178It is only when a man knows little, that he knows anything at all. With knowledge grows doubt.
340
An active scepticism is one which constantly aims at overcoming itself, and arriving by means of regulated experience at a kind of conditioned certainty.
341
The general nature of the sceptical mind is its tendency to inquire whether any particular predicate really attaches to any particular object; and the purpose of the inquiry is safely to apply in practice what has thus been discovered and proved.
394
The thinker makes a great mistake when he asks after cause and effect: they both together make up the indivisible phenomenon.
416
Deep and earnest thinkers are in a difficult position with regard to the public.
424
Superstition is the poetry of life. And so it does not hurt the poet to be superstitious.
430
Mysticism is the scholastic of the heart, the dialectice of the feelings.
441
When a boy begins to understand that an invisible point must always come before a visible one, and that the shortest way between two points is a straight line, before he can draw it on his paper with a pencil, he experiences a certain pride and pleasure. And he is not wrong; for he has the source of all thought opened to him; idea and reality, potentia et actu, are become clear; the philosopher has no new discovery to bring him; as a mathematician, he has found the basis of all thought for himself.
443
Let us remember how great the ancients were; and especially how the Socratic school holds up to us the source and standard of all life and action, and bids us not indulge in empty speculation, but live and do.
445
If we set our gaze on antiquity and earnestly study it, in the desire to form ourselves thereon, we get the feeling as if it were only then that we really became men.
481
The Beautiful is a manifestation of secret laws of nature, which, without its presence, would never have been revealed.
525
With the growth of knowledge our ideas must from time to time be organized afresh. The change takes place usually in accordance with new maxims as they arise, but it always remains provisional.
529
We more readily confess to errors, mistakes, and shortcoming in our conduct than in our thoughts.
530
And the reason of it is that conscience is humble and even takes a pleasure in being ashamed. But the intellect is proud, and if forced to recant is driven to despair.
531
This also explains how it is that truths which have been recognised are at first tacitly admitted, and then gradually spread, so that the very thing which was obstinately denied appears at last as something quite natural.
532
Ignorant people raise questions which were answered by the wise thousands of years ago.
561
Our mistake is that we doubt what is certain and want to establish what is uncertain. My maxim in the study of Nature is this: hold fast what is certain and keep a watch on what is uncertain.
[From: The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe]
