Edgar Quinet Quotes

The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next.

We do not progress from error to truth, but from truth to truth

I think it's important to view the issues on the broadest possible reference plane. In fact, if you firmly believe in any issue, I urge you to read the opposite of it. Most of the time, it'll merely reinforce your original beliefs, but on the rare occasion, it might change your mind.

The scientist is a lover of truth for the very love of truth itself, wherever it may lead.

The truth of things is the chief nutriment of superior intellects.

Knowledge is the parent of knowledge. He who possesses most of the information of his age will not quietly submit to neglect its current acquisitions, but will go on improving as long as means and opportunities offer; while he who finds himself ignorant of most things, is only too apt to shrink from a labour which becomes Herculean.

Beware of the person of one book.

My emotional investment is in finding truth. If string theory is wrong, I'd like to have known that yesterday. But if we can show it today or tomorrow, fantastic.

Quick condemnation of all that is not ours, of views with which we disagree, of ideas that do not attract us, is the sign of a narrow mind, of an uncultivated intelligence. Bigotry is always ignorant, and the wise boy, who will become the wise man, tries to understand and to see the truth in ideas with which he does not agree.

Notwithstanding this high Ecclesiastical authority, he who dared accept truth only because it could be proved, or proved to be good, and disregard authority, was commonly stigmatized as an infidel.

The search for the truth for truth's sake is the mark of the historian.

Learning is always rebellion... Every bit of new truth discovered is revolutionary to what was believed before.

Some minds improve by travel, others, rather, resemble copper wire, or brass, which get the narrower by going farther.

I change my method and field of reference from book to book because I can never believe in the same thing two times running.

Certitude belongs exclusively to those who only own one encyclopedia.

It is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and end in superstitions.

The attempt to discover and promulgate the truth is nevertheless an obligation upon all scientists, one that must be persevered in no matter what the rebuffs—for otherwise what is the point in being a scientist?

A liberal is a person who kept an open mind … a person who did not always look backward but would look forward to new possible solutions.

Science, my lad, has been built upon many errors; but they are errors which it was good to fall into, for they led to the truth.

Falsehoods which we spurn to-day Were the truths of long ago.

Without free speech no search for Truth is possible; without free speech no discovery of Truth is useful; without free speech progress is checked, and the nations no longer march forward towards the nobler life which the future holds for man. Better a thousand-fold abuse of free speech than denial of free speech. The abuse dies in a day; the denial slays the life of the people and entombs the hope of the race.

Most men indeed as well as most sects in Religion, think themselves in possession of all truth, and that where ever others differ from them it is so far error.

No one has a monopoly on truth, and science continues to advance. Yesterday's heresies may be tomorrow's conventional wisdom.

It is as certain that many opinions, now general, will be rejected by future ages, as it is that many, once general, are rejected by the present.

New constellations of truth are daily discovered in the firmament of knowledge, and new stars are daily shining forth in each constellation.