Top 100 Quotes About The Incomprehensible
#1. Find the stories that help you comprehend the incomprehensible. Find the stories that make you stronger.
Eleanor Davis
#2. You can't explain the unknown in terms of the incomprehensible.
Theodore Schick
#3. A man must cling to the belief that the incomprehensible is comprehensible; otherwise he would not try to fathom it.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#4. Spectacular sporting events are bread & circuses. The Superbowl, for instance, is anything but "super". It is a Petri dish under the lens of mediaocrity, where surveillance of the spectators is just as mind numbing as the incomprehensible homo-erotic beefcake ballet being enacted on the pitch
Dean Cavanagh
#5. If we make a couple of discoveries here and there we need not believe things will go on like this for ever. Just as we hit water when we dig in the earth, so we discover the incomprehensible sooner or later.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#6. Of a terrible, the incomprehensible way one's most banal, incidental, even comical choices archive the most disproportionate result.
Philip Roth
#7. A cultural snob is someone who claims to be familiar with the incomprehensible.
Igor Stravinsky
#8. After all, humans - especially adult ones - want to believe the most mundane truths possible. They need to, in order to stop their world-views, and their sanity, from capsizing and plunging them into the vast ocean of the incomprehensible.
Matt Haig
#9. An economist is a man who states the obvious in terms of the incomprehensible.
Alfred A. Knopf
#10. I do not want to found anything on the incomprehensible. I want to know whether I can live with what I know and with that alone.
Albert Camus
#11. The function of Theology? The recitation of the incomprehensible by the unspeakable to pick the pockets of the unthinking.
Robert Anton Wilson
#12. In my solitude I have pondered much on the incomprehensible subjects of space, eternity, life and death.
Alfred Russel Wallace
#13. Explanation separates us from astonishment, which is the only gateway to the incomprehensible.
Eugene Ionesco
#14. People often do the incomprehensible. It's what makes them so fascinating.
J.D. Robb
#15. As masks are the sign that there are faces, words are the sign that there are things. And these things are the sign of the incomprehensible.
Marcel Schwob
#16. Go through what is comprehensible and you conclude that only the incomprehensible gives any light.
Saul Bellow
#17. Philosophy, the love of Wisdom, is at the very bottom defence against the incomprehensible.
Oswald Spengler
#18. You can't make the incomprehensible comprehensible without losing it completely
Max Frisch
#19. Occasionally, merely for the pleasure of being cruel, we put unoffending Frenchmen on the rack with questions framed in the incomprehensible jargon of their native language, and while they writhed, we impaled them, we peppered them, we scarified them, with their own vile verbs and participles.
Mark Twain
#20. Secrets of the incomprehensible wisdom of God, unknown to any besides Himself! Man, sprung up only of a few days, wants to penetrate, and to set bounds to it. Who is it that hath known the mind of the Lord, or who hath been His counselor?
Jeanne Marie Bouvier De La Motte Guyon
#21. The real world is devoid of narratives, after all. Narratives are just a thing that our brains do with facts in order to draw a line around the incomprehensible largeness of reality and wrestle it into something learnable and manipulable. Existence is devoid of plot, theme, and most of all moral.
Charles Stross
#22. Egoism , which is the moving force of the world, and altruism , which is its morality , these two contradictory instincts , of which one is so plain and the other so mysterious, cannot serve us unless in the incomprehensible alliance of their irreconcilable antagonism.
Joseph Conrad
#23. "And" seems to me closest. "And" nods toward the real. And "and" is the path to perspective. To feel and see from more angles and know all of them true, even the incomprehensible ones, even the ones that contradict one another.
Jane Hirshfield
#25. Education: the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent.
John Maynard Keynes
#26. In his recent book Unexplainable, he said, "[God] wants to do the inconceivable, the uncommon, the unexpected, the remarkable, the incomprehensible, so that He - God - is the only explanation for what occurs in our lives."3
James MacDonald
#27. The senses are our bridge between the incomprehensible and the comprehensible.
August Macke
#28. The family is a vast project, so enormous and important, both for us personally and for the world at large, that it's worth putting up with all the incomprehensible cares of life, all that superfluous pain, for its sake.
Sandor Marai
#29. He has, He reminds us, "graven thee upon the palms of my hands" (1 Nephi 21:16). Considering the incomprehensible cost of the Crucifixion, Christ is not going to turn His back on us now.
Jeffrey R. Holland
#30. Infinity is a way to describe the incomprehensible to the human mind. In a way, it notates a mystery. That kind of mystery exists in relationships. A lifetime is not enough to know someone else. It provides a brief glimpse.
Simon McBurney
#31. Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication, which is baffling
the incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather than admiration.
Niklaus Wirth
#32. I suspect that the word (art) was invented by second-rate intelligences to describe the incomprehensible activities of their betters.
Jack Vance
#33. A novel can grant humanity even to those who act inhumanely, and by making men and women of monsters, it can offer not only a ground-level view of a particular conflict, but a descent into the substratum of human nature capable of the incomprehensible.
Anthony Marra
#34. That deep emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.
Albert Einstein
#35. Whatever people in general do not understand, they are always prepared to dislike; the incomprehensible is always the obnoxious.
Letitia Landon
#36. He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is detestable. And it has a fascination, too, which goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination
you know.
Joseph Conrad
#37. Take from the church the miraculous, the supernatural, the incomprehensible, the unreasonable, the impossible, the unknowable, the absurd, and nothing but a vacuum remains.
Robert G. Ingersoll
#38. Human beings are like timid punctuation marks sprinkled among the incomprehensible sentences of life.
Jean Giraudoux
#39. 'I have nothing to offer you but a lifetime's worth of failures and misfortune,' Sergio said with damp eyes,
'but they are yours if you want them.'
And for some reason buried deep in the incomprehensible mystery that is woman, she did want them. Very much.
Josh Wagner
#40. never held a book before and reverently turned the pages, looking at the incomprehensible print and wishing she could understand the meaning of the words.
Henri drifted close to peer over her arm. "What's that?"
"A book. There be stories in here.
Debra Holland
#41. He thought of the incomprehensible sequence of changes and chances that make up
a life, all the beauties and horrors and absurdities whose conjunctions create the
uninterpretable and yet divinely significant pattern of human destiny.
Aldous Huxley
#42. I indulge prayer when the world seems incomprehensible and only a plea to the incomprehensible makes sense.
James Ellroy
#43. There is an increasingly pervasive sense not only of failure, but of futility. The legislative process has become a cruel shell game and the service system has become a bureaucratic maze, inefficient, incomprehensible, and inaccessible.
Elliot Richardson
#44. The so-called Transcendentalists are not the only people who deal in Transcendentals. On the contrary, we seem to see that the Utilitarians,
the every-day world's people themselves, far transcend those inferior Transcendentalists by their own incomprehensible worldly maxims.
Herman Melville
#45. For those who have lived on the edge of poverty all their lives, the semblance of poverty affected by the affluent is both incomprehensible and insulting.
Lillian B. Rubin
#47. Barrick could only stand and watch them go, alone with the tribe of incomprehensible strangers who lived now in his blood and his thoughts.
Tad Williams
#48. One of the monks was doing something incomprehensible at the altar, and the others would occasionally chant a few phrases of mumbo jumbo.
Ken Follett
#49. The atoms that make up your body were once forged inside stars, and the causes of even the smallest event are virtually infinite and connected with the whole in incomprehensible ways.
Eckhart Tolle
#50. Putting is a fascinating, aggravating, wonderful, terrible and almost incomprehensible part of the game of golf.
Arnold Palmer
#51. I have the instinctive reaction of a Western man when confronted with sublimely incomprehensible. I grab my camera and start to photograph it
Douglas Adams
#52. It was a day of winter east wind, and I had now for some time entered into that dreary fellowship with the winds and their changes, so little known, so incomprehensible by the healthy. The north and east owned a terrific influence, making all pain more poignant, all sorrow sadder.
Charlotte Bronte
#53. You look back in time to when there was slavery and you think 'how did people even remotely believe that this was a good idea?'.
It's incomprehensible for us to think of what the mindset was 100 or 200 years ago. I hope to make the present as incomprehensible to the future as the past is to us.
Stefan Molyneux
#54. The danger to the country, to Europe, to her vast Empire, which is involved in having all these great interests entrusted to the shaking hand of an old, wild, and incomprehensible man of 82, is very great!
Queen Victoria
#55. Kindness is a source of relief to the soul of the giver, creating a sense of fortitude that is incomprehensible to those who do not know what kindness is all about.
Janvier Chouteu-Chando
#56. When the nature of the thing is incomprehensible, I can acquiesce in the Scripture: but when the signification of words is incomprehensible, I cannot acquiesce in the authority of a Schoolman.
Thomas Hobbes
#57. My chief reason for choosing Christianity was because the mysteries were incomprehensible. What's the point of revelation if we could figure it out ourselves? If it were wholly comprehensible, then it would just be another philosophy.
Mortimer Adler
#58. It's only when I say that everything is incomprehensible that I come as close as possible to understanding the only thing it is given to us to understand.
Eugene Ionesco
#59. The passion for being for ever with one's fellows, and the fear of being left for a few hours alone, is to me wholly incomprehensible. I can entertain myself quite well for weeks together, hardly aware, except for the pervading peace, that I have been alone at all.
Elizabeth Von Arnim
#60. We sinned for no reason but an incomprehensible lack of love, and He saved us for no reason but an incomprehensible excess of love.
Peter Kreeft
#61. The pleasure of the mulch pile is incomprehensible. I wouldn't care if they just hauled the mulch to the landfill somewhere. Obviously, grass clippings are biodegradable, but when they're bunched together at the landfill, they become badly influenced by other garbage.
Paula Poundstone
#62. He so tempers the outcome of events according to his incomprehensible plan that the prayers of the saints, which are a mixture of faith and error, are not nullified."185
Timothy J. Keller
#63. To believe that the United States is post-racial requires an almost incomprehensible inability or unwillingness to stare truth in the face.
Tim Wise
#64. The world is incomprehensible. We won't ever understand it; we won't ever unravel its secrets. Thus we must treat the world as it is: a sheer mystery.
Carlos Castaneda
#65. In all church discussions we are apt to forget the second Testament is avowedly only a supplement. Jesus came to complete the law and the prophets. Christianity is completed Judaism, or it is nothing. Christianity is incomprehensible without Judaism, as Judaism is incomplete without Christianity.
Benjamin Disraeli
#66. It has always been incomprehensible for me: people are ashamed of the poverty but aren't ashamed of the wealth.
Faina Ranevskaya
#67. The consequence of a world full of nuclear powers to me is so incomprehensible in terms of the dangers that that implies.
Lawrence Eagleburger
#68. Poetry connects us to what is deepest in ourselves. It gives us access to our own feelings, which are often shadowy, and engages us in the art of making meaning. It widens the space of our inner lives. It is a magical, mysterious, inexplicable (though not incomprehensible) event in language.
Edward Hirsch
#69. He alone knows to whom He will reveal Himself under which form. By what path and in what manner He attracts any particular man to Himself with great force is incomprehensible to the human intellect. The Path differs indeed for different pilgrims.
Anandamayi Ma
#70. And I gazed at these forms incomprehensible to me, but which revealed the immortal thoughts of the greatest shatterer of dreams who had ever dwelt on earth.
Guy De Maupassant
#71. To think that all we've known to be true is not necessarily an absolute is unsettling and almost incomprehensible, and so to walk the road of acceptance and peace often takes more courage than the way of the warrior.
R.A. Salvatore
#72. Well, it is very odd of you to threaten to throw your friends out of the window, I must say," remarked Juliana.
He smiled. "Not at all. It is only my friends that I would throw out of the window."
"Dear me!" said Juliana, finding the male sex incomprehensible.
-Chapter XIII
Georgette Heyer
#73. In our sad condition our only consolation is the expectancy of another life. Here below all is incomprehensible.
Martin Luther
#74. In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent.
Joseph Conrad
#75. I think the biggest challenge for Somalia has been the sense that it is a hopeless case of incomprehensible internal conflicts and there is nothing we can do.
Jan Egeland
#76. Alexey Alexandrovitch was standing face to face with life, with the possibility of his wife's loving someone other than himself, and this seemed to him very irrational and incomprehensible because it was life itself.
Leo Tolstoy
#77. No more verbally incomprehensible no more devoid of the vision thing and no more the cautious pragmatist proudly displaying the virtues of tradition and the advantages of biological seniority.
Bob Dole
#78. May the conscience and the common sense of the peoples be awakened, so that we may reach a new stage in the life of nations, where people will look back on war as an incomprehensible aberration of their forefathers!
Albert Einstein
#79. For the writer, the serial killer is, abstractly, an analogue of the imagination's caprices and amorality; the sense that, no matter the dictates and even the wishes of the conscious social self, the life or will or purpose of the imagination is incomprehensible, unpredictable.
Joyce Carol Oates
#80. Of all the criminal cases in which Philo Vance participated as unofficial investigator, the most sinister, the most bizarre, the seemingly most incomprehensible, and certainly the most terrifying was the one that followed the famous Greene murders.
S. S. Van Dine
#81. His glory Jesus Christ does not consist in beingplaced without the confines of history; a more real worship is paid to him, by showing that the whole of history is incomprehensible without him.
Ernest Renan
#82. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest.
Annie Dillard
#83. He had a penchant for idioms, sayings, proverbs and the like; some of which he invented or used in a way that was incomprehensible to me,
Javier Marias
#84. God is represented as infinite, eternal, incomprehensible; he is contained under every predicate in non that the logic of ignorance could fabricate.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#85. All grandeur, all power, and all subordination to authority rests on the executioner: he is the horror and the bond of human association. Remove this incomprehensible agent from the world and at that very moment order gives way to chaos, thrones topple and society disappears.
Joseph De Maistre
#86. What happens to us either happens to everyone or only to us: in the first instance it's banal; in the second it's incomprehensible.
Fernando Pessoa
#87. When I came to the West and heard about knights slaying dragons, I was shocked. In Tibet, the dragon symbolizes incomprehensible profundity.
Sakyong Mipham
#88. All human language draws its nature and value from the fact that it both comes from the Word of God and is chosen by God to manifest himself. But this relationship is secret and incomprehensible, beyond the bounds of reason and analysis.
Jacques Ellul
#89. Depression is a disorder of mood, so mysteriously painful and elusive in the way it becomes known to the self
to the mediating intellect
as to verge close to being beyond description. It thus remains nearly incomprehensible to those who have not experienced it in its extreme mode.
William Styron
#90. People who've had any genuine spiritual experience always know that they don't know. They are utterly humbled before mystery. They are in awe before the abyss of it all, in wonder at eternity and depth, and a Love, which is incomprehensible to the mind.
Richard Rohr
#91. Scotland is a picturesque country where the people are friendly yet completely incomprehensible. Also, the national delicacy is a sheep's stomach filled with its liver, lungs, and heart.
Adam Schlesinger
#92. I certainly wanted to write a book that was honest about New Orleans without explaining it to death, so much so that the first draft contained references absolutely incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't lived here for several years.
Poppy Z. Brite
#93. Look deeply at yourself, and see in yourself the divine architect's incomprehensible art!
Bryant McGill
#94. A miracle is not the breaking of physical laws, but rather represents laws which are incomprehensible to us.
G.I. Gurdjieff
#95. The Koran claims for itself that it is "mubeen," or clear. But if you look at it, you will notice that every fifth sentence or so simply doesnt make sense. Many Muslims and Orientalists will tell you otherwise, of course, but the fact is that a fifth of the Koranic text is just incomprehensible.
Gerd R. Puin
#96. People of a television culture need "plain language" both aurally and visually, and will even go so far as to require it in some circumstances by law. The Gettysburg Address would probably have been largely incomprehensible to a 1985 audience.
Neil Postman
#97. But eternity is not temporality at a standstill. What is oppressive about the concept of the eternal is the justification, incomprehensible to us, that time must undergo in eternity and the logical conclusion of that, the justification of ourselves as we are.
Franz Kafka
#98. Until it is clearly proved that the Universe was created, we may reasonably suppose that it has endured from all eternity. In a case where two propositions are diametrically opposite, the mind believes that which is less incomprehensible:
Christopher Hitchens
#99. The allegiance of the citizen, in the only sense in which the word can be tolerated in a republic, is due to the law. What idea other men may have of a law higher than the supreme law, I know not. Like the notion of the Stoics concerning Fate, it is perfectly incomprehensible.
James L. Petigru
#100. I would be astonished to find myself in a state of darkness, pleasant and restful enough for the eyes, and even more, perhaps, for my mind, to which it appeared incomprehensible, without a cause, a matter dark indeed.
Marcel Proust
