Bruno Latour Quotes

What is not surrounded by uncertainty cannot be the truth.

I secretly think reality exists so we can speculate about it.

The most solid piece of scientific truth I know of is that we are profoundly ignorant about nature.

Now the truth of the matter is that there are a lot of things people don't understand. Take the Einstein theory. Take taxes. Take love. Do you understand them? Neither do I. But they exist. They happen.

There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

There is only one thing about which I am certain, and that is that there is very little about which one can be certain.

In my long experience, one thing I know is that truth is elusive.

Only a blind man can easily define what light is. When you do not know, you are bold. Ignorance is always bold; knowledge hesitates. And the more you know, the more you feel that the ground underneath is dissolving. The more you know, the more you feel how ignorant you are.

The real truth is splintered and spread throughout time.

Democritus says, "But we know nothing really; for truth lies deep down".

The Gods did not reveal, from the beginning, all things to us, but in the course of time through seeking we may learn & know things better. But as for certain truth no man knows it, nor shall he know it, neither of the Gods nor yet of all things that I speak. For even if by chance he were to utter The Final Truth, he would himself not know it: for all is but a woven web of guesses.

We know nothing in reality; for truth lies in an abyss.

Even if I seemed to remember, I could not know. For just to remember something is not to know if it really happened. That is a primary fact of the inner life, the most difficult fact with which we must live.

Answers are a perilous grip on the universe. They can appear sensible yet explain nothing.

It is as certain as it is strange that truth and error come from one and the same source. Thus it is that we are often not at liberty to do violence to error, because at the same time we do violence to truth.

Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations.

I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not.

Everything is true and not true about everything. That’s one thing I’ve learned.

... no bell in us tolls to let us know for certain when truth is in our grasp.

In my experience, the most staunchly held views are based on ignorance or accepted dogma, not carefully considered accumulations of facts. The more you expose the intricacies and realtities of the situation, the less clear-cut things become.

In the world we live in, what we know and what we don't know are like Siamese twins, inseparable, existing in a state of confusion.

As we acquire knowledge, things do not become more comprehensible, but more mysterious.

There's something beautifully soothing about a fact — even (or perhaps especially) if we're not sure what it means.