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“Each of you is right, and none of you is wrong.”
The parable resists a simple either-or verdict by showing that apparently competing explanations can each describe part of a larger movement.
Source note: The Forerunner, “The Two Learned Men”; the line concludes a parable about different explanations of motion and perspective.
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“We hear only the questions to which we are capable of finding an answer.”
The aphorism suggests that inquiry is limited by the conceptual capacities of the person asking, making intellectual growth partly a matter of becoming able to formulate and recognize better questions.
Source note: The Joyful Wisdom, aphorism 196; Thomas Common translation.
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“Theories thus become instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which we can rest.”
James describes theories as tools for moving inquiry and experience forward rather than final intellectual resting places that eliminate the need for further testing or revision.
Source note: Pragmatism, Lecture II, “What Pragmatism Means”; Project Gutenberg #5116. Capitalization has been normalized from the represented all-caps sentence while the wording is otherwise preserved.
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“Our business here is not to know all things, but those which concern our conduct.”
Locke places useful limits around intellectual ambition: human inquiry need not comprehend everything in order to guide life well, and knowing where understanding stops is part of using it responsibly.
Source note: An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Book I, Chapter I, section 6, Project Gutenberg #10615.
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“Pragmatism unstiffens all our theories, limbers them up and sets each one at work.”
James presents pragmatism as a method that makes theories answer to practical consequences and experience instead of allowing abstract formulations to remain rigid and self-sufficient.
Source note: Pragmatism, Lecture II, “What Pragmatism Means”; Project Gutenberg #5116. The sentence follows James’s claim that theories become instruments rather than final answers.
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“To define is to limit.”
Voice: Fictional character · Lord Henry Wotton
Definitions clarify ideas but can also narrow them, especially when a label is treated as the complete reality of a person or experience.
Source note: The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891 edition, Chapter 17; Lord Henry answers the Duchess of Monmouth’s question “What are you?” with “To define is to limit.”