Joseph Glanvill Quotes

That though we are certain of many things, yet that Certainty is no absolute Infallibility, there still remains the possibility of our being mistaken in all matters of humane Belief and Inquiry.

They that never peeped beyond the common belief in which their easy understandings were at first indoctrinated are strongly assured of the truth of their receptions.

The ignorant Looker-on can't imagine what the Limner means by those seemingly rude Lines and Scrawls, which he intends for the Rudiments of a Picture, and the Figures of Mathematick Operation are Nonsense, and Dashes at a Venture, to one uninstructed in Mechanicks. We are in the Dark to one another's Purposes and Intendments; and there are a thousand Intrigues in our little Matters, which will not presently confess their Design, even to sagacious Inquisitors

There is nothing in words and styles out suitableness that makes them acceptable and effective.

We have a mistaken notion of antiquity, calling that so which in truth is the world's nonage.

What's impossible to all humanity may be possible to the metaphysics and physiology of angels.

Justice is but the distributing to everything according to the requirements of its nature.

The understanding also hath its idiosyncrasies as well as other faculties.

The woman in us still prosecutes a deceit like that begun in the garden.

We cannot conceive how the Foetus is form'd in the Womb, nor as much as how a Plant springs from the Earth we tread on ... And if we are ignorant of the most obvious things about us, and the most considerable within our selves, 'tis then no wonder that we know not the constitution and powers of the creatures, to whom we are such strangers.

It may not be impossible, but that our Faculties may be so construed, as always to deceive us in the things we judge most certain and assured.

To converse at the distance of the Indes by means of sympathetic contrivances may be as natural to future times as to us is a literary correspondence.