Partial Knowledge Quotes

Better know nothing than half-know many things.

I think the intelligent thing about it is that you have to carefully listen to it all to grasp it, and because I'm not in every scene - colossal disappointment to everybody that it may be - I'm not getting the full picture here today while recording it.

Everything we see… is just the visible part of reality.

People only know me for what they've heard, but that only represents about 10 percent of what I've done.

The whole point of science is that most of it is uncertain. That's why science is exciting--because we don't know. Science is all about things we don't understand. The public, of course, imagines science is just a set of facts. But it's not. Science is a process of exploring, which is always partial. We explore, and we find out things that we understand. We find out things we thought we understood were wrong. That's how it makes progress.

It is better to be ignorant than to half know something.

There are mysteries which men can only guess at, which age by age they may solve only in part.

Half a truth is better than no politics.

Probability is expectation founded upon partial knowledge. A perfect acquaintance with all the circumstances affecting the occurrence of an event would change expectation into certainty, and leave nether room nor demand for a theory of probabilities.

If you don't know everything, you must go on with what you do know.

After all, once you know that part of something exists, it stands to reason that the rest of it is somewhere out there, too.

We live in this world like a child who enters a room where a clever person is speaking. The child did not hear the beginning of the speech, and he leaves before the end; and there are certain things which he hears but does not understand

Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative.

Loneliness is the fundamental force that urgees mystics to a deeper union with God... An experience of God quenches this thirst for the absolute but at the same time, paradoxiacally, whets it, because this is an experience that can never be total; by necessity, the knowledge of God is always partial. So loneliness opens up mystics to a desire to love each other and every human being as God loves them.

Imperfect understanding is often more dangerous than ignorance.

Science...is part and parcel of our knowledge and obscures our insight only when it holds that the understanding given by it is the only kind there is.

I read 'How to Rig an Election.' Well, I read parts of it. I wouldn't necessarily quote me as saying I read the whole thing.

Everybody knows something, and nobody knows everything.

... the besetting danger is not so much of embracing falsehood for truth, as of mistaking a part of the truth for the whole.

No one is offended at not seeing everything; but one does not like to be mistaken, and that perhaps arises from the fact that man naturally cannot see everything, and that naturally he cannot err in the side he looks at, since the perceptions of our senses are always true.

It's not the one-half that's never been told; it's the three-quarters.

It's a pity people pick and choose what they learn from the Bible.

Even the most broad-minded of us can embrace only that part of truth into which our own snout has blundered.

People who don't have a concept of the whole can do very unfortunate things.

The summit charms us, the steps to it do not; with the heights before our eyes, we like to linger in the plain. It is only a part of art that can be taught; but the artist needs the whole. He who is only half instructed speaks much and is always wrong; who knows it wholly is content with acting and speaks seldom or late.