Plato defines man "the hunter of truth," "for science is a chase, and in a chase the pursuit is always of greater value than the game."

Parmenides did for science what Plato would later do for morality and aesthetics as well: he alerts us to the fact that opinions are just opinions, and they may differ widely. There may yet be a single truth, which need not be as anyone thought. To search for knowledge is to search for access to the truth, not to collect other people’s opinions, and philosophy conducts its unrelenting search for truth in the steps of Parmenides, by respecting sound and rigorous logical argument rather than the variegated tapestry of unexamined opinions.

The seeker after the truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them, but rather the one who suspends his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration, and not to the sayings of a human being whose nature is fraught with all kinds of imperfection and deficiency. Thus the duty of the man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself an enemy of all that he reads, and, applying his mind to the core and margins of its content, attack it from every side. He should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency.

While the average well adjusted man can make the reality that is generally accepted as truth into his own truth, the creative searcher after truth seeks and finds his own truth which he then wants to make general.

It would be better, I think, for the man who really seeks the truth not to ask what the poets say; rather, he should first learn the method of finding the scientific premises that I discussed in the second book; then he should train and exercise himself in this method; and when his training is sufficiently advanced, then, as he approaches each particular problem, he should enquire into the premise needed for proving it, which premise he should take from simple sense-perception, which from experience, whether drawn from life or from the arts, which from the truths clearly apprehended by the mind, in order to draw out from them the desired conclusion.

There is in the true man of science a desire stronger than the wish to have his beliefs upheld; namely, the desire to have them true.

To be sure, it is not the fruits of scientific research that elevate a man and enrich his nature, but the urge to understand, the intellectual work, creative or receptive.

The attempt to discover and promulgate the truth is nevertheless an obligation upon all scientists, one that must be persevered in no matter what the rebuffs—for otherwise what is the point in being a scientist?

to men and women there falls the task of exploring truth with their reason, and in this their nobility consists.

Ardent desire for knowledge, in fact, is the one motive attracting and supporting investigators in their efforts; and just this knowledge, really grasped and yet always flying before them, becomes at once their sole torment and sole happiness.… [A] man of science rises ever, in seeking truth; and if he never finds it in its wholeness, he discovers nevertheless very significant fragments; and these fragments of universal truth are precisely what constitutes science.

"All men", said Aristotle, "by nature desire to know." The pursuit of truth, the effort to comprehend, arrange, interpret some aspect or other of the universe we perceive, is an activity of humanity which justifies, rewards and motivates itself. The study of something for its own sake, for the sake of knowing, understanding, grasping it and for nothing else, is an essential characteristic of education, lower or higher, though more obviously of higher education. The content of education must therefore be that which men would wish to know for its own sake.

The ancient Greeks, as Plato reports, believed that we discover truth through "reminiscence," that is by "remembering," by intuitively searching into our own experience.

The more a person strives after God, the more earnest he will become--the les he will converse with men.