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realize that you are as ignorant as the average person is in every other area of knowledge in which you are not expert.

— Skeptics' Guide to the Universe by Steven Novella, Bob Novella, Cara Santa Maria, and 2 others

just as with memory, be wary of saying, “I know what I saw.” Hmm… no, you don’t. You have a constructed memory of a constructed perception based on filtered partial sensation and altered by your knowledge and expectations.

— Skeptics' Guide to the Universe by Steven Novella, Bob Novella, Cara Santa Maria, and 2 others

Your real-time perceptions are not a passive recording of the outside world. Rather, they are an active construction of your brain. This means that there is an imperfect relationship between outside reality and the model of that reality crafted by your brain. Obviously, the model works well enough for us to interact with that reality, and that’s actually the idea. Constructed perception is not optimized for accuracy but rather for functionality.

— Skeptics' Guide to the Universe by Steven Novella, Bob Novella, Cara Santa Maria, and 2 others

Whenever you find yourself saying, “I clearly remember…” stop! No, you don’t. You have a constructed memory that is likely fused, contaminated, confabulated, personalized, and distorted. And each time you recall that memory you reconstruct it, changing it further.

— Skeptics' Guide to the Universe by Steven Novella, Bob Novella, Cara Santa Maria, and 2 others

Most people have had the experience of being in a heated conversation, and then once the dust settles and everyone tries to resolve the discrepancies, it becomes clear that each person has a different memory of the conversation that just happened. You may be tempted in these situations to assume your memory is accurate and everyone else is losing their mind. Of course, that’s what everyone else is thinking about you.

— Skeptics' Guide to the Universe by Steven Novella, Bob Novella, Cara Santa Maria, and 2 others

Scientific skepticism, a term first popularized by Carl Sagan, is an overall approach to knowledge that prefers beliefs and conclusions that are reliable and valid to ones that are comforting or convenient,

— Skeptics' Guide to the Universe by Steven Novella, Bob Novella, Cara Santa Maria, and 2 others

The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what’s true. —Carl Sagan

— Skeptics' Guide to the Universe by Steven Novella, Bob Novella, Cara Santa Maria, and 2 others

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.

— The Call of Cthulhu by H.P. Lovecraft

In Newton’s time it was possible for an educated person to have a grasp of the whole of human knowledge, at least in outline. But since then, the pace of the development of science has made this impossible.

— A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

There are at least three different arrows of time. First, there is the thermodynamic arrow of time, the direction of time in which disorder or entropy increases. Then, there is the psychological arrow of time. This is the direction in which we feel time passes, the direction in which we remember the past but not the future. Finally, there is the cosmological arrow of time. This is the direction of time in which the universe is expanding rather than contracting.

— A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

Why do we remember the past but not the future?

— A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired.

— A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

a machine that was powerful enough to accelerate particles to the grand unification energy would have to be as big as the Solar System—and would be unlikely to be funded in the present economic climate.

— A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking