The Commonplace Book
Other people said it better.
For centuries, serious readers kept a commonplace book: a private ledger of borrowed sentences worth keeping. This is ours, kept in public. Every entry is real, sourced, and here because it taught us something about thinking in the gray.
On doubt
I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.
Oliver Cromwell, letter to the Church of Scotland, 1650
Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one.
Voltaire, letter to Frederick William of Prussia, 1770
The stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.
Bertrand Russell, The Triumph of Stupidity, 1933
The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right.
Learned Hand, The Spirit of Liberty, 1944
The older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment, and to pay more respect to the judgment of others.
Benjamin Franklin, speech to the Constitutional Convention, 1787
On holding two things
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up, 1936
Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.
John Keats, letter to his brothers, 1817
The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.
Niels Bohr
The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1973
We know the truth not only through our reason but also through our heart.
Blaise Pascal, Pensees
On seeing clearly
He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859
To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.
George Orwell, In Front of Your Nose, 1946
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 1871
The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming, 1919
Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.
Simone Weil, letter to Joe Bousquet, 1942
On questions
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, 1903
I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.
Richard Feynman, BBC Horizon interview, 1981
What do I know?
Michel de Montaigne, his motto, c. 1576
Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.
Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge, 1972
The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, 1978
The ledger stays open. New entries arrive through Margin Notes, where most of them are argued about first.