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“If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.”
Intellectual confidence can be improved by beginning with questions rather than pretending certainty too early.
Source note: The Advancement of Learning, Book I; Bacon contrasts premature certainty with an inquiry willing to begin from doubt and work toward firmer knowledge.
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“Culture is then properly described not as having its origin in curiosity, but as having its origin in the love of perfection.”
Curiosity becomes more than collecting information when it is directed toward fuller development, better judgment, and a serious desire to improve understanding.
Source note: Culture and Anarchy; Arnold distinguishes idle curiosity from the pursuit of intellectual and moral perfection.
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“it is only when he has turned it over that he can be said to know it.”
Learning becomes knowledge, in this account, when material has been actively reconsidered and integrated rather than merely encountered or memorized.
Source note: The Art of Literature, section “On Thinking for Oneself,” T. Bailey Saunders translation; Project Gutenberg #10714. The preceding sentence says a person must first learn something before turning it over in the mind.
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“What we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy”
Pater recommends intellectual openness and repeated testing rather than easy conformity, making revision and exposure to new impressions part of an active critical life.
Source note: The Renaissance, Conclusion; Project Gutenberg #2398. The sentence names Comte, Hegel and one’s own orthodoxy in its immediate continuation.
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“The first thing that experience finds to do is to free us from the phantoms of the brain—those false notions that have been put into us in youth.”
Experience is presented as corrective: inherited assumptions and youthful projections can be revised when later encounters expose a mismatch between expectation and reality.
Source note: Counsels and Maxims, T. Bailey Saunders translation; Project Gutenberg #10715. The statement belongs to Schopenhauer’s broader, characteristically pessimistic discussion of age and experience.
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“experience, intellectual attainments, the practice of seeing to the bottom of things, and so a perfect mental vision, form in themselves a mass which continues to increase in size”
Schopenhauer describes accumulated experience and practiced inquiry as resources that can continue growing even while other capacities change with age.
Source note: Counsels and Maxims, T. Bailey Saunders translation; Project Gutenberg #10715. The passage appears in an age-related comparison of intellectual powers and accumulated material.