Hans Jonas Quotes

If I am fool, it is, at least, a doubting one; and I envy no one the certainty of his self-approved wisdom.

Doubt is the vestibule through which all must pass before they can enter into the temple of wisdom.

There is a cleansing humility about doubt.

I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance.

Doubt your doubts before you doubt your beliefs.

The object of studying philosophy is to know one's own mind, not other people's.

The philosophy of the wisest man that ever existed, is mainly derived from the act of introspection.

I've reached the age of self-knowledge, so I don't know anything. People who claim that they know something are responsible for most of the fuss in the world.

True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing.

Who knows most, doubts most.

Doubt is the offspring of knowledge: the savage never doubts at all.

Doubt is the origin of wisdom.

We cannot infer that because sciences of things divine and human are full of controversies and quarrels, therefore their whole subject-matter is uncertain ; for there have been many persons so enamoured of contradiction, as to turn into ridicule geometrical axioms.

True belief is not about blind submission. It is about open-eyed acceptance, and acceptance requires persistent distance from the truth, and that distance is doubt. Doubt, in other words, can feed faith, rather than destroy it. And it forces us, even while believing, to recognize our fundamental duty with respect to God's truth: humility. We do not know. Which is why we believe.

The thing I believe in most in the world is my own fallibility, so I am willing to believe that I may be wrong too.

We don't need to invest all of our faith in every concept, in every symbol, in every opinion that forms the totality of our knowledge. Faith means to believe in something 100% without a doubt, and to doubt our own knowledge can seem like the most frightening thing that can happen to us.

A man who has humility will have acquired in the last reaches of his beliefs the saving doubt of his own certainty.

Belief is in ignorance. If you know, you know. And it is good that if you don’t know, know that you don’t know — the belief can deceive you. The belief can create an atmosphere in your mind, where, without knowing, you start thinking that you know. Belief is not trust, and the more strongly you say that you believe totally, the more you are afraid of the doubt within you.

All are sure in their days except the most wise ... He is the wisest philosopher who holds his theory with some doubt.

It would be the height of absurdity to label ignorance tempered by humility "faith"! (Institutio III.2.3)

This idea is more surely understood by interrogation; WHAT DO I KNOW? which I bear as my motto with the emblem of a pair of scales.

I have thousands of opinions still - but that is down from millions - and, as always, I know nothing.

He who knows others is wise. He who knows himself is enlightened.

As I get older I seem to believe less and less and yet to believe what I do believe more and more.