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“The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit is to rouse, to startle it into sharp and eager observation.”
Pater values philosophy for sharpening attention: its practical intellectual service is to make perception more alert rather than allowing experience to pass unnoticed through habit.
Source note: The Renaissance, Conclusion; Project Gutenberg #2398. The line belongs to Pater’s historically controversial conclusion on experience and culture.
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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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“I may be wrong.”
The admission places a limit on Washington’s own policy claims and models intellectual uncertainty rather than presenting judgment as infallible.
Source note: The Future of the American Negro, Chapter VIII; Project Gutenberg #26507. The sentence appears in Washington’s closing policy discussion immediately after his summary of dangers and immediately before his qualification that he may also be in some degree right.
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“Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.”
Nietzsche warns that fixed certainty can block revision more effectively than an obvious falsehood because conviction can make contrary evidence harder to examine.
Source note: Human, All-Too-Human, Part I, aphorism 483, “The Enemies of Truth”; Helen Zimmern translation, 1909 edition.
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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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“What a long time it requires to know ourselves, and yet every one has more of this knowledge than he is willing to own.”
Self-knowledge develops slowly, and the second clause suggests that people may resist acknowledging what experience has already taught them about their own motives or limitations.
Source note: Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark; a first-person travel reflection on self-knowledge and experience.