Cognitive Boundaries Quotes

What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me - that I understand. And these two certainties - my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle - I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my conditions?

The fundament upon which all our knowledge and learning rests is the inexplicable.

You cannot go on 'explaining away' for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on 'seeing through' things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it.

The one thing we do not know is the limit of the knowable.

What we cannot think we cannot think, therefore we also cannot say what we cannot think.

It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand, and what those things are

We sift reality through screens composed of ideas . (And such ideas have their roots in older ideas.) Such idea systems are necessarily limited by language , by the ways we can describe them. That is to say: language cuts the grooves in which our thoughts move. If we seek new validity forms (other laws and other orders) we must step outside language.

Human intelligence is a limited resource. It cannot solve problems caused by ignoring fundamentals of existence.

Know that for the human mind there are certain objects of perception which are within the scope of its nature and capacity; on the other hand, there are, amongst things which actually exist, certain objects which the mind can in no way and by no means grasp: the gates of perception are closed against it.

The more we know, the better we realize that our knowledge is a little island in the midst of an ocean of ignorance.

Our brains have evolved to help us survive within the orders of magnitude of size and speed which our bodies operate at. We never evolved to navigate in the world of atoms.

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.

What are the "maximum" limits of acceptance of the term "intellectual"?

There are surely many ways that [media select and contextualise events determine the boundaries of public thinking] happens, but we can note at the most obvious level the way in which forms of resistance or violence get cast as "conflicts" that assume two sides that are fighting only against one another.

Maybe we can comprehend a flower or an insect, but we can never comprehend ourselves. Even less can we expect to comprehend the universe.

dogma and shrinking from the external world are at one limit of the range of belief. At the other are science and poetry and, indeed, reality.

Borders I have never seen one. But I have heard they exist in the minds of some people.

Few topographical boundaries can rival the frontiers of the mind.

There are brains so large that they unconsciously swamp all individualities ties which come in contact or too near, and brains so small that they cannot take in the conception of any other individuality as a whole, only in part or parts.

Any assault on the borders of perception is going to seem rash at first.

The limits of my language mark the limits of my world.

Most real failures are due to limitations which men set up in their own minds.

The bounds of a man's knowledge are easily concealed, if he has but prudence.

The world which we perceive is a tiny fraction of the world which we can perceive, which is a tiny fraction of the perceivable world.

All I know is what I have words for.