Incomplete Understanding Quotes

Our intelligence is always imperfect.

All models are wrong, but some are useful.

We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and there is 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. People are terrified — how can you live and not know? It is not odd at all. You only think you know, as a matter of fact. And most of your actions are based on incomplete knowledge and you really don’t know what it is all about, or what the purpose of the world is, or know a great deal of other things. It is possible to live and not know.

Stupidity consists in wanting to reach conclusions. We are a thread, and we want to know the whole cloth.

Nobody really knows everything, and they can only assume.

What is not fully understood is not possessed.

There is no practical question on which anything more than an approximate solution can be had.

Half-knowledge is worse than ignorance.

In completing one discovery we never fail to get an imperfect knowledge of others.

Uncertainty means that we do not have a complete description of the world which we fully believe to be true.

One is never satisfied with the portrait of a person that one knows.

I read 'How to Rig an Election.' Well, I read parts of it. I wouldn't necessarily quote me as saying I read the whole thing.

... the besetting danger is not so much of embracing falsehood for truth, as of mistaking a part of the truth for the whole.

With science and reason throughout history, what people believed turned out to be false. So I like to keep an open mind to all perspectives and learn and become more fully realised as a person. I just feel we're never going to know what the full picture is.

There are minds constructed like the eyes of certain insects, which discern, with admirable distinctness, the most delicate lineaments and finest veins of the leaf which bears them, but are totally unable to take in the ensemble of the plant or shrub. When error has effected an entrance into such minds, it remains there impregnable, because no general view assists them in throwing off the chance impression of the moment.

We don't claim to be infallible. I don't claim to be giving you truths from on high.

All I know is what I am getting.

We take it for granted we know the whole story - We judge a book by its cover and read what we want between selected lines.

Dividing an elephant in half does not produce two small elephants.

Psychology which explains everything explains nothing, and we are still in doubt.

We keep, in science, getting a more and more sophisticated view of our essential ignorance.

We need to approach the Bible each day with a spirit of deep humility, recognizing that our understanding of spiritual truth is at best incomplete and to some extent inaccurate ... we should approach the Scriptures in humility and expect the Spirit to humble us even further as we continue being taught by Him from His Word.

There's always something you missed or something you didn't notice or somehow you got wrong... I don't really have a beginning.

None of our beliefs are quite true; all have at least a penumbra of vagueness and error.

Their vain presumption of knowing all can take beginning solely from their never having known anything; for if one has but once experienced the perfect knowledge of one thing, and truly tasted what it is to know, he shall perceive that of infinite other conclusions he understands not so much as one.