Top 100 Quotes About The Unknowable
#1. PUBLISHER'S NOTE To seize the knowledge of the UNKNOWABLE needs a language, which is at once symbolically creative, revealingly poetic, infinitely plastic, luminously rhythmic, automatic perception of right relations and their inevitable descent of truth of idea, word and action.
Maa Krishna Sri Aurobindo
#2. It's one of our greatest human flaws: Arrogance. We look up and dare to assume we know, when the universe is unknowable.
Romina Russell
#3. As far as I know, only a small minority of mathematicians, even of those with Platonist views, accept the idea that there may be mathematical facts which are true but unknowable.
Abraham Robinson
#4. Nobody says these things - it's against the rules - but deep inside we know that we are, each of us, unknowable and ultimately alone, even when we love. Most
Adrian Barnes
#5. The desert wears ... a veil of mystery. Motionless and silent it evokes in us an elusive hint of something unknown, unknowable, about to be revealed. Since the desert does not act it seems to be waiting
but waiting for what?
Edward Abbey
#6. There was so much we had done to ourselves, so much we said in our sessions that our hearts were rent with sorrow. There is so much that happens to the human heart that is in the realm of the unthinkable, the unknowable, the unbearable. (95)
Robert Goolrick
#7. There may be things that are completely unknowable to us, so we must be careful not to treat the limits of our knowledge as sure guides to the limit of what there is.
Daniel Dennett
#9. I had known a couple of people who had died, but the loss of my mother contained something of the profoundly unknowable.
Andrew Solomon
#10. Most preachers say the nature of God is unknowable, but I'm certain of one thing at least. God almighty has a sense of humor.
Robert Ferrigno
#11. The only roads of enquiry there are to think of: one, that it is and that it is not possible for it not to be, this is the path of persuasion (for truth is its companion); the other, that it is not and that it must not be - this I say to you is a path wholly unknowable.
Parmenides
#12. Our civilization ... is not devaluing its awareness of the unknowable; nor is it deifying it. It is the first civilization that has severed it from religion and superstition. In order to question it.
Andre Malraux
#13. There is only ever one answer to the question what did you do with your life, and it's the same
fleeting and unknowable
for every one of us. I lived.
Marianne Wiggins
#14. It is this belief in a power larger than myself and other than myself which allows me to venture into the unknown and even the unknowable.
Maya Angelou
#15. By the time a student gets to college, he's spent a decade curating a bewilderingly diverse resume to prepare for a completely unknowable future. Come what may, he's ready--for nothing in particular.
Peter Thiel
#16. In the end, the only thing the true New Yorker knows about New York is that it is unknowable.
Pete Hamill
#17. Difference of opinion has never been sufficiently appreciated. It is the unexpected, the unknowable, the divine irrationality of life that saves us.
Florida Scott-Maxwell
#18. To say that we cannot know anything about God is to say something about God; it is to say that if there is a God, he is unknowable. But in that case, he is not entirely unknowable, for the agnostic certainly thinks that we can know one thing about him: That nothing else can be known about him.
J. Budziszewski
#19. Truth is, something exists, and everything exists for a reason. Regardless if the reason is known or unknown, knowable or unknowable, reason exists and can be named.
John K. Brown
#20. What do you love, Ari? What do you really love?"
"I love the desert. God, I love the desert."
"It's so lonely."
"Is it?"
Dante didn't understand. I was unknowable.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#21. We are born spiritual creatures, with a body to feel and a mind, to fathom the unknowable.
Nelly Mazloum
#22. Individualism. Campbell said, "All religions are true in that the metaphor is true." I think this means that religions are meant to be literary maps, not literal doctrines, a signpost to the unknowable, a hymn to the inconceivable. Edward Slingerland is a professor
Russell Brand
#23. Only fools and philosophers waste time on the unknowable.
Rex Stout
#24. For us scientists, on the other wing, life is not quite so simple. Because we learn the unknown. Unlike, hah-hah, our esteemed friends the philosophers, who learn the unknowable.
Ken MacLeod
#25. The short story narrates the moment when a dark door, long closed, is opened, when a forgotten error is unwittingly repeated, when the fabric of a life is revealed to have been woven from frail and dubious fiber over top of something unknowable and possibly very bad.
Michael Chabon
#26. The unknowable creates the greatest controversies.
Mason Cooley
#28. Beside her, Adam was once again retreating inside himself, most interested, as always, in the thing that remained unknowable to him: his own mind.
Maggie Stiefvater
#29. A universe that is unknowable is no fit place for a thinking being. The ideal universe for us is one very much like the universe we inhabit.
Carl Sagan
#30. Excuses are nothing more than neatly packaged reports on the messy, unknowable truth
Kelly Zekas
#31. The highest happiness of man ... is to have probed what is knowable and quietly to revere what is unknowable.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#32. what I feel is that spending my life trying to earn the favor of an unseen, unknown, and unknowable being who watches me from the sky is an exercise in sheer futility.
Brandon Sanderson
#33. In the absence of grace, there is only right and wrong, black and white, and the endless unknowable gray of performance.
Kara Tippetts
#34. He experienced a familiar comfort being in the presence of another person's unknowable pain. More than any landscape, this place felt like home.
Adam Haslett
#35. She was completely inside herself, and I realized I'd never seem her that way- unknowable and unknown. Exactly the way I felt. It seemed confirmation we were made for each other, however painfully.
Scott Hutchins
#36. The Good was not a form of reality. It was reality itself, ever-changing, ultimately unknowable in any kind of fixed, rigid way.
Robert M. Pirsig
#37. The world you experience, every day and night of your life, is transient. They only last for the blink of an eye, and then they dissolve back into that unknowable and formless eternity.
Frederick Lenz
#38. Religion. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.
Ambrose Bierce
#39. It was unknowable then, but so much of the progress that would define the 20th century, on both sides of the Atlantic, came down to the battle for a slice of beach only 6 miles long and 2 miles wide.
Barack Obama
#40. Music ... can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.
Leonard Bernstein
#41. You can't rationalize suffering - it's indeterminate - the real unknowable variable God substitutes in ...
John Geddes
#42. But one wants the idea of Death, you know, as something large and unknowable, something that allows a person to stretch himself out. Especially one wants it if one is tired. Or perhaps what one wants is simply a release from sensation, from all consciousness for ever ...
Stevie Smith
#43. We aren't haunted by the dead, but by the impossible reach of history. By how unknowable these others are to us, how unfathomable we'd be to them.
Rebecca Makkai
#44. Why did he care if Gansey and Ronan saw this? They already knew. They knew everything about him. What a lie unknowable was. The only person who didn't know Adam was himself.
Maggie Stiefvater
#45. We're forever teetering on the brink of the unknowable, and trying to understand what can't be understood.
Isaac Asimov
#46. Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.
H.L. Mencken
#47. And so Rebecca consigned herself to, not ignorance, but a judicious incuriosity: she decided, for the time being, to live with the constant, cryptic reminders that the scope of another person's soul could never be fully surveyed.
Dexter Palmer
#48. Nothing can temper the spirit of a warrior as much as the challenge of dealing with impossible people in positions of power. Only under those conditions can warriors acquire the sobriety and serenity to withstand the pressure of the unknowable.
Carlos Castaneda
#49. We stared out at the city that hummed and glittered like a computer chip deep in some unknowable machine, holding its secret like a poker hand
Janet Fitch
#50. When I look back at my childhood on the Ayrshire coast, I recall a basic devotion to the idea that human nature and national character are as unknowable as the weather's rationale.
Andrew O'Hagan
#51. Something was comforting about strangers - it seemed like they would exist forever as the same, unknowable mass.
Megan Boyle
#52. There's no telling how far down it goes," the captain says, the left side of his mustache twitching like the tail of a rat. "Fall into that unknowable abyss, and you'll be counting the days before you reach bottom.
Neal Shusterman
#53. Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.
Carl Sandburg
#54. Logos (The Biblical Manuscripts/Canon of Scriptures) & Rhema (The Person/Life/Words/Death/Resurrection of Jesus Christ): The 'special' & 'ultimate' revelation of God. Without these revelations God would be unsearchable, unknowable, and inscrutable."
~R. Alan Woods [2013]
R. Alan Woods
#55. If in the place of God we write "Reality", "Nature", "Unknowable", or "Zero", it matters not one whit; the equation is just as obscure; for all we have done is to replace a by b, c, d, or e, not knowing what these letters mean. The symbol has changed, but what it symbolizes remains as inscrutable.
J. F. C. Fuller
#56. The most important figures for management of any organization are unknown and unknowable.
W. Edwards Deming
#57. And there's no figuring out the unknowable. And there's some kind of oxymoron in that that's more moron than anything else.
Sarah Mussi
#58. You can't know people, only their names.
Marty Rubin
#59. She knew there was enormous penalty for what they had done to her - but she could not conceive of that, did not require that: she only wanted a little comfort, a bit of charity; with the awfulness, the unknowable, removed.
John Hawkes
#60. The secret belongs only to the Maker of good and faithful dogs.
John Buchan
#61. The entire hierarchy of angels
can best be described as an endlessly vast sphere of beings,
who surround an unknowable centre-point, which is called God.
Malcolm Godwin
#62. God is therefore unknowable. This is the fundamental premise of the Bible.
Leo Strauss
#63. 'Hamlet' is one of the most dangerous things ever set down on paper. All the big, unknowable questions like what it is to be a human being; the difference between sanity and insanity; the meaning of life and death; what's real and not real. All these subjects can literally drive you mad.
Michael Sheen
#64. Sometimes in life we fear a dark season that may never arrive, the underpinnings of those grave days set on some unknowable horizon. I had feared a lot of things that in the end proved futile - my
Addison Moore
#65. The scientist knows that the ultimate of everything is unknowable. No matter What subject you take, the current theory of it if carried to the ultimate becomes ridiculous. Time and space are excellent examples of this.
Charles Proteus Steinmetz
#66. Once the sin against God was the greatest sin; but God died, and these sinners died with him. To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful thing, and to esteem the entrails of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#67. He acquired the unknowable, variable depths; he could be anyone he wanted to be, and if he didn't like who he became, he could switch again, going in, going out. And who the fuck are you?
Aleksandar Hemon
#68. Where to now? Only the previously unknowable and unspoken will bring us there.
Kazim Ali
#69. No matter how long it's been or how far you've drifted, no matter how unknowable you might be, there were at least two people in the world whose job it was to see you, to find you, to recognize you and reel you back in. No matter what.
Jennifer E. Smith
#70. I cannot describe God in the same way that I cannot describe a picture I am holding millimeters from my eyes - the picture is made strange and unknowable not because it is distant but because it is so close.
Lauren F. Winner
#71. We must start from what seems a be a nullity, the unknowable, the inexpressible, the creative mystery wherein we are established. We cannot become more exact than this without introducing falsehood.
D.H. Lawrence
#72. Jim's father possessed such certain knowledge of the Unknowable as made for the righteousness of people in cottages without disturbing the ease of mind of those whom an unerring Providence enables to live in mansions.
Joseph Conrad
#73. Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops
H.L. Mencken
#74. In that moment, the future - uncontainable by any Theorem mathematical or otherwise - stretched out before Colin: infinite and unknowable and beautiful.
John Green
#75. That women are mysterious and unknowable is something every young man grows up believing. Men, on the other hand, never think of themselves as mysterious or confusing, and we are often at a loss as to why women want to figure us out.
Chris Abani
#76. No matter how careful you planned or did your research, the unknowable things would rise up out of the deep and overturn everything. But that was what had drawn him in, wasn't it? The depths of what we don't know?
Sharon Guskin
#77. If I photograph you in the shadows, you become mysterious, perhaps unknowable. If I light you from above, so your eyelashes throw shadows on your cheeks, you could be a Hollywood film star.
Whitney Otto
#78. Later that summer, as rain fell, such a moment shimmered and paused on the brink, and then began the ancient dance of numbers: two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and a new life took root and began to grow. And thus the generations past were joined to the unknowable future.
Mary Doria Russell
#79. One cannot be successful on visible figures alone ... the most important figures that one needs for management are unknown or unknowable, but successful management must nevertheless take account of them.
W. Edwards Deming
#80. There are three ingredients in the good life: learning, earning, and yearning. A man should be learning as he goes; and he should be earning bread for himself and others; and he should be yearning, too: yearning to know the unknowable.
Christopher Morley
#81. The negative way [of describing God] is a cardboard prop of Christianity to conceal its unknowable God. When this prop collapses, theistic agnosticism emerges, complete with its package of contradictions and non-sensical utterances.
George H. Smith
#82. We really wanted to know all the unknowable things about each other and how we were the same and how we were different, if we even were, maybe nobody is.
Miranda July
#83. Science is the art of creating suitable illusions which the fool believes or argues against, but the wise man enjoys for their beauty or their ingenuity, without being blind to the fact that they are human veils and curtains concealing the abysmal darkness of the unknowable
Carl Jung
#84. Perhaps life is actually more confusing and unknowable to an adult than a child, but grown-ups have learned to deceive themselves and act as if they understand what's going on; and some are elected to high office on the basis of their ability to create this impression.
Michael Leunig
#85. Logic only tells us what's there; it can't really address what isn't. Even the most devoted empiricist must admit that we have no hope of understanding the universe. Some things are unknowable.
Megan Chance
#86. The ultimate message of this book is terrifying: you may not know your own children, and, worse yet, your children may be unknowable to you. The stranger you fear may be your own son or daughter.
Sue Klebold
#87. What really makes us is beyond grasping. It's way beyond knowing. We give in to love ... because it gives us some sense of what is unknowable. Nothing else matters, not at the end.
Josephine Hart
#88. Reason is an effort to know the unknown and intuition is the happening of the unknowable. To penetrate the unknowable is possible, but to explain it is not. The feeling is possible, the explanation is not.
Osho
#89. If atheism is to be used to express the state of mind in which God is identified with the unknowable, and theology is pronounced to be a collection of meaningless words about unintelligible chimeras, then I have no doubt, and I think few people doubt.
Leslie Stephen
#90. Visibility limits your imagination of the ocean only as far as you can see, ten metres, fifteen at a stretch. But it's only in the utter black that you can feel the true scale, the volume and weight of that gaping unknowable drift between continents.
Lauren Beukes
#91. Something about the memory caused him to tear up, to think again about the unknowable nature of the people we love.
Jess Walter
#92. I studied him and realized that madness is the last defence of the mind when it can't hope to reconcile itself with events; I too was standing between routine and the unknowable.
Derek Raymond
#93. Investing is about making probabilistic decisions with limited information about an unknowable future. The variables are well known, as are the possible outcomes.
Barry Ritholtz
#94. I want the flashbacks to feel that once you're there they have their own unity, their own kind of atmospheric sensibility; I want the reader to be transported. The novel is a big, complicated, unknowable thing before it's written.
Chang-rae Lee
#95. I'm not straight, and I'm not gay. I'm not bisexual. I want out of the labels. I don't want my whole life crammed into a single word. A story. I want to find something else, unknowable, some place to be that's not on the map. A real adventure.
Chuck Palahniuk
#96. The beauty of our sky is really just a nice way for the earth to protect us from the terror of what's so vast and unknowable beyond. The boundlessness of the universe is disturbing when you think about it. It's too big and we're too small.
Nadia Bolz-Weber
#97. I never get used to it, the unknowable mystery of a person so suddenly, totally closed, snapped shut like a half-read novel.
Linda Barnes
#98. While the future is unknowable, the winds always blow in the direction of human progress.
Barack Obama
#100. She closed her eyes and tried desperately to swim through the mist that enveloped her memories. She was near here and then she wasn't. She was whole and then she was wounded. Forever scarred. And in between? Unknowable, it seemed. Absolutely unknowable.
Chris Bohjalian
