Stephen Jay Gould Quotes

Knowledge is what we get when an observer, preferably a scientifically trained observer, provides us with a copy of reality that we can all recognize.

What you see is what you see.

At the heart of 'The Famished Road' is a philosophical conundrum - for me, an essential one: what is reality? Everybody's reality is subjective; it's conditioned by upbringing, ideas, temperament, religion, what's happened to you.

I think what happens is when we start to look at the facts, everybody has their impression of what truth is.

What I want people to consider is that no matter what it is we want to believe, and no matter what story it is we want to jam the world into, the truth is the truth.

Truth I have no trouble with, it's the facts I get all screwed up.

Paradigms are powerful because they create the lens through which we see the world.

Nature is objective, and nature is knowable, but we can only view her through a glass darkly and many clouds upon our vision are of our own making: social and cultural biases, psychological preferences, and mental limitations (in universal modes of thought, not just individualized stupidity).

Belief is nearly the whole of the universe whether based on truth or not.

We can never be quite clear whether we are referring to the world as it is or to the world as we see it.

Insanity is believing your hallucinations are real. Religion is believing that other peoples' hallucinations are real.

Facts do not convey truth. That's a mistake. Facts create norms, but truth creates illumination.

Facts and truth really don't have much to do with each other.

To believe and to understand are not diverse things, but the same things in different periods of growth.

I think the reality is important anyway.

'What would be better for us to believe!' This sounds very like a definition of truth

Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations.

You can only photograph a fragment of the here and now. The photograph presents the world as object; language, the world as idea.

Each worldview was a cultural product, but evolution is true and separate creation is not. [...] Worldviews are social constructions, and they channel the search for facts. But facts are found and knowledge progresses, however fitfully. Fact and theory are intertwined, and all great scientists understand the interaction.

We simply assume that the way we see things is the way they really are or the way they should be. And our attitudes and behaviors grow out of these assumptions.

We say seeing is believing, but actually, we are much better at believing than at seeing. In fact, we are seeing what we believe all the time and occasionally seeing what we can't believe

Our reality is influenced by our notions about reality, regardless of the nature of those notions

What Degas called 'a way of seeing' must consequently bear a wide enough interpretation to include way of being, power, knowledge, and will.

Some like to understand what they believe in. Others like to believe in what they understand.

Reality has actually very little to do with truth; there is no necessary connection between the two.