Quotes About The Unanswerable

#1. Will the things that are being lost - the wilderness, the plants and animals, the skills, and all the others - leave too vast a gap in the human spirit? This is the unanswerable question. In the meantime, we must live in our century and wait, enduring somehow the unavoidable sadness.

David Ehrenfeld

#2. My mom was there to answer the unanswerable, to make sense of the fault in our life - and we got through that somehow; we came out on the other side. Now I'm 0 for 2 and I don't get any more pitches to swing at.

Daisy Whitney

#3. If men were ever to lose the appetite for meaning we call thinking, they would lose the capacity for asking all the unanswerable questions upon which every civilization is founded.

Hannah Arendt

#4. The unanswerable mysteries ... the attitude that all is uncertain ... to summarize it - the humility of the intellect.

Richard P. Feynman

#5. Oh! too convincing
dangerously dear
In woman's eye the unanswerable tear! That weapon of her weakness she can wield, To save, subdue
at once her spear and shield.

Lord Byron

#6. The trouble with Ian Mackenzie's questions was that he asked the unanswerable. And yet she should know how to answer - everyone should. But they couldn't, because everyone simply knew. Everyone except Ian.

Jennifer Ashley

#7. How womanly it is to ask the unanswerable at the moment impossible.

Christopher Morley

#8. If the Creator should take the line that I am born to work and not to sleep, I would agree that I am indeed born to work but I would also make the unanswerable point that I cannot work unless I also rest.

Soseki Natsume

#9. The only really interesting questions are the unanswerable ones.

Jacob Needleman

#10. In the terms in which you set it, the problem is unanswerable; but in the Kingdom of Heaven, those terms do not apply. You have asked the question in a form that is much too limited; the 'solution' must be brought in from outside your sphere of reference altogether.

Dorothy L. Sayers

#11. Christianity claims that the supernatural is as reasonable as the natural, that man himself is supernatural as truly as he is natural, and that the Bible is so clearly the word of God by proofs that are unanswerable, that it is unreasonable to disbelieve its divine truths.

Abbott Eliot Kittredge

#12. Down here everything was dark, but up there the gray conglomerate was being struck by the final light of day to an unanswerable brilliance.

Thomas Pynchon

#13. Under the summer roses When the flagrant crimson Lurks in the dusk Of the wild red leaves, Love, with little hands, Comes and touches you With a thousand memories, And asks you Beautiful, unanswerable questions.

Carl Sandburg

#14. War, for all its evil, is at any rate an unanswerable test of strength, like a try-your-grip machine. Great strength returns the penny, and there is no way of faking the result.

George Orwell

#15. Why Anglo-Saxon history? At the time it had struck the Gray Man as a foolish and unanswerable question. The things that drew him to that time period were surely unconscious and many-headed, diffused through his blood from a lifetime of influences.

Maggie Stiefvater

#16. So when I think of, what is the meaning of life, to me, that's not an eternal unanswerable question. To me it is in arms reach of me every day.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

#17. If you do not believe in a personal God, the question: 'What is the purpose of life?' is unaskable and unanswerable.

J.R.R. Tolkien

#18. Life is full of unanswerable questions including how to live and what to live for. It takes extreme courage to live honestly by a person's beliefs and never rest until a person achieves the type of life that he or she envisions.

Kilroy J. Oldster

#19. The most terrible of motives and the most unanswerable of responses: Because.

Victor Hugo

#20. Learning to sit with ambiguity can be a very important start at a life liberated from anxiety - and the way to do it is to resist the urge to chase answers to questions that may actually be unanswerable.

Kelly G. Wilson

#21. The question is unanswerable because its truth can't be tested.

Jen Nadol

#22. But your questions, which are unanswerable without exception, all spring from the same erroneous thinking.

Herman Hesse

#23. I'm against unanswerable concentrations of power, whether that be government or private industry or religious figures - anybody who is not accountable to the larger social climate or society for the power they wield, that concerns me. I'm very pro-democracy.

Daniel Suarez

#24. Jesus' coming is the final and unanswerable proof that God cares.

William Barclay

#25. In The Future of an Illusion, Freud made the obvious point that religion suffered from one incurable deficiency: it was too clearly derived from our own desire to escape from or survive death. This critique of wish-thinking is strong and unanswerable,

Christopher Hitchens

#26. What is the mind? The question is, of course, ultimately quite unanswerable. We do not and we cannot know what mind really is. We do not and cannot know, of that matter, what anything really is.

Aldous Huxley

#27. He that opposes his own judgment against the consent of the times ought to be backed with unanswerable truths; and he that has truth on his side is a fool as well as a coward if he is afraid to own it because of other men's opinions.

Daniel Defoe

#28. The door of the novel, like the door of the poem, also shuts. But not so fast, nor with such manic, unanswerable finality.

Sylvia Plath

#29. If you ask a negative, unanswerable question, you will get a negative, impractical answer. The question you ask determines the focus of your thinking, your focus determines your attitude, and your attitude determines your ability to take action.

Dorothy Leeds

#30. Fabricating answers to unanswerable questions is the domain of religion. A deity model is not the default alternative to a scientific mystery.

Graham Kendall

#31. I've always been a deep thinker. Since I was a kid I was delving into the very depths of why we existed, often driving my parents crazy with unanswerable questions.

Missy Higgins

#32. In the midst of excitement, grief, joy, and solitude, I remind myself every moment that the sole mission of my life is to find 'the ultimate questioner' - that unimaginable who has put me in this madness to answer an unanswerable question.

Kedar Joshi

#33. Those meaningless and unanswerable questions the minds keep returning to, like a tongue exploring a broken tooth.

Arthur C. Clarke

#34. We may not understand how the spirit works; but the effect of the spirit on the lives of men is there for all to see; and the only unanswerable argument for Christianity is a Christian life. No man can disregard a religion and a faith and a power which is able to make bad men good ...

William Barclay

#35. An agnostic position is one that leaves open the question whether there exists a god or gods, professing to find such a question unanswered or unanswerable. For the atheist, the question has been answered, and in the negative.

Jaroslav Pelikan

#36. Where did God come from? If we decide this is an unanswerable question why not save a step and conclude that the origin of the universe is an unanswerable question.

Carl Sagan

#37. If I can give you all of these real answers to the questions you assumed were big unanswerable ones, imagine the depth of the new set of questions awaiting on the other side of resolution.

Jeremy Vaeni

#38. The truth is that in our lives we are all going to encounter questions that should be answered, that deserve to be answered, and yet prove unanswerable.

John Green

#39. How many fluids should you take in daily? That is an unanswerable question with all of the variables that affect our fluid needs at any given time. If you meet anyone who can answer that question for you, run away quickly.

Matt Stone

#40. I don't spend much time thinking about whether God exists. I don't consider that a relevant question. It's unanswerable and irrelevant to my life, so I put it in the category of things I can't worry about.

Wendy Kaminer

#41. Perhaps the one unanswerable question in life is why so many of us choose to live in a fantasy world of our own creation that offers us nothing but pain.

James Rozoff

#42. The final tormenting, unanswerable question: what is 'success' in mourning?

Julian Barnes

#43. In the presence of real tragedy you feel neither pain nor joy nor hatred, only a sense of enormous space and time suspended, the great doors open to black eternity, the rising across the terrible field of that enormous, unanswerable question.

Michael Shaara

#44. Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask - half our great theological and metaphysical problems - are like that.

C.S. Lewis

#45. Of all eloquence a nickname is the most concise; of all arguments the most unanswerable.

William Hazlitt

#46. The nonconformist and the rebel say all manner of unanswerable things against the existing republic, but discover to our sense no plan of house or state of their own.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#47. Numeration comes from 1 and 2, not 0 and 1. The 2 is silence, unanswerable without the 1.
How: a means. Are: exist. You: subject, other?

Erin Moure

#48. The question is unanswerable, which is not to say futile. The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, of confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from ghosts and girded me against the sheer terror of disembodiment.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#49. You must bring every particle of your energy, unanswerable resolution, your best efforts, your persistent industry to your task or the best will not come out of you. You must back up your ambition by your whole nature, by unbounded enthusiasm and a determination to win which knows no failure.

Orison Swett Marden