Epistemological Uncertainty Quotes

It is not that there are no certainties, it is that it is an absolute certainty that there are no certainties.

Man's progress is but a gradual discovery that his questions have no meaning.

It's not a silly question if you can't answer it.

I must confess that I know nothing whatsoever about true underlying reality, never having met any.

I can't even make a leap of faith to believe in my own existence.

If we can't agree on objective truth, then how are we ever going to agree on opinions?

The sole philosophy open to those who doubt the possibility of truth is absolute silence -- even mental.

If what you mean by the word "matter" be only the unknown support of unknown qualities, it is no matter whether there is such a thing or no, since it no way concerns us; and I do not see the advantage there is in disputing about what we know not what, and we know not why.

While the dogmatist is harmful, the sceptic is useless ...; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or of ignorance. Knowledge is not so precise a concept as is commonly thought. Instead of saying 'I know this', we ought to say 'I more or less know something more or less like this'. ... Knowledge in practical affairs has not the certainty or the precision of arithmetic.

There are no indisputable truths.

Which is why we cannot say of the purloined letter that, like other objects, it must be or not be in a particular place but that unlike them it will be and not be where it is, wherever it goes.

I read an interview with a Japanese freestyle jazz musician once, and he said something like, "Everything I'm going to tell you is not going to be true." He's not saying, "I'm trying to lie to you." But he's kind of saying that you can never say what something really is.

It does not seem to me that the evidence concerning the being of a God, and concerning immortality, is such as to enable us to assert anything in regard to either of these topics.

I could be wrong. Not being certain is what being a philosopher is all about.

There is no original truth, only original error.

One can't even know what it means to be lost in reality. For instance, it is easy to know whether you are lost or not in the Sahara desert, but to be lost in reality! This is much more complex!

It's so hard to believe in anything anymore, you know what I mean? It's like, religion, you really can't take it seriously, 'cause it seems so mythological, and seems so arbitrary; and then on the other hand, science is just pure empiricism, and by virtue of its method, it excludes metaphysics. I guess I wouldn't believe in anything if it weren't for my lucky astrology mood watch.

In passing, we should note this curious mark of our own age: the only absolute allowed is the absolute insistence that there is no absolute.

The proper method of philosophy consists in clearly conceiving the insoluble problems in all their insolubility and then in simply contemplating them, fixedly and tirelessly, year after year, without any hope, patiently waiting.

There's something in the Western mind that gets very nervous when you try to talk about the bedrock of ontology.

On Monday, when the sun is hot, I wonder to myself a lot. Now is it true, or is it not, that what is which and which is what?

Almost nothing that makes any real difference can be proved.

The pretensions of final truth are always partlyan effort to obscure a darkly felt consciousness of the limits of human knowledge.

The assumption that Derrida always knows what he is talking about is not Derridean.

Everything is discursive opinion instead of direct experience.