Unmatch'd at the bottle, unconquer'd in war, He drank his poor god-ship as deep as the sea; No tide of the Baltic e'er drunker than he.

They deem him their worst enemy who tells them the truth. -Plato, philosopher (427-347 BCE)

The learned man who does not act up to his knowledge is like a patient who describes the qualities of a medicine without using it or like a hungry man who describes the taste of a food without eating it.

The more man learned, the more he realized he did not know.

The most educated person in the world now has to admit — I shall not say confess — that he or she knows less and less but at least knows less and less about more and more.

Who in his mind has not probe the dark water?

It has always been my private conviction that any man who puts his intelligence up against a fish and loses had it coming.

Ideally, intellectual sparring partners “hone each other’s arguments so that they are sharper and better,” Yale historian Paul Sabin wrote. “The opposite happened with Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon.” As each man amassed more information for his own view, each became more dogmatic, and the inadequacies in their models of the world more stark.

"the man who told tales and spied upon his fellows would rise; but the man who minded his own business and did his work — why, they would "speed him up" till they had worn him out, and then they would throw him into the gutter."

His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read.

No one described him better than he did when someone accused him of being rich.
“No, not rich,” he said. “I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing.

The spirit of the depths took my understanding and all my knowledge and placed them at the service of the inexplicable and the paradoxical. He robbed me of speech and writing for everything that was not in his service, namely the melting together of sense and nonsense, which produces the supreme meaning.

A man can learn wisdom even from a foe

I went to interview a man with a high reputation for wisdom, because I felt that here if anywhere I should succeed in disproving the oracle and pointing out to my divine authority 'You said that I was the wisest of men, but here is a man who is wiser than I am.' Well, I gave a thorough examination to this person... and in conversation with him I formed the impression that although in many people's opinion, and especially in his own, he appeared to be wise, in fact he was not. Then when I began to try to show him that he only thought he was wise and was not really so, my efforts were resented both by him and by many of the other people present. However, I reflected as I walked away: 'Well, I am certainly wiser than this man. It is only too likely that neither of us has any knowledge to boast of; but he thinks that he knows something which he does not know, whereas I am quite conscious of my ignorance. At any rate it seems that I am wiser than he is to this small extent, that I do not think that I know what I do not know... [A]s I pursued my investigation at the god's command,... my honest impression was... that the people with the greatest reputations were almost entirely deficient, while others who were supposed to be their inferiors were much better qualified in practical intelligence.