Protagoras Quotes

Science is a tribute to what we can know, although we are fallible.

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

The more one thinks, the more one feels the hopeless immensity of man's ignorance.

What does reason know? Reason only knows what it has succeeded in learning.

There are genuine mysteries in the world that mark the limits of human knowing and thinking. Wisdom is fortified, not destroyed, by understanding its limitations. Ignorance does not make a fool as surely as self-deception.

In the world we live in, what we know and what we don't know are like Siamese twins, inseparable, existing in a state of confusion.

I don't believe anybody can really grasp everything that's even in one textbook.

If man made himself the first object of study, he would see how incapable he is of going further. How can a part know the whole?

I know nothing, except the fact of my ignorance.

Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them.

In teaching man, experimental science results in lessening his pride more and more by proving to him every day that primary causes, like the objective reality of things, will be hidden from him forever and that he can only know relations.

To deprecate human reason by saying that none of us is or can be omniscient is absurd, for it takes an impossible standard as the judge of a possible and real condition. All of our knowledge we get from the exercise of our reason; to say that no man can be God and know everything is to take an irrational standard of evaluation.

We can't all wake up and know everything.

I shall reconsider human knowledge by starting from the fact that we can know more than we can tell.

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

As touching the gods, I do not know whether they exist or not, nor how they are featured; for there is much to prevent our knowing: the obscurity of the subject and the brevity of human life.

I have often wondered and even laughed at those who fancied that everything had been so consummately and absolutely investigated by an Aristotle or a Galen or some other mighty name, that nothing could by any possibility be added to their knowledge.

Have you come over time to think that you know more now than you did when you were young, know less now than when young, know now there is so much more to know than you knew there was to know when young that it is moot whether you think you knew more then than now or less, or do you now know that you never knew anything at all and never will and only the bluster of youth persuaded you that you did or would?

But let a man know that there are things to be known, of which he is ignorant, and it is so much carved out of his domain of universal knowledge.

That knowledge which stops at what it does not know, is the highest knowledge.

Indeed he knows not how to know who knows not also how to un-know.

Grown people know that they do not always know the way of things, and even if they think they know, they do not know where and how they got the proof.

Science has been seriously retarded by the study of what is not worth knowing and of what is not knowable.

It is not enough to say that we cannot know or judge because all the information is not in. The process of gathering knowledge does not lead to knowing. A child's world spreads only a little beyond his understanding while that of a great scientist thrusts outward immeasurably. An answer is invariably the parent of a great family of new questions. So we draw worlds and fit them like tracings against the world about us, and crumple them when we find they do not fit and draw new ones.

The worst, the most difficult thing I think is that the more you become intrigued by science and the information is out there, the more you are aware of the paucity of your own knowledge.