“The attitude of the true scientist towards the real limits of human understanding was unforgettably impressed on me in early youth by the obviously unpremeditated words of a great biologist; Alfred Kuhn finished a lecture to the Austrian Academy of Science with Goethe's words, "It is the greatest joy of the man of thought to have explored the explorable and then calmly to revere the inexplorable." After the last word he hesitated, raised his hand in repudiation and cried, above the applause, "No, not calmly, gentlemen; not calmly!"”

Source: On Aggression (1963), Ch. XII : On the Virtue of Scientific Humility

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The attitude of the true scientist towards the real limits of human understanding was unforgettably impressed on me in …" by Konrad Lorenz?

Konrad Lorenz17

Austrian zoologist, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology… 1903–1989

Related quotes

“Hark, his hands the lyre explore!
Bright-eyed Fancy hovering o'er
Scatters from her pictured urn
Thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.”

Thomas Gray (1716–1771) English poet, historian

III. 3, Line 2 <br class="br"> The Progress of Poesy http://www.thomasgray.org/cgi-bin/display.cgi?textpppo (1754) <br class="br">Source: Selected Poems

“A word or a phrase or a line is not a poem. A poem is the exploration and shaping of an experience. A real poem demands intelligence, imagination, passion, understanding, experience and not least a knowledge of the craft.”

Vernon Scannell (1922–2007) British boxer and poet

A Proper Gentleman, 1977

“Philosophy, as I understand the word, is a positive theoretical science, and a science in an early stage of development.”

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist

Lecture II : The Universal Categories, §3. Laws: Nominalism, CP 5.61
Pragmatism and Pragmaticism (1903)
Context: Philosophy, as I understand the word, is a positive theoretical science, and a science in an early stage of development. As such it has no more to do with belief than any other science. Indeed, I am bound to confess that it is at present in so unsettled a condition, that if the ordinary theorems of molecular physics and of archaeology are but the ghosts of beliefs, then to my mind, the doctrines of the philosophers are little better than the ghosts of ghosts. I know this is an extremely heretical opinion.

“There are no limits to what science can explore.”

Ernest Solvay (1838–1922) Belgian chemist, industrialist, philanthropist

“Money was nice but it was not everything to the actor whose greatest joys were words, words, and words.”

Richard Burton (1925–1984) Welsh actor

Biography, in "Life: Richard Burton"

“Dialogue, as we are choosing to use the word, is a way of exploring the roots of the many crises that face humanity today. It enables inquiry into, and understanding of, the sorts of processes that fragment and interfere with real communication between individuals, nations, and even different parts of the same organization.”

David Bohm (1917–1992) American theoretical physicist

Dialogue: A Proposal (1991) http://www.david-bohm.net/dialogue/dialogue_proposal.html David Bohm, Don Factor, and Peter Garrett <br class="br">Collaborations with others <br class="br">Context: Dialogue, as we are choosing to use the word, is a way of exploring the roots of the many crises that face humanity today. It enables inquiry into, and understanding of, the sorts of processes that fragment and interfere with real communication between individuals, nations, and even different parts of the same organization. In our modern culture men and women are able to interact with one another in many ways: they can sing, dance, or play together with little difficulty, but their ability to talk together about subjects that matter deeply to them seems invariably to lead to dispute, division, and often to violence. In our view this condition points to a deep and pervasive defect in the process of human thought.