172 Quotes About Epistemology

If proof were the standard of truth, fallacies would constitute the ultimate reality.

There you go again, doubting. You doubt that the moon ever existed, you doubt the gods, you doubt the cards, and you doubt magic. Is there anything you don’t doubt?”“Quite a lot,” Rowan told her, laughing despite herself. “I don’t doubt that some things people believe are true, and some are false. And I don’t doubt that there’s some means to tell the difference.” Then she admitted, “But I sometimes doubt that I possess the means.

Is numerical equality (forced by the use of specific physical units) the same as conceptual equality? Of course NOT!

…every feeling is the perception of a truth...

The mind leans on [innate] principles every moment, but it does not come so easily to distinguish them and to represent them distinctly and separately, because that demands great attention to its acts, and the majority of people, little accustomed to think, has little of it.

The mind is not only capable of knowing [innate ideas], but further of finding them in itself; and if it had only the simple capacity to receive knowledge…it would not be the source of necessary truths…

For the [innate] general principles enter into our thoughts, of which they form the soul and the connection. They are as necessary thereto as the muscles and sinews are for walking, although we do not at all think of them.

A prepared mind is always made up; it knows what it thinks and why it thinks that. When it's time to change, it just makes itself up a different way. A really made-up mind--made up properly, knowing what it knows and on what basis it knows it--is open. People close an undecided mind because they're trying to protect those sore uncertainties from getting bumped and scraped.

The denial of sleep is the violent dispossession of self by external force, the calculated shattering of an individual.