Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes

The task of science is to stake out the limits of the knowable, and to center consciousness within them.

There may be things that are completely unknowable to us, so we must be careful not to treat the limits of our knowledge as sure guides to the limit of what there is.

It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand, and what those things are

Our ignorance will always remain greater than our knowledge.

What science cannot discover, mankind cannot know.

Our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.

If man made himself the first object of study, he would see how incapable he is of going further. How can a part know the whole?

The known is finite, the unknown is infinite.

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

We do have to use our minds as far as they will take us, yet acknowledging that they cannot take us all the way.

All our knowledge - past, present, and future - is nothing compared to what we will never know.

The limit of man s knowledge in any subject possesses a high interest which is perhaps increased by its close neighbourhood to the realms of imagination.

One cannot come back too often to the question what is knowledge and to the answer knowledge is what one knows.... Knowledge is the thing you know and how can you know more than you do know.

It is not for man to follow the trail of truth too far, since by so doing he entirely loses the directing compass of his mind.

Man, being the servant and interpreter of Nature, can do and understand so much and so much only as he has observed in fact or thought of the course of nature; beyond this he neither knows anything nor can do anything.

The scientist knows that the ultimate of everything is unknowable. No matter What subject you take, the current theory of it if carried to the ultimate becomes ridiculous. Time and space are excellent examples of this.

I have with me all that I do not knowI have lost none of it.

You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.

We're forever teetering on the brink of the unknowable, and trying to understand what can't be understood.

Science and religion have to go hand in hand with the mystery, because there's a certain point beyond which you say, "There are no answers."

If we make a couple of discoveries here and there we need not believe things will go on like this for ever. Just as we hit water when we dig in the earth, so we discover the incomprehensible sooner or later.

That knowledge which stops at what it does not know, is the highest knowledge.

There are few things in the world that we don't know. Science has explained everything away.

The greatest part cannot know, and therefore they must believe.

The highest knowledge is to know that we are surrounded by mystery.