Charles Caleb Colton Quotes

I go with what I know and what I see, and I believe in reality.

When general observations are drawn from so many particulars as to become certain and indisputable, these are jewels of knowledge.

You could know the what of something forever and never discover the why.

I'm just quizzical about how things work and why things are.

You gotta ask 'why' questions. 'Why did you do this?' A 'why' question you can't answer with one word.

I don't have to have faith, I have experience.

The knowledge of anything, since all things have causes, is not acquired or complete unless it is known by its causes.

The only source of knowledge is experience.

Science is curiosity, testing and experimenting.

Experience alone can give a final answer. The knowledge gained in a few years by a commission of the kind suggested would be worth more than volumes of mere assertions and contradictions.

Read a lot, live your life, and listen and watch, so that your mind fills up with millions of images.

I often wish... that I could rid the world of the tyranny of facts. What are facts but compromises? A fact merely marks the point where we have agreed to let investigation cease.

A very great deal more truth can become known than can be proved.

Happy is the one who knows the causes of things.

The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend

Writing isn't necessarily about what one knows but what one wants to know.

Science is about questioning things.

By doubting we come to questioning, and by questioning we perceive the truth.

The word of knowledge, strictly employed, implies three things: truth, proof, and conviction.

Experience alone can decide on truth.

To know truly is to know by causes.

Even facts become fictions without adequate ways of seeing "the facts". We do not need theories so much as the experience that is the source of the theory. We are not satisfied with faith, in the sense of an implausible hypothesis irrationally held: we demand to experience the "evidence".

You may read any quantity of books, and you may almost as ignorant as you were at starting, if you don't have, at the back of yourminds, the change for words in definite images which can only be acquired through the operation of your observing faculties on the phenomena of nature.

A thing is not proved because no one has ever questioned it... Skepticism is the first step toward truth.

Reason must approach nature with the view, indeed, of receiving information from it, not, however, in the character of a pupil, who listens to all that his master chooses to tell him, but in that of a judge, who compels the witnesses to reply to those questions which he himself thinks fit to propose. To this single idea must the revolution be ascribed, by which, after groping in the dark for so many centuries, natural science was at length conducted into the path of certain progress.