Preston

“Perhaps you are beginning to see how essential a part of reading it is to be perplexed and know it. Wonder is the beginning of wisdom in learning from books as well as from nature. If you never ask yourself any questions about the meaning of a passage, you cannot expect the book to give you any insight you do not already possess.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“So if any man think philosophy and universality to be idle studies, he doth not consider that all professions are from thence served and supplied.  And this I take to be a great cause that hath hindered the progression of learning, because these fundamental knowledges have been studied but in passage. ”
― Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning

“As the philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright has put it, what modern science seems to show is not that we live in a world governed by a single systematic set of natural laws that apply at all times and in all places, but rather that we live in a ‘dappled world’ in which pockets of order emerge, or can be made to emerge, using a patchwork of different scientific theories (from physics, to biology, to economics), none of which is applicable across all domains.”
― Thomas Dixon, Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction

“Now, of course, most oratory deals with matters of probability, not certainty, and most evidence is in the realm of the probable, not the scientifically demonstrable”
― George A. Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times