Black Elk Quotes

I tell myself that I know you, and then when I think about it, I realize that I don't.

I owe it to myself and to historic truth to declare that some circumstances … are founded only in conjecture and analogy.

Did you ever think that maybe what you see isn't really what's true?

Just because something didn't happen doesn't mean it isn't true.

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

You want the truth, of course. You want me to put two and two together. But two and two doesn’t necessarily get you the truth. Two and two equals a voice outside the window. Two and two equals the wind. The living bird is not its labeled bones.

Don't think you are looking at me because you are not.

Even if all parts of a problem seem to fit together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, one has to remember that the probable need not necessarily be the truth and the truth not always probable.

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

In Shakespeare's world, characters cannot trust their senses. Is the ghost in Hamlet true and truthful, or is it a demon, tempting young Hamlet into murderous sin? Is Juliet dead or merely sleeping? Does Lear really stand at the edge of a great cliff? Or has the Fool deceived him to save his life?

I realize that nothing's as it seems.

We are quite at ease in this no man's land of ignorance and doubt and dispute, absorbed in the ambiguities of trying to reach truth by mixing fact with invention.

Reality is not always probable, or likely.

We can only reason from what is; we can reason on actualities, but not on possibilities.

Questions are fiction, and answers are anything from more fiction to science-fiction.

A thousand probabilities don't make one fact.

No one will ever know the complete truth.

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.

Knowing and assuming are two different things.

There's no use in asking what if. No one could ever give you the answers. I try, I really do, but it's hard for me to accept this way of thinking. I'm always wondering about the what-ifs, about the road not taken.

But is all this true?" said Brutha. Didactylos shrugged. "Could be. Could be. We are here and it is now. The way I see it is, after that, everything tends towards guesswork." "You mean you don't KNOW it's true?" said Brutha. "I THINK it might be," said Didactylos. "I could be wrong. Not being certain is what being a philosopher is all about.

Everything is but what we think it.

It was in the forest. No one saw it or heard it. So did it actually happen?

Everything you know could already be wrong.

Life is not always what we think it is.