A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true, for if the things be false, the apprehension of them is not understanding.
Our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.
Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man's only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth.
Mistakes are at the very base of human thought, embedded there, feeding the structure like root nodules. If we were not provided with the knack for being wrong, we could never get anything useful done. We think our way along by choosing between right and wrong alternatives, and the wrong choices have to be made as often as the right ones. We get along in life this way.
Knowing is not understanding. There is a great difference between knowing and understanding: you can know a lot about something and not really understand it.
from one thing, know ten thousand things
The wise are instructed by reason; ordinary minds by experience; the stupid, by necessity; and brutes by instinct.
Instinct perfected is a faculty of using and even constructing organized instruments; intelligence perfected is the faculty of making and using unorganized instruments.
Free choice is one of the highest of all the mental processes.
Every day I hear stupid people say things that are not stupid.
We do not live to think, but, on the contrary, we think in order that we may succeed in surviving.
Animals have personalities and minds and emotions.
A man with a scant vocabulary will almost certainly be a weak thinker. The richer and more copious one's vocabulary and the greater one's awareness of fine distinctions and subtle nuances of meaning, the more fertile and precise is likely to be one's thinking. Knowledge of things and knowledge of the words for them grow together. If you do not know the words, you can hardly know the thing.
We fear only what we haven’t understood.
It is almost as if the human brain were specifically designed to misunderstand Darwinism, and to find it hard to believe
Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.
We are asleep. Our Life is a dream. But we wake up sometimes, just enough to know that we are dreaming.
I saw more than I can tell / And I understood more than I saw.
What makes us human is that we ask questions. All the animals have interests, instincts and conceptions. All the animals frame for themselves an idea of the world in which they live. But we alone question our surroundings.
Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.
First, then, I say, that the mind, which we often call the intellect, in which is placed the conduct and government of life, is not less an integral part of man himself, than the hand, and foot, and eyes, are portions of the whole animal.
The psychologists and the metaphysicians wrangle endlessly over the nature of the thinking process in man, but no matter how violently they differ otherwise they all agree that it has little to do with logic and is not much conditioned by overt facts.
But every time our ability to access information and to communicate it to others is improved, in some sense we have achieved an increase over natural intelligence.
We think because we have words, not the other way around. The more words we have, the better able we are to think conceptually.
Memory is not wisdom; idiots can by rote repeat volumes. Yet what is wisdom without memory?
