“The universe is wider than our views of it.”
Reality exceeds any one viewpoint, so confidence in a perspective should leave room for what has not yet been seen.
Walden, Conclusion; Thoreau uses the sentence while arguing that familiar human views do not exhaust reality.
“To define is to limit.”
Definitions clarify ideas but can also narrow them, especially when a label is treated as the complete reality of a person or experience.
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.”
“He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.”
Understanding a position requires serious contact with competing arguments; familiarity with only one side can produce confidence without real comprehension.
On Liberty, Chapter 2; Mill argues for open discussion because opposing views expose weaknesses and sharpen understanding.
“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
The line separates events from the judgments people place on them, a useful distinction for thinking about perception and response.
Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2; Hamlet says this to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern while explaining that Denmark feels like a prison to him. The line is dramatic dialogue, not a detached psychological proposition by Shakespeare.
“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.
The Joyful Wisdom, aphorism 196; Thomas Common translation.
“It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.”
Intellectual flexibility requires seeing how the same issue can appear from more than one position before settling on a judgment.
Middlemarch; the narrator contrasts narrow judgment with considering a subject from several points of view.
“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.
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.
