Truth-seeking

Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.

If common sense were a reliable guide, we wouldn't need science.

No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer?

We like things to be black or white, tall or short, here or there. We like to consider two sides to every story. Unfortunately, there aren’t always two sides. Sometimes there’s only one; more often, there are multitudes. Many facets on the stone. Nooks and crannies in abundance. Things are usually not either black or white, but multicolored.

Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.

Faith is not a way of knowing. It is a way of yearning, of aspiring, and so, a way of creating.

The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are.

If you look at every human being as a Divine mirror, you will know yourself and understand life.

I like not to know for as long as possible because then it tells me the truth instead of me imposing the truth.

Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.

Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music-the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself. -

Don't expect anything original from an echo.

You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.

Fear is static that prevents me from hearing myself.

Whenever we teach our children that groundless faith is a virtue, we pave the way for groundless violence.

Things that you cannot face in yourself you will hate when you see them in someone else.

This physical world, though necessary to our evolution, is the embodiment of impermanence, of constant change. Thus, we take care not to become overly attached to it.

The truth is in the mystery.

It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in argument.

On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow.

Belief is what you do when there is no data.

Progess is confusion at a higher level

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry on as if nothing happened.

Preserving the right to uncensored expression is important not only because it is indispensable for an objective examination of truth claims—it is no accident that dictatorships uniformly suppress speech—but also because it has intrinsic value. Human dignity requires the freedom to express oneself as an individual.

What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.

The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts.

A conclusion is simply where you stopped thinking.

The doubts of an honest man contain more moral truth than the profession of faith of people under a worldly yoke.

"There are two mistakes one can make along the road to truth - not going all the way, and not starting."- Buddha

The more we learn, the more we question; institutions and beliefs, once immutable, become like a river, fluid, moving, changing.

That which takes us nearer to the Almighty (Sat) is truth. Truth needs no external support to sustain or promote itself.

The strength of Truth lies in Love and the strength of Love lies in Truth.

A belief which leaves no place for doubt is not a belief; it is a superstition.

The door of a bigoted mind opens outwards so that the only result of the pressure of facts upon it is to close it more snugly.

The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie — deliberate, contrived and dishonest — but the myth — persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.

Why does the wind not cease? Why does the mind not rest? Why do the waters, seeking truth, never ever cease?

A few observations and much reasoning lead to error; many observations and a little reasoning to truth.

Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.

Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.

The one who first states a case seems right, until the other comes and cross-examines.

Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.

I try to believe what I have to believe, not what I want to believe.

Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.

You cannot understand what a person is saying unless you understand who they are arguing with.

3) Jesus said, "If those who lead you say, 'See, the Kingdom is in the sky,' then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, 'It is in the sea,' then the fish will precede you. Rather, the Kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living Father. But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty and it is you who are that poverty."

Self-knowledge is the first step to maturity. ~Pride and Prejudice~

If science is to carry on a meaningful dialogue with religion, it must work to establish a level playing field where both sides honestly address what we can and cannot know about ourselves and the world around us. We need to back away from perpetuating the all-knowing rational mind myth that makes real discussion impossible. At the same time, we need to acknowledge that the evidence for a visceral need for a sense of faith, purpose and meaning is as powerful as the evidence for evolution.

Properly conducted scientific studies . . . give us a pretty good idea of when something is likely to be correct. To me, pretty good is a linguistic statistic that falls somewhere in between more likely than not and beyond a reasonable doubt, et avoides the pitfalls arising from the belief in complete objectivity.

We have an innate tendency to characterize the unexpected and unlikely according to our worldview.

In science, 'fact' can only mean confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.

The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.

We use patterns of behavior to guide us around life's potholes and minefields. We choose neighborhoods, friends, jobs and activities based on our own pattern of experience. Science tries to interpret the past, understand the present, and predict future events from a more rigorously catalogued and analyzed collection of patterns.

Some men of a secluded and studious life have sent forth from their closet or their cloister, rays of intellectual light that have agitated courts and revolutionized kingdoms; like the moon which, though far removed from the ocean, and shining upon it with a serene and sober light, is the chief cause of all those ebbings and flowings which incessantly disturb that restless world of waters.

It is one thing to show a man that he is in error, and another to put him in possession of the truth.

If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.

To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.

Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers.

It is better to read a little and ponder a lot than to read a lot and ponder a little.

Give me a man or woman who has read a thousand books and you give me an interesting companion. Give me a man or woman who has read perhaps three and you give me a dangerous enemy indeed.

Let us grant that the pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit, a refuge from the goading urgency of contingent happenings.

Mathematics is the supreme judge; from its decisions there is no appeal.

We could use up two Eternities in learning all that is to be learned about our own world and the thousands of nations that have arisen and flourished and vanished from it. Mathematics alone would occupy me eight million years.

There was a blithe certainty that came from first comprehending the full Einstein field equations, arabesques of Greek letters clinging tenuously to the page, a gossamer web. They seemed insubstantial when you first saw them, a string of squiggles. Yet to follow the delicate tensors as they contracted, as the superscripts paired with subscripts, collapsing mathematically into concrete classical entities - potential; mass; forces vectoring in a curved geometry - that was a sublime experience. The iron fist of the real, inside the velvet glove of airy mathematics.

“Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.”

Nothing before had ever made me thoroughly realise, though I had read various scientific books, that science consists in grouping facts so that general laws or conclusions may be drawn from them.

What wretched doings come from the ardor of fame; the love of truth alone would never make one man attack another bitterly.

To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.

I am turned into a sort of machine for observing facts and grinding out conclusions.

Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

The ultimate court of appeal is observation and experiment... not authority.

The medieval university looked backwards; it professed to be a storehouse of old knowledge. The modern university looks forward, and is a factory of new knowledge.

The man of science has learned to believe in justification, not by faith, but by verification.

The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, skepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin.

Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every conceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing.

Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.

Science is organized common sense--where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact.

Nothing can be more incorrect than the assumption one sometimes meets with, that physics has one method, chemistry another, and biology a third.

My business is to teach my aspirations to confirm themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations.

Learn what is true in order to do what is right.

It is not who is right, but what is right, that is of importance.

Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.

I do not say think as I think, but think in my way. Fear no shadows, least of all in that great spectre of personal unhappiness which binds half the world to orthodoxy.

History warns us that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.

Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.

The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love.

Religion is to do right. It is to love, it is to serve, it is to think, it is to be humble.

I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.

One evening a Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people. He said, "My son, the battle is between 2 wolves inside of us all. One is Evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego. The other is Good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith." The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather: "Which wolf wins?" The Cherokee simply replied, "The one you feed."

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

A good gardener starts as a good weeder.

The less you know, the more you believe.

For imagining lies within our power whenever we wish . . . but in forming opinons we are not free . . .

The investigation of the truth is in one way hard, in another easy. An indication of this is found in the fact that no one is able to attain the truth adequately, while on the other hand we do not collectively fail, but every one says something true about the nature of things, and while individually we contribute little or nothing to the truth, by the union of all a considerable amount is amassed.

There is no harm in doubt and skepticism, for it is through these that new discoveries are made.

Every great idea starts as a movement, becomes a business and turns into a scam.

To the scientists of the Renaissance, your critic was really your ally, helping you advance upon reality. Critics in science are not like drama critics, determining flops and successes. Criticism to scientists is just another means of finding out whether they're wrong, like running another experiment to see if it confirms or refutes a theory. Along with the advocacy principle of the courtroom, it is one of the best ways human beings have evolved to get closer to the truth.

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

When we consider reality itself we quickly become aware of its infinite complexity, and we realize that our habitual perception of it is often inadequate. If this were not so, the concept of deception would be meaningless.

If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

Science lets questions determine the answers; Ideology lets answers determine the questions.

Science means following the questions where they lead, even if you don’t like what the results are telling you.

In science, every set of conclusions is just a status report. They say, “this is how far we’ve gotten in terms of figuring out what’s real.”

The scientific method is simply what we know about how not to fool ourselves.

Let us use science to discover truth. That done, let us use science and the humanities to guide our use of newly discovered truths. But let us recognize that the road to truth is forked, dimly lit, strewn with obstacles. We need, therefore, to recognize and to applaud the role of faith and the spiritual as founts of strength and of perseverance.

Make your books your companions.

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. Wikis give us a place where anyone who is kind, thoughtful and intelligent can come and join us in building a better and more rational world.

Writing recently in the New York Times, David Brooks noted correctly (if belatedly) that conservatives' "disdain for liberal intellectuals" had slipped into "disdain for the educated class as a whole," and worried that the Republican Party was alienating educated voters. I couldn't care less about the future of the Republican Party, but I do care about the quality of political thinking and judgment in the country as a whole. There was a time when conservative intellectuals raised the level of American public debate and helped to keep it sober. Those days are gone. As for political judgment, the promotion of Sarah Palin as a possible world leader speaks for itself. The Republican Party and the political right will survive, but the conservative intellectual tradition is already dead. And all of us, even liberals like myself, are poorer for it.

I am convinced that whenever we exaggerate or demonize, oversimplify or overstate our case, we lose. Whenever we dumb down the political debate, we lose. For it's precisely the pursuit of ideological purity, the rigid orthodoxy and the sheer predictability of our current political debate, that keeps us from finding new ways to meet the challenges we face.

[The] issues are never simple. One thing I’m proud of is that very rarely will you hear me simplify the issues.

I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

Most of the change we think we see in life
Is due to truths being in and out of favor.

The aim of education is to enable individuals to continue their education ... (and) the object and reward of learning is continued capacity for growth. Now this idea cannot be applied to all the members of a society except where intercourse of man with man is mutual, and except where there is adequate provision for the reconstruction of social habits and institutions by means of wide stimulation arising from equitably distributed interests. And this means a democratic society.

The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth.

I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crises. The great point is to bring them the real facts.

In religion and politics people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.

The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.

Intellectual liberty [is] the right to think right and the right to think wrong. Thought is the means by which we endeavor to arrive at truth.

I believe that ignorance is the root of all evil. And that no one knows the truth.

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.

Readers no less than writers are the gatekeepers of truth.

Sages forever strive to be at one with truth. Their ideal – which they pursue earnestly but never achieve to perfection – is to grow into supreme human beings whose knowledge and behavior coincide with the nature of things and their earthly mission: with life and love.

… truth, or the conformity of thought to reality, is the sine qua non of vital efficacy. Health, pleasure, successful careers, and harmonious relationships require that we know the needs and capabilities of our nature, and the workings of the world. The absence of this knowledge leads to accidents, illness, suffering, failure, and death. Therefore, the first object of our desires should be truth, or the knowledge of ourselves and the world around us.

Don't believe everything you think.

A man who sees the world the same at fifty as he did at thirty, has wasted twenty years of his life.

All I say is by way of discourse, and nothing by way of advice. I should not speak so boldly if it were my due to be believed.

There is no wisdom save in truth. Truth is everlasting, but our ideas about truth are changeable. Only a little of the first fruits of wisdom, only a few fragments of the boundless heights, breadths and depths of truth, have I been able to gather.

We must now surrender to the obligation to understand and to care. We must surrender ourselves to becoming conscious, thinking members of the human race. We must put down the temptation to powerlessness and surrender to the questions of the moment.

The human understanding, from its peculiar nature, easily supposes a greater degree of order and quality in things than it really finds.

No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no past at my back.

To see what is in front of one's nose requires a constant struggle.

Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

Good science requires distinguishing between "felt knowledge" and knowledge arising out of testable observations. "I am sure" is a mental sensation, not a testable conclusion. Put hunches, gut feelings, and intuitions into the suggestion box. Let empiric methods shake out the good from bad suggestions.

Good science is more than the mechanics of research and experimentation. Good science requires that scientists look inward--to contemplate the origin of their thoughts. The failures of science do not begin with flawed evidence or fumbled statistics; they begin with personal self-deception and an unjustified sense of knowing.

We want to be known for having original ideas, inspired hunches, and gut feelings that make a difference. Indeed, a "well-honed sixth sense"' is considered a measure of the good clinician. But being a good doctor also requires sticking with the best medical evidence, even if it contradicts your personal experience. We need to distinguish between gut feeling and testable knowledge, between hunches and empirically tested evidence.

As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there afre known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns--the ones we don't know we don't know.

Thoughts are the shadows of our sensations--always darker, emptier, simpler than these.

Guarding knowledge is not a good way to understand. Understanding means to throw away your knowledge. You have to be able to transcend your knowledge the way people climb a ladder.

Thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed unfold its wings but cannot fly.

Truth is something which can't be told in a few words. Those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning.

The real community of man, in the midst of all the self-contradictory simulacra of community, is the community of those who seek the truth, of the potential knowers... of all men to the extent they desire to know. But in fact, this includes only a few, the true friends, as Plato was to Aristotle at the very moment they were disagreeing about the nature of the good... They were absolutely one soul as they looked at the problem.

The theologian may indulge the pleasing task of describing Religion as she descended from Heaven, arrayed in her native purity. A more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian. He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption which she contracted in a long residence upon Earth, among a weak and degenerate race of beings.

I have observed that the world has suffered far less from ignorance than from pretensions to knowledge. It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress. No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever.

The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land.

In regard to the past, where contemplation is not obscured by desire and the need for action, we see, more clearly than in the lives about us, the value for good and evil, of the aims men have pursued and the means they have adopted. It is good, from time to time, to view the present as already past, and to examine what elements it contains that will add to the world's store of permanent possessions, that will live and give life when we and all our generation have perished.

History is valuable, to begin with, because it is true; and this, though not the whole of its value, is the foundation and condition of all the rest. That all knowledge, as such, is in some degree good, would appear to be at least probable; and the knowledge of every historical fact possesses this element of goodness, even if it posses no other.

Concerning [postmodern] ideas, let us not mince words. The ideas are profoundly dangerous. They subvert our civilization by denying that truth is found by conscientious attempts accurately to portray a reality that exists independently of our perception or attitudes or other attributes such as race, ethnicity, sex or class.

Without free speech no search for truth is possible... no discovery of truth is useful... Better a thousandfold abuse of free speech than denial of free speech. The abuse dies in a day, but the denial slays the life of the people, and entombs the hope of the race.