Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

With knowledge comes more doubt.

Doubt grows with knowledge.

To know anything well involves a profound sensation of ignorance.

Doubt is the middle position between knowledge and ignorance. It encompasses cynicism but also genuine questioning.

The greater the knowledge, the greater the doubt.

I love to doubt as well as know.

He who replies to words of doubt doth put the light of knowledge out.

We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!

The more I see, the less I know.

Doubting pleases me no less than knowing

To know much is often the cause of doubting more.

At the very smallest wheel of our reasoning it is possible for a handful of questions to break the bank of our answers.

There will always be more questions. Every answer leads to more questions. The only way to survive is to let some of them go.

Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question.

The job is to ask questions-it always was-and to ask them as inexorably as I can. And to face the absence of precise answers with a certain humility.

We know accurately only when we know little, with knowledge doubt increases.

We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand.

The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.

There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

Who knows most, doubts most.

Doubt is the origin of wisdom.

In philosophy you're never 100% sure. You're always undermining what you think you know. That's always been my philosophy and my intellectual ethos.

Only a blind man can easily define what light is. When you do not know, you are bold. Ignorance is always bold; knowledge hesitates. And the more you know, the more you feel that the ground underneath is dissolving. The more you know, the more you feel how ignorant you are.

We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and no learning. There is no learning without having to pose a question. And a question requires doubt. People search for certainty. But there is no certainty.