But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

I'm beginning to think it's very hard to know what to believe in this world.

All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie.

The fact that a great many people believe something is no guarantee of its truth.

Misconceptions play a prominent role in my view of the world.

History is a blood-drenched enigma and the world an error.

we are suffering from a plethora of surmise, conjecture, and hypothesis.

I don't pretend to understand the universe — it's much bigger than I am.

One always has exaggerated ideas about what one doesn't know.

I am beginning to believe that nothing can ever be proved. These are honest hypotheses which take the facts into account: but I sense so definitely that they come from me, and that they are simply a way of unifying my own knowledge. Not a glimmer comes from Rollebon's side. Slow, lazy, sulky, the facts adapt themselves to the rigour of the order I wish to give them; but it remains outside of them. I have the feeling of doing a work of pure imagination.

I look at the world and I see absurdity all around me. People do strange things constantly, to the point that, for the most part, we manage not to see it.

The world is immeasurably complex and the private stock of reason is small.

There's no escaping it-the world is full of lies. It is safest always to accept what one hears as if it were utterly commonplace and devoid of interest.

Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.