John Lancaster Spalding Quotes

It's one thing thinking something and another thing knowing it.

Science is not wisdom.

But we shall not know the world by looking at it; we know it by looking at the hovering fly.

The answers aren't important really... What's important is- knowing all the questions.

Is Knowledge knowable? If not, how do we know?

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.

Knowledge is two-fold, and consists not only in an affirmation of what is true, but in the negation of that which is false.

If with open mind one reads and observes industriously and long; if in so doing one covers a wide field and so covering reflects in terms of realism, he is likely, soon or late, to be brought to a sudden consciousness that Man is an unknown quantity and his existence unsuspected.

If you use your mind to study reality, you won't understand either your mind or reality. If you study reality without using your mind, you'll understand both.

A man doesn't know what he knows until he knows what he doesn't know.

Our reason arises, at the very least, from this twofold lesson of sensuous revelations and human testimonies.

To know that we know what we know, and to know that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.

To every object there correspond an ideally closed system of truths that are true of it and, on the other hand, an ideal system of possible cognitive processes by virtue of which the object and the truths about it would be given to any cognitive subject.

It is one thing to show a man that he is in an error, and another to put him in possession of the truth.

The most important part of teaching is to teach what it is to know.

We hear only those questions for which we are in a position to find answers

Comprehension follows perception.

I have been a strong proponent of helping people understand that during the last decade or so, as it lies at the very bottom of how we know anything. Let me give a couple examples to get that point across.

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

Ultimately all knowing, from the highest to the lowest, is the result of experience; it arises on the way of experiences.

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.

Did they know why they knew? Not at all. But the Knew!

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

Till a man can judge whether they be truths or not, his understanding is but little improved, and thus men of much reading, though greatly learned, but may be little knowing.

Again, if you only know what you know, you don't know if something's good or bad. You don't have perspective.