowing.

We know a lot of things, but what we don't know is a lot more.

The beginning of wisdom is fear.

Our ignorance will always remain greater than our knowledge.

We have people we admire, like Einstein, saying mystery is the most beautiful thing a human being can experience. Yet, everywhere in our culture, everything that is truly mysterious is immediately dismissed.

I'll never know everything. My life would be a lot worse if there was nothing I knew the answers about - and if there was nothing I didn't know the answers about.

What is imponderable in the world is greater than what we can handle.

I don't feel it incumbent on me to make sense of everything.