Nicholas Of Cusa Quotes

#1. But if you search further, you find in yourself nothing similar to God, but rather you affirm that God stands above all this as cause, origin, and the light of life of your intellective soul.

Nicholas Of Cusa

#2. The fact is that man has no longing for any other nature but desires only to be perfect in his own.

Nicholas Of Cusa

#3. Time is to eternity as an image is to its exemplar, and those things which are temporal bear a resemblance to those things which are eternal.

Nicholas Of Cusa

#4. All we know of the truth is that the absolute truth, such as it is, is beyond our reach.

Nicholas Of Cusa

#5. A given circle cannot be so true that a truer one cannot be found; and the movement of a sphere at one moment is never precisely equal to its movement at another, nor does it ever describe two circles similar and equal, even if from appearances the opposite may seem true.

Nicholas Of Cusa

#6. In humility alone lies true greatness, and knowledge and wisdom are profitable only in so far as our lives are governed by them.

Nicholas Of Cusa

#7. The intellect alone has an eye for viewing an essence, which it cannot see except in the true Cause, which is the Fount of all desire. Moreover, since all things seek to exist, then in all things there is desire from the Fount-of-desire, wherein being and desire coincide in the Same.

Nicholas Of Cusa

#8. Through itself the soul arrives at all harmony that is perceptible in otherness-just as through what is internal the soul arrives at what is external.

Nicholas Of Cusa

#9. Nothing could be more beneficial for even the most zealous searcher for knowledge than his being in fact most learned in that very ignorance which is peculiarly his own; and the better a man will have known his own ignorance, the greater his learning will be.

Nicholas Of Cusa

#10. In creating the world, God used arithmetic, geometry, and likewise astronomy.

Nicholas Of Cusa

#11. Love is subsequent to knowledge and to the thing known, for nothing unknown is loved.

Nicholas Of Cusa

#12. Nor is the darkness of colour a proof of the earth's baseness; for the brightness of the sun, which is visible to us, would not be perceived by anyone who might be in the sun.

Nicholas Of Cusa

#13. Since beings desire to exist, because to exist is a good thing: they desire the One without which they cannot exist.

Nicholas Of Cusa

#14. For reason's measurements, which attain unto temporal things, do not attain unto things that are free from time-just as hearing does not attain unto whatever is not-audible, even though these things exist and are unattainable by hearing.

Nicholas Of Cusa

#15. The rational is apprehended through the intellect, however, the intellect is not found in the region of the rational; the intellect is as the eye and the rational as the colors.

Nicholas Of Cusa

#16. All visible things would not claim as their king some color of their region, which is actually among the visible things of this region, but rather would say, he is the highest possible beauty of the most lucid and perfect color.

Nicholas Of Cusa

#17. God says to man: 'Be thou thyself, and I shall be thine.'

Nicholas Of Cusa

#18. There will be a machina mundi whose centre, so to speak, is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere, for God is its circumference and centre and He is everywhere and nowhere.

Nicholas Of Cusa

#19. Divinity is in all things in such a way that all things are in divinity.

Nicholas Of Cusa

#20. For all the [body's] members seek nothing except inseparable union with the intellect, as with their beginning, ultimate good, and everlasting life.

Nicholas Of Cusa

#21. That that which is neither true nor truthlike does not exist. Now, whatever exists, exists otherwise in something else than it exists in itself.

Nicholas Of Cusa

#22. All things are in the intended endpoint, and this mode of being is called will or desire.

Nicholas Of Cusa

#23. An external thing that is knowable [is knowable] by means of something internal that is consubstantial [with the rational soul].

Nicholas Of Cusa

#24. Number, in consequence, includes all things that are capable of comparison. It is not then in quantity only that number produces proportion; it produces it in all things that are capable of agreement and differences in any way at all, whether substantially or accidentally.

Nicholas Of Cusa

#25. Within itself the soul sees all things more truly than as they exist in different things outside itself. And the more it goes out unto other things in order to know them, the more it enters into itself in order to know itself.

Nicholas Of Cusa