Intellectual Boundaries Quotes

Knowledge is boundless,--human capacity, limited.

There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.

The limits of thought are not so much set from outside, by the fullness or poverty of experiences that meet the mind, as from within, by the power of conception, the wealth of formulative notions with which the mind meets experiences.

It has often been said, and certainly not without justification, that the man of science is a poor philosopher.

There are huge areas where the human mind is apparently incapable of forming sciences, or at least has not done so. There are other areas - so far, in fact, one area only [physics] - in which we have demonstrated the capacity for true scientific progress.

I think we now know the limits also of intelligence and rhetoric.

The heart of it all is mystery, and science is at best only the peripheral trappings to that mystery--a ragged barbed-wire fence through which mystery travels, back and forth, unencumbered by anything so frail as man's knowledge.

We have not strength enough to follow our reason so far as it would carry us.

The very might of the human intellect reveals its limits.

The whole object of the Prophets and the Sages was to declare that a limit is set to human reason where it must halt.

For each of us there is a set limit to our intellectual powers which we cannot pass.

To reflect on the essence of the Creator ... is forbidden to the human intellect because of the severance of all relation between the two existences.

Now, scholars can be very useful and necessary, in their own dull and unamusing way. They provide a lot of information. It's just that there is Something More, and that Something More is what life is really all about.

You're chained to you reason ... Understanding is only a very small affair, so very small

He who gives you the diameter of your knowledge,presc ribes the circumference of your activities.

Philosophy used to be a field that had content, but then 'natural philosophy' became physics, and physics has only continued to make inroads. Every time there's a leap in physics, it encroaches on these areas that philosophers have carefully sequestered away to themselves, and so then you have this natural resentment on the part of philosophers.

The region belonging to the pure intellect is straitened: the imagination labours to extend its territories, to give it room. She sweeps across the boarders, searching out new lands into which she may guide her plodding brother. The imagination is the light which redeems from the darkness for the eyes of the understanding. Novalis says, 'The imagination is the stuff of the intellect' -affords, that is, the material upon which the intellect works.

We do have to use our minds as far as they will take us, yet acknowledging that they cannot take us all the way.

There is no doctrine of the Reason which will bear to be taught by the Understanding.

Even great spirits have only their five-fingers' breadth of experience - just beyond it their thinking ceases and their endless empty space and stupidity begins.

With our human limitations we're not always able to understand the explanations.

Languages happily restrict the mind to what is of its own native growth and fitted for it, as rivers and mountains bond countries; or the empire of learning, as well as states, would become unwieldy and overgrown.

Man cannot always think of matter, however pleasurable it may be.

No human mind can comprehend all the knowledge which guides the actions of society.

Scholars, who pride themselves on speaking their minds, often engage in a form of self-censorship which is called "realism." To be "realistic" in dealing with a problem is to work only among the alternatives which the most powerful in society put forth. It is as if we are all confined to a, b, c, or d in the multiple choice test, when we know there is another possible answer. American society, although it has more freedom of expression than most societies in the world, thus sets limits beyond which respectable people are not supposed to think or speak.