Quotes about Understanding

Love is the weapon of the wise.

Jos itse tekee jonkin päätöksen, eihän sen jälkeen voi suuttua siitä että toinen hyväksyy sen

People are not stupid. They believe things for reasons. The last way for skeptics to get the attention of bright, curious, intelligent people is to belittle or condescend or to show arrogance toward their beliefs.

Not explaining science seems to me perverse. When you're in love, you want to tell the world.

We must understand the Cosmos as it is and not confuse how it is with how we wish it to be.

Humans may crave absolute certainty; they may aspire to it; they may pretend, as partisans of certain religions do, to have attained it. But the history of science — by far the most successful claim to knowledge accessible to humans — teaches that the most we can hope for is successive improvement in our understanding, learning from our mistakes, an asymptotic approach to the Universe, but with the proviso that absolute certainty will always elude us.

The book of Nature had waited more than a millennium for a reader.

If we know only our own side of the argument, we hardly know even that; it becomes stale, soon learned only by rote, untested, a pallid and lifeless truth.

Those who make uncritical observations or fraudulent claims lead us into error and deflect us from the major human goal of understanding how the world works. It is for this reason that playing fast and loose with the truth is a very serious matter.

But knowledge is preferable to ignorance. Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring fable.

Some of science is very simple. When it gets complicated, that's usually because the world is complicated—or because we're complicated. When we shy away from it because it seems too difficult (or because we've been taught so poorly), we surrender the ability to take charge of our future. We are disenfranchised. Our self-confidence erodes.

His argument was not with God but with those who believed that our understanding of the sacred had been completed. Science's permanently revolutionary conviction that the search for truth never ends seemed to him the only approach with sufficient humility to be worthy of the universe that it revealed.