Epistemic Limits Quotes

All our knowledge - past, present, and future - is nothing compared to what we will never know.

Reality is never more than a first step towards an unknown on the road to which one can never progress very far.

Science says the first word on everything, and the last word on nothing.

Given that we cannot know all the elements in a problem, we never can solve it.

The unanswerable mysteries... the attitude that all is uncertain... to summarize it - the humility of the intellect.

A lost trail always extends beyond the evidence, and even the trails we find are only fragments of the trails that lie beyond our comprehension.

There is not a piece of science, but its flank may be turned tomorrow.

The logic of validation allows us to move between the two limits of dogmatism and skepticism.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.

There's no such thing as saying that we'll ever find the ultimate cause of stuff. We can only work to push our understanding one step further.

Maybe we should admit that our science is not as perfect as we would like to believe and that nature is ultimately inexplicable and beyond our control.

The last proceeding of reason is to recognize that there is an infinity of things which are beyond it. There is nothing so conformable to reason as this disavowal of reason.