“I like this idea. It encourages us to be earnest and ingenious and brave, as befits ancestral peoples; but keeps us from deciding that because we don't know all the answers, they must be unknowable and thus unprofitable to pursue.”

— Teresa Nielsen Hayden

On Time (1995) http://nielsenhayden.com/ontime.html at nielsenhayden.com, accessed May 9, 2014.
Context: My own personal theory is that this is the very dawn of the world. We're hardly more than an eyeblink away from the fall of Troy, and scarcely an interglaciation removed from the Altamira cave painters. We live in extremely interesting ancient times.
I like this idea. It encourages us to be earnest and ingenious and brave, as befits ancestral peoples; but keeps us from deciding that because we don't know all the answers, they must be unknowable and thus unprofitable to pursue.

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Teresa Nielsen Hayden 3

American editor and writer 1956

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The "thing" which pursues us, we subsequently learn, is either "a Money-Devil" or "some appetite or lust" and "the advice is given to all in youth that they must make up their minds which of the two sorts of exercise they would choose, and the first [i.e. pursuit by a Money-Devil] is commonly praised and thought worthy; the second blamed." (p. 32)
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“Books, like conversation, rarely give us any precise ideas: nothing is so common as to read and converse unprofitably. We must here repeat what Locke has so strongly urged—Define your terms.”

Voltaire (1694–1778) French writer, historian, and philosopher

"Abuse of Words" http://www.gutenberg.org/files/35621/35621-h/35621-h.htm (1764)
C.f. Locke: "The names of simple ideas are not capable of any definition; the names of all complex ideas are. It has not, that I know, been yet observed by anybody what words are, and what are not, capable of being defined; the want whereof is (as I am apt to think) not seldom the occasion of great wrangling and obscurity in men's discourses, whilst some demand definitions of terms that cannot be defined; and others think they ought not to rest satisfied in an explication made by a more general word, and its restriction, (or to speak in terms of art, by a genus and difference), when, even after such definition, made according to rule, those who hear it have often no more a clear conception of the meaning of the word than they had before."
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) Book III http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/locke/locke1/Book3.html, chapter 4
Citas, Dictionnaire philosophique (1764)