Cassandra Clare Quotes

Learning philosophy is learning a particular kind of intuitive understanding.

Knowledge is a beautiful thing, but there are a few things I wish I didn't know.

I read things like theology, and I read about science, 'Scientific American' and publications like that, because they stimulate again and again my sense of the almost arbitrary given-ness of experience, the fact that nothing can be taken for granted.

Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end.

Learning is a tunnel experience that makes us think more broadly.

Experience is a good school, but the fees are high.

Sixty years ago I knew everything. Now I know nothing. Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

What is the truth? Is it what you experience? Is it what I experience? Or is there some objective truth in between?

Philosophy teaches you to think big.

There is something irreversible about acquiring knowledge; and the simulation of the search for it differs in a most profound way from the reality.

No man thoroughly understands a truth until he has contended against it.

I said I 'liked' being half-educated; you were so much more 'surprised' at everything when you were ignorant.

The hardest part of gaining any new idea is sweeping out the false idea occupying that niche.

The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; they did not engender those beliefs, and they are powerless to destroy them.

When you have made a thorough and reasonably long effort, to understand a thing, and still feel puzzled by it, stop, you will only hurt yourself by going on.

Absolute truisms rot brains absolutely.[...]'Power corrupts' is useless as a tool for understanding the past, and gives us nothing as a guide to action.

Whenever we proceed from the known to the unkown we may hope to understand, but we may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word 'understanding'

In the minds of most men, the kingdom of opinion is divided into three territories,--the territory of yes, the territory of no, and a broad, unexplored middle ground of doubt.

I know nothing, because I know too much, and understand not nearly enough and never will.

We do not progress from error to truth, but from truth to truth

You cannot be wise without some basis of knowledge, but you may easily acquire knowledge and remain bare of wisdom.

Philosophy, with the aid of experience, has at length banished the study of alchymy; and the present age, however desirous of riches, is content to seek them by the humbler means of commerce and industry.

Ignorance was just as dynamic as knowledge, and it grew in the same proportion.

I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not.

Every increase in your knowledge is a simultaneous decrease. You learn and you unlearn at the same time. A new certainty is a new doubt as well.