Relative Understanding Quotes

If you convinced me And I convinced you, Would there not still be Two points of view?

Everybody calls "clear" those ideas which have the same degree of confusion as his own.

To complain that man measures God by his own experience is a waste of time; man measures everything by his own experience; he has no other yardstick.

Obviously, we all look at things through the filter of our own experiences.

A beetle may or may not be inferior to a man - the matter awaits demonstration; but if he were inferior by ten thousand fathoms, the fact remains that there is probably a beetle view of things of which a man is entirely ignorant. If he wishes to conceive that point of view, he will scarcely reach it by persistently revelling in the fact that he is not a beetle.

Life may be seen through many windows, none of them necessarily clear or opaque, less or more distorting than any of the others.

We ought never to be afraid to repeat an ancient truth, when we feel that we can make it more striking by a neater turn, or bring it alongside of another truth, which may make it clearer, and thereby accumulate evidence. It belongs to the inventive faculty to see clearly the relative state of things, and to be able to place them in connection; but the discoveries of ages gone by belong less to their first authors than to those who make them practically useful to the world.

All discussion of the ultimate nature of things must necessarily be barren unless we have some extraneous standards against which to compare them.