Source: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
“We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand.”
—
Eric Hoffer
,
book
The True Believer
Section 57
The True Believer (1951), Part Three: United Action and Self-Sacrifice
Context: We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand. A doctrine that is understood is shorn of its strength.
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American philosopher 1898–1983Related quotes
Aleister Crowley
(1875–1947) poet, mountaineer, occultist
Appendix VI : A few principal rituals – Liber Reguli.
Magick Book IV : Liber ABA, Part III : Magick in Theory and Practice (1929)
Context: We know one thing only. Absolute existence, absolute motion, absolute direction, absolute simultaneity, absolute truth, all such ideas: they have not, and never can have, any real meaning. If a man in delirium tremens fell into the Hudson River, he might remember the proverb and clutch at an imaginary straw. Words such as "truth" are like that straw. Confusion of thought is concealed, and its impotence denied, by the invention. This paragraph opened with "We know": yet, questioned, "we" make haste to deny the possibility of possessing, or even of defining, knowledge. What could be more certain to a parabola-philosopher that he could be approached in two ways, and two only? It would be indeed little less that the whole body of his knowledge, implied in the theory of his definition of himself, and confirmed by every single experience. He could receive impressions only be meeting A, or being caught up by B. Yet he would be wrong in an infinite number of ways. There are therefore Aleph-Zero possibilities that at any moment a man may find himself totally transformed. And it may be that our present dazzled bewilderment is due to our recognition of the existence of a new dimension of thought, which seems so "inscrutably infinite" and "absurd" and "immoral," etc. — because we have not studied it long enough to appreciate that its laws are identical with our own, though extended to new conceptions.
Source: The Summing Up (1938), Ch. 5, p. 12 http://books.google.com/books?id=2hNbAAAAMAAJ&q=%22There+is+only+one+thing+about+which+I+am+certain+and+this+is%22&pg=PA12#v=onepage- 13 http://books.google.com/books?id=2hNbAAAAMAAJ&q=%22that+there+is+very+little+about+which+one+can+be+certain%22&pg=PA13#v=onepage
“Everywhere we seek the Absolute, and always we find only things.”
Novalis
book
Blüthenstaub
Fragment No. 1; Variant: We seek the absolute everywhere and only ever find things.
Blüthenstaub (1798)
“Social science means inventing a certain brand of human we can understand.”
Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 95
Aron Ra
(1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast
"3rd Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnj7PlqmJ5o, Youtube (December 10, 2007)
Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism
Jane Goodall
(1934) British primatologist, ethologist, and anthropologist
Reported in Patti Denys, Mary Holmes, Animal Magnetism: At Home With Celebrities & Their Animal Companions (1998), p. 106
Source: Jane Goodall: 40 Years at Gombe
“We need to understand what we can do and how. Otherwise we will never do it.”
Constantinos Apostolou Doxiadis
(1914–1975) Greek architect
Preface, p. x
Building Entopia - 1975