Dark Knowledge Quotes & Sayings

Optimism hopes for the best without any guarantee of its arriving and is often no more than whistling in the dark. Christian hope, by contrast, is faith looking ahead to the fulfillment of the promises of God, as when the Anglican burial service inters the corpse 'in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ.' Optimism is a wish without warrant; Christian hope is a certainty, guaranteed by God himself. Optimism reflects ignorance as to whether good things will ever actually come. Christian hope expresses knowledge that every day of his life, and every moment beyond it, the believer can say with truth, on the basis of God's own commitment, that the best is yet to come. — J.I. Packer

So dark. Endless darkness, eternal. It was not the absence of light that was so frightening as the absence of thought, of knowledge, of comprehension. Our lives, the lives of the living will go on. The sun shines, the moons rise, we will laugh and talk, and he will know nothing, feel nothing. Nothing.
So final. It will come to us all. It will come to me. — Tracy Hickman

A mind without clarity is like a dark cloudy sky. — Debasish Mridha

By and large over time, pain turns to grief, grief turns to silence, and silence turns to lonesomeness, as vast and bottomless as the dark oceans ... You think you cannot live anymore. You think that the light of your soul has been put out and that you will stay in the dark forever. But when you are engulfed by such solid darkness, when you have both eyes closed to the world, a third eye opens in your heart. And only then do you come to realize that eyesight conflicts with inner knowledge. No eye sees so clear and sharp as the eye of love. After grief comes another season, another valley, another you. And the lover who is nowhere to be found, you start to see everywhere. — Elif Shafak

You may think you're not blind, but can you see in the dark? — Luis Marques

You find your genius by looking in the mirror of your life. Your visible image shows your inner truth, so when you're estimating others, what you see is what you get. It therefore becomes critically important to see generously, or you will get only what you see; to see sharply, so that you discern the mix of traits rather than a generalized lump; and to see deeply into dark shadows, or else you will be deceived. — James Hillman

But karma is not in fact a material accumulation, and does not depend on externals; rather its power to condition us depends on the obstacles that impede our knowledge. If we compare our karma and the ignorance that creates it to a dark room, knowledge of the primordial state would be like a lamp, which, when lit in the room, at once causes the darkness to disappear, enlightening everything. In the same way, if one has the presence of the primordial state, one can overcome all hindrances in an instant. — Namkhai Norbu

Perhaps, if I use my reason in good faith, I may suceed in discovering some ray of probability to lighten me in the dark night of nature. And if this faint dawn which I seek does not come to me, I shall be consoled to think that my ignorance is invincible; that knowledge which is forbidden me is assuredly useless to me; and that the great Being will not punish me for having sought a knowledge of him and failed to obtain it. — Voltaire

Thank you."
"Whatever."
"V, seriously - "
"Make that fuck you." When there was no slappy comeback, he looked up.
Shit. Butch was standing right in front of him, the cop's hazel eyes dark with a knowledge V wished the guy didn't have.
V dropped his stare to his lighter. "Whatever, cop, they're just knives."
The black tip of the dagger slid under V's chin and angled his head up. As he was forced to meet Butch's stare, V's body tensed. Then trembled.
With the weapon linking them, Butch said, "They're beautiful. — J.R. Ward

My name isn't Offred, I have another name, which nobody uses now because it's forbidden. I tell myself it doesn't matter, your name is like your telephone number, useful only to others; but what I tell myself is wrong, it does matter. I keep the knowledge of this name like something hidden, some treasure I'll come back to dig up, one day. I think of this name as buried. This name has an aura around it, like an amulet, some charm that's survived from an unimaginably distant past. I lie in my single bed at night, with my eyes closed, and the name floats there behind my eyes, not quite within reach, shining in the dark. — Margaret Atwood

I think the future of this planet depends on humans, not technology, and we already have the knowledge - we're kind of at the endgame with knowledge. But we're nowhere near the endgame when it comes to our perception. We still have one foot in the dark ages. — Graham Hawkes

The optimization of cosmic darkness and of Earth's location within the dark universe that sacrifices neither the material needs of human beings nor their capacity to gain knowledge about the universe reflects masterful engineering at a level far beyond human capability- and even imagination. It testifies of a supernatural, superintelligent, superpowerful, fully deliberate Creator. — Hugh Ross

the past, like the future, is dark. There is so much we don't know, and to write truthfully about a life, your own or your mother's, or a celebrated figure's, an event, a crisis, another culture is to engage repeatedly with those patches of darkness, those nights of history, those places of unknowing. They tell us that there are limits to knowledge, that there are essential mysteries, starting with the notion that we know just what someone thought or felt in the absence of exact information. Often — Rebecca Solnit

Asleep he'd been more of a temptation than she wanted. He'd looked relaxed and gentle.
Inviting.
Awake he looked dangerous.
And still inviting.
She would give the goddess credit, Artemis had exquisite taste in men; and to Tabitha's knowledge, and according to Amanda's words, there was no such thing as an ugly Dark-Hunter. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Some knowledge comes to us like a seed ... Then, we have to bury it and leave it alone in the dark. When it's time, it comes up again and grows. — Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl

It was so easy to disappear, so easy to deny knowledge, so very easy in the smoke and din to mask that something dark had taken root. This was Chicago, on the eve of the greatest fair in history. — Erik Larson

I didn't like what that word-'childhood'-conjured up, or rather, I didn't like the way most people use it: that presumption of innocence and starry-eyed wonder. The only good thing about childhood is that no one really remembers it, or rather, that's the only thing about it to like: this forgetting. What else could possibly lie beneath that blissful oblivion but shame: a dark knowledge of that terrible badge of weakness, that inescapable servitude (bearable only thanks to the slow revelation that we could inflict cruelty and evil on the weaker kids), a sickening awareness that just about everything there is to understand was beyond us, made even worse by the lies and inaccuracies that adults feel entitled to spread around, deliberately, or because they don't know any better, about themselves or about the nature of reality? — Jean-Christophe Valtat

Perhaps no theoretical man can be equal to such a burden: to feel knowledge as power when one's mind reshapes the world irrevocably, to see the light of truth as the agent of some dark majesty, is not grace but ordeal. — Algis Valiunas

It's not by accident that people talk of a state of confusion as not being able to see the wood for the trees, or of being out of the woods when some crisis is surmopunted. It is a place of loss, confusion, terror and anger, a place where you can, like Dante, find yourself going down into Hell. But if it's any comfort, the dark wood isn't just that. It's also a place of opportunity and adventure. It is the place in which fortunes can be reversed, hearts mended, hopes reborn. — Amanda Craig

Upon This Age, That Never Speaks Its Mind

Upon this age, that never speaks its mind,
This furtive age, this age endowed with power
To wake the moon with footsteps, fit an oar
Into the rowlocks of the wind, and find
What swims before his prow, what swirls behind -
Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour,
Rains from the sky a meteoric shower
Of facts . . . they lie unquestioned, uncombined.
Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill
Is daily spun; but there exists no loom
To weave it into fabric; undefiled
Proceeds pure Science, and has her say; but still
Upon this world from the collective womb
Is spewed all day the red triumphant child. — Edna St. Vincent Millay

I had tried to be happy by telling myself that man is an animal, like any other which sought its meat from God. But now I really was happy, for I had learnt that man is a monstrosity. I had been right in feeling all things as odd, for I myself was at once worse and better than all things. The optimist's pleasure was prosaic, for it dwelt on the naturalness of everything; the Christian pleasure was poetic, for it dwelt on the unnaturalness of everything in the light of the supernatural. The modern philosopher had told me again and again that I was in the right place, and I had still felt depressed even in acquiescence. But I had heard that I was in the wrong place, and my soul sang for joy, like a bird in spring. The knowledge found out and illuminated forgotten chambers in the dark house of infancy. I knew now why grass had always seemed to me as queer as the green beard of a giant, and why I could feel homesick at home. — G.K. Chesterton

Live for a purpose.
For if the purpose gets lost and fly
then life is a crewless boat,
destination in the dark sky.
Live for a purpose.
For now it may feel far away,
but persist with love.
For sure, you will find the way.
Live for a purpose.
For if life is a journey for happiness,
purpose is the ever-fresh flower,
which fills life with joy that's endless. — Debasish Mridha

It is often said that there should be no death or grief in children's stories. It is not wise to dwell on the dark and sad side of these things; but they have also a bright and lovely side, and since even the youngest, dearest, and most guarded child cannot escape some knowledge of the great mystery, is it not well to teach them in simple, cheerful ways that affection sweetens sorrow, and a lovely life can make death beautiful? — Louisa May Alcott

Today is my thirtieth birthday and I sit on the ocean wave in the schoolyard and wait for Kate and think of nothing. Now in the thirty-first year of my dark pilgrimage on this earth and knowing less than I ever knew before, having learned only to recognize merde when I see it, having inherited no more from my father than a good nose for merde, for every species of shit that flies - my only talent - smelling merde from every quarter, living in fact in the very century of merde, the great shithouse of scientific humanism where needs are satisfied, everyone becomes an anyone, a warm and creative person, and prospers like a dung beetle, and one hundred percent of people are humanists and ninety-eight percent believe in God, and men are dead, dead, dead; and the malaise has settled like a fall-out and what people really fear is not that the bomb will fall but that the bomb will not fall - on this my thirtieth birthday, I know nothing and there is nothing to do but fall prey to desire. — Walker Percy

It can be a way of knowledge, a path, an inspiration, a Tao, an ordering, a memory, a fantasy, a seduction, a prayer, a summoning, an incantation murmured under the breath as the torchlights sink lower and the forest looms taller and the wolves howl louder and the fire prepares for its submission to the encroaching dark. — John Lanchester

Metaphorically, Tom said, if you take knowledge as light, and ignorance as dark, there does sometimes seem to be a real presence to the dark
to ignorance. Something more tactile and muscley than just lack of knowledge. A sort of will to ignorance. It would explain some politicians. — Elizabeth Moon

If you look from a distance, you observe a sea of roofs, and have no more knowledge of the dark streams of people than of denizens of some unknown ocean. But the city is always a heaving and restless place, with its own torrents and billows, its foam and spray. The sound of its streets is like the murmur from a sea shell and in the great fogs of the past the citizens believed themselves to be lying on the floor of the ocean. — Peter Ackroyd

The true division of humanity is this: the luminous and the dark.
To diminish the number of the dark, to increase the number of the luminous, there is the aim.That is why we cry: education, knowledge! to learn to read is to kindle a fire; every syllable spelled sparkles.
But whoever say light does not necessarily say joy.
There is suffering in light; an excess burns. Flames is hostile to the wing. To burn and yet to fly, this is the miracle of genius — Victor Hugo

You didn't answer my question. I asked you about being in love. You said what it was like when your wife went away."
Martin sat down again. How young she is. When we were that young we invented the world, no one could tell us a thing. Julia stood with her hands clenched, as though she wanted to pound an answer out of him. "Being in love is ... anxious," he said. "Wanting to please, worrying that she will see me as I really am. But wanting to be known. That is ... you're naked, moaning in the dark, no dignity at all ... I wanted her to see me and to love me even though she knew everything I am, and I knew her. Now she's gone, and my knowledge is incomplete. So all day I imagine what she is doing, what she says and who she talks to, how she looks. I try to supply the missing hours, and it gets harder as they pile up, all the time she's been gone. I have to imagine. I don't know, really. I don't know any more. — Audrey Niffenegger

Some girls have to go to college to discover what they are good at; some are born doing what they must without even truly knowing why. I felt a hole in my heart shaped like a dark door I needed to guard. — Catherynne M Valente

What a man finds circa se or sub se is overwhelming in amount, what he finds in se is embarassing in its obscurity, but when from his own being he would obtain light as to what is supra se, then indeed he finds himself face to face with a dark and somewhat terrifying mystery. The trouble is that he is himself involved in the mystery. If, in any true sense, man is an image of God, how should he know himself without knowing God? But if it is really of God that he is an image, how should he know himself? — Etienne Gilson

I see all mythology as one tradition, a way of disseminating knowledge that must come to us in code so that we can live sanely with it, since some forms of knowledge are too dark, or too complex, to be plainly spoken. And so we have these weird (and also sometimes entertaining and surprising and heartening) tales that belong to all of us. — Helen Oyeyemi

You have knowledge, and I have skill, and between us we have ... "
"We have the Ring of Erreth-Akbe."
"Yes, that. But I thought also of another thing between us. Call it trust ... That is one of its names. It is a very great thing. Though each of us alone is weak, having that we are strong, stronger than the Powers of the Dark. — Ursula K. Le Guin

We are in our own dark Eden where the snake is not selling the Tree of Knowledge. He is selling love, and if you take a bite of that apple, you will go the way of Abel when this is clearly the land of Cain. — Shane Kuhn

...Greyhald Spold knows that Death is looking for him, and has spent many years designing an impregnable hiding place.
He has just set the complicated clockwork of the lock and shut the lid, lying back in the knowledge that here at last is the perfect defence against the most ultimate of all his enemies, although as yet he has not considered the important part that airholes must play in an enterprise of this kind.
And right beside him, very lose to his ear, a voice has just said: DARK IN HERE, ISN'T IT? — Terry Pratchett

He watched her in the aisles: Molly, his pretty baseball wife, with her ceaseless vigilance for lumps, her insistence on quarterly medical checkups for him and Willy, her controlled fear of the dark; her hard-bought knowledge that time is luck. She knew the value of their days. She could hold a moment by its stem. She had taught him to relish. — Thomas Harris

When the dark clouds of doubt, anger or worry begin to move upon you, steady yourself in the knowledge that in time, the storm will pass. — Bryant McGill

foundations, laid in the dark but well laid. On these, methodically and carefully but with a deftness and certainty that seemed nothing of his own but a knowledge working through him, using him as its vehicle, he built up the beautiful steadfast structure of the Principles of Simultaneity. Takver, — Ursula K. Le Guin

Valuing knowledge above all else results in a lust for power, and that leads men into dark and empty places. — Veronica Roth

The Reader may here observe the Force of Numbers, which can be successfully applied, even to those things, which one would imagine are subject to no Rules. There are very few things which we know, which are not capable of being reduc'd to a Mathematical Reasoning, and when they cannot, it's a sign our Knowledge of them is very small and confus'd; and where a mathematical reasoning can be had, it's as great folly to make use of any other, as to grope for a thing in the dark when you have a Candle standing by you. — John Arbuthnot

I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.
Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?
Is it for such I agitate my heart?
I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches? -
Its snaky acids kiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults
That kill, that kill, that kill.
From the poem "Elm", 19 April 1962 — Sylvia Plath

His eyes sparkle with some kind of hidden knowledge as he lets me pass, like beautiful people know the meaning of the universe and are amused by us ordinary folks who have to bumble along in the dark. — L. H. Cosway

I want knowledge. How, like a starved thing in the dark, I'm driven to reach for it. — Anzia Yezierska

It was agreeable to her, the smell of tobacco. It was part of her knowledge of his body. It was the aura of the man, a residue of smoke and unbroken habit, a dimension in the night, and she lapped it off the curled gray hairs on his chest and tasted it in his mouth. It was who he was in the dark, cigarettes and mumbled sleep and a hundred other things nameable and not. — Don DeLillo

You think you cannot live anymore. You think that the light of your soul has been put out and that you will stay in the dark forever. But when you are engulfed by such solid darkness, when you have both eyes closed to the world, a third eye opens in your heart. And only then do you come to realize that eyesight conflicts with inner knowledge. No eye sees so clear and sharp as the eye of love. After grief comes another season, another valley, another you. And the lover who is nowhere to be found, you start to see everywhere.
You see him in the drop of water that falls into the ocean, in the high tide that follows the waxing of the moon, or in the morning wind that spreads its fresh smell; you see him in the geomancy symbols in the sand, in the tiny particles of rock glittering under the sun, in the smile of a newborn baby, or in your throbbing vein. How can you say Shams is gone when he is everywhere and in everything? — Elif Shafak

Used to think that intelligence came from books and knowledge and rational thought. But that's not intelligence: It's just information and interpretation. Real intelligence is when your mind and your heart connect. That's when you see the truth so clearly and unmistakably that you don't have to think about it. In fact, all thinking will do is lead you away from the truth and soon you'll be back in your head, groping with a penlight in the dark again. — Neil Strauss

Death was a thief that always wore a mask. Accident, disease, stillbirths, old age, natural causes, war, murder. It existed in the shivering silence between tolls of a bell. It stole everything away while it left its mark, a dark knowledge that lingered at the back of smiling eyes, a hesitation between thought and action in times of danger, a heaviness that tunneled wormholes into happy memories. — Thea Harrison

Too many writers cannot come to terms with the ways in which the past, like the future, is dark. There is so much we don't know, and to write truthfully about a life, your own or your mother's, or a celebrated figure's, an event, a crisis, another culture is to engage repeatedly with those patches of darkness, those nights of history, those places of unknowning. They tell us that there are limits to knowledge, that there are essential mysteries, starting with the notion that we know just what someone thought or felt in the absence of exact information. — Rebecca Solnit

O God, our merciful Father, by Your Holy Law do You work in us the true knowledge of our sin, that our heart may be penitent, and our soul humble before You. Blot out our iniquities with the blood of Your Son, cleanse our souls from the dark spots with which we have soiled them, and comfort us with the assurance of Your grace. Build Your Church with us and our children, that Your name may be glorified by many generations. Amen. — Martin Luther

The spirit of the depths even taught me to consider my action and my decision as dependent on dreams. Dreams pave the way for life, and they determine you without you understanding their language. One would like to learn this language, but who can teach and learn it? Scholarliness alone is not enough; there is a knowledge of the heart that gives deeper insight. The knowledge of the heart is in no book and is not to be found in the mouth of any teacher, but grows out of you like the green seed from the dark earth. Scholarliness belongs to the spirit of this time, but this spirit in no way grasps the dream, since the soul is everywhere that scholarly knowledge is not. — C. G. Jung

I think of my own life, how it embraces a great quest to know every cog of nature
the names of oaks and ferns, the secret lives of birds, the taste of venison and Ogeechee lime, wax myrtle's smell and rattlesnake's, the contour of bobcat tracks, the number of barred owl cackles, the feel of Okefenokee Swamp water on my skin under a blistering sun.
I search for a vital knowledge of the land that my father could not teach me, as he was not taught, and guidance to know and honor it, as he was not guided, as if this will shield me from the errancies of the mind, or bring me back from that dark territory should I happen to wander there. I search as if there were peace to be found. — Janisse Ray

Her hands shot up. "See that's exactly what I'm saying. You're seeing what you want, and what you see you explain away and excuse things like you're fixing me. I'm not perfect, Ephraim and I really wish you would see that."
"You drool."
"What?" That caught her off guard.
"When you're asleep you drool. I've woken up more than a few times with a little puddle forming on my chest." After a thought he added. "And you snore. Not a delicate snore either mind you."
"I do not!" Her face colored with indignation.
He sighed heavily as if the knowledge pained him. "Oh, but you do. I've even heard Jill talk about it. Did you know that's the main reason she was happy about her room. Actually, she and Joshua thanked your Grandmother for putting you at the other end of the house, something about finally getting a decent night's sleep. They compared your snore to a chainsaw. I can see why they'd say that. — R.L. Mathewson

Knowledge is a rope, and you're weaving a noose out of it. Leave some slack for the enemy. — Nenia Campbell

I must go beyond the dark world of sense information to the clear brilliance of the sunlight of the outside world. Once done, it becomes my duty to go back to the cave in order to illuminate the minds of those imprisoned in the 'darkness' of sensory knowledge. — Plato

Her searches after knowledge were arbitrary and without context. It was as if she were shining a small flashlight of curiosity into the dark room of the world. — Gloria Steinem

The bottom fell out of my stomach. It was like putting a foot wrong on a frozen creek, the crack of ice, and sudden drop, the knowledge that there was nothing beneath but dark water. — Leigh Bardugo

And suddenly there came a second, when somehow for the first time I saw (as if a door had opened from a dark room into the sunny street), and in the next second I already knew for sure that God exists and that God is the Jesus Christ of Orthodoxy, and not some other God. I call this moment the greatest miracle because this precise knowledge came to me not through reason (I know this for sure) but by some other way, and I am unable to explain this moment rationally .... — Seraphim Rose

But the Wisconsin tradition meant more than a simple belief in the people. It also meant a faith in the application of intelligence and reason to the problems of society. It meant a deep conviction that the role of government was not to stumble along like a drunkard in the dark, but to light its way by the best torches of knowledge and understanding it could find. — Adlai Stevenson

Ignorance is death, knowledge is life. Life is of very little value, if it is a life in the dark, groping through ignorance and misery. — Swami Vivekananda

But if I had to choose between where I live and you, I'd rip up everything I own because the only landscape worth looking is the landscape of the human body. I kiss your Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. I kiss your Missouri and Monongahela and Susquehanna and Shenandoah and Rio Grande. I kiss the confluence of all those rivers. I kiss your amber waves of grain. I kiss your spacious skies, your rocket's red glare, your hand I love, your purple mountain'd majesty. But most of all I kiss your head. I kiss the place where we make our decisions. I kiss the place where we keep our resolves. The place where we do our dreams. I kiss the place behind the eyes where we store up secrets and knowledge to save us if we're caught in a corridor on a dark, wintry evening. — John Guare

When I was a child and heard about angels, I was both frightened and fascinated by the thought of these enormous, invisible presences in our midst. I conceived of them not as white-robed androgynes with yellow locks and thick gold wings, which was how my friend Matty Wilson had described them to me
Matty was the predecessor of all sorts of arcane knowledge
but as big, dark, blundering men, massive in their weightlessness, given to pranks and ponderous play, who might knock you over, or break you in half, without meaning to. When a child from Miss Molyneaux's infant school in Carrickdrum fell under the hoofs of a dray-horse one day and was trampled to death, I, a watchful six year old, knew who was to blame; I pictured his guardian angel standing over the child's crushed form with his big hands helplessly extended, not sure whether to be contrite or to laugh. — John Banville

We have something they want. Valuing knowledge above all else results in a lust for power, and that leads men into dark and empty places. We should be thankful that we know better. — Veronica Roth

Easy to see that naught save sorrow could bring a man to such a view of things. And yet a sorrow for which there can be no help is no sorrow. It is some dark sister traveling in sorrow's clothing. Men do not turn from God so easily you see. Not so easily. Deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot be fled nor hid from. To imagine otherwise is to imagine the unspeakable. It was never that this man ceased to believe in God. No. It was rather that he came to believe terrible things of Him. — Cormac McCarthy

The purposeful restriction of knowledge has been at the heart of untold misery and hardship in this world. Serfs were kept illiterate so as to not jeopardize the feudal system. Slaves were kept in the dark on a variety of subjects so as to not provide them the possibility of escape. — Niger Innis

You would never do anything like that, would you?" my wife asked him. "You would never hurt animals."
Our son shook his head, looking offended by the question. He might have been lying, but my knowledge of his belief system, composed of equal parts off-kilter Far Side animal-centrism and a dark Captain Nemoesque contempt for humanity, inclined me to think he was telling the truth. Gigantic fish pulling the limbs from cruel little boys, that might be something you could get him to sign on for. — Michael Chabon

It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free. — Elizabeth Bishop

The black thing in her brain and the dark water on the page were the same thing, a form of knowledge. This is how myths work. They are things, creatures, stories, inhabiting the mind. They cannot be explained and do not explain; they are neither creeds nor allegories. The black was now in the thin child's head and was part of the way she took in every new thing she encountered. — A.S. Byatt

This was not the way to think things out for himself, and that was what he had to do. Take each piece of happening that, by itself, was just a meaningless hurt and find its place in the big picture. Do it over and over and over, because that way one came to understand things, and they hurt less. He had ... come to understand a lot and the knowledge he now held within himself was not made of sharp, separate hurts. It was just one big, heavy sadness. It made him stand very straight, braced against the weight in his heart proudly ... Each bit of knowledge he had gathered, each new hurt he had mastered, made him lift his chin a little higher, hold himself more closely knit and proud, because he had found out all by himself that his pride could be used as a shield to soften and deflect each new blow. His proud, strong body, his still, calm face, was the shield; he had no other weapon against the monsters in this dark tunnel of time that was so much like the shivery, scary part of a story. — Kate Seredy

Plato would hardly need to change a single word of his myth of the cave. Our knowledge would not be able to furnish an answer to his anxiety, his disquietude, his "premonitions." The world would remain for him, "in the light" of our "positive" sciences, what it was - a dark and sorrowful subterranean region - and we would seem to him like chained prisoners. Life would again have to make superhuman efforts, "as in a battle," to break open for himself a path through the truths created by the sciences which "dream of being but cannot see it in waking reality." [1] In brief, Aristotle would bless our knowledge while Plato would curse it. — Lev Shestov

Things external to her may have their own weight and dimension: but within inside us she gives them such measures as she wills: death is terrifying to Cicero, desirable to Cato, indifferent to Socrates. Health, consciousness, authority, knowledge, beauty and their opposites doff their garments as they enter the soul and receive new vestments, coloured with qualities of her own choosing: brown or green; light or dark; bitter or sweet, deep or shallow, as it pleases each of the individual souls, who have not agreed together on the truth of their practices, rules or ideas. Each soul is Queen in her own state. So let us no longer seek excuses from the external qualities of anything, the responsibility lies within ourselves. Our good or our bad depends on us alone. So let us make our offertories and our vows to ourselves not to Fortune: she has no power over our behaviour, on the contrary our souls drag Fortune in their train and mould her to their own idea. — Michel De Montaigne

To be sure, the doctrine of a personal God interfering with natural events could never be refuted, in the real sense, by science, for this doctrine can always take refuge in those domains in which scientific knowledge has not yet been able to set foot. But I am persuaded that such behavior on the part of the representatives of religion would not only be unworthy but also fatal. For a doctrine which is able to maintain itself not in clear light, but only in the dark, will of necessity lose its effect on mankind, with incalculable harm to human progress. — Albert Einstein

Some creatures are made to see in the dark. — Henry David Thoreau

The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. — H.P. Lovecraft

There is simple ignorance, not knowing, and willful ignorance that refuses to know, that covers the light of knowledge with the dark blanket of bias. — Elizabeth Moon

Because we are limited in our knowledge, even the sanest of us are slightly insane. Our limitations are a kind of madness, and we can only choose to deny we are mad, and so descend into a dark spiral of total insanity, or accept we are mad and embark on a quest to regain our true and wholesome sanity — Dwight Longenecker

Dark night lay on my eyes, like a veil of black cloves - dust on my feet, at the beginning of the path of knowledge.
Tracer from an invisible hand, a rainbow, fell in my thoughts - I encountered the truth; and truth shall be my light until the end of days. — Kristian Goldmund Aumann

How do we recognise another person? At its most basic, by shape, by colour, by outline, by dark and light, by smell. Or by nuances of tone, by the way the face looks in repose, the cadences of the voice, full of small interior knowledge, the way they hold their mouth while listening, or the way their gaze holds yours. By what their eyes say when they are not speaking. — Marion Coutts

Where the Jedi courted power, the Sith lusted after it; where the Jedi believed they knew the truth, the Sith possessed it. Owned by the dark side, they ultimately became their knowledge. — James Luceno

I can't muster a smile. Even with the knowledge that it's dark outside and light up here, it's hard to believe that he can see us. We should be invisible. We are so alone. Mabel and I are standing side by side, but we can't even see each other. In the distance are the lights of town. People must be finishing their workdays, picking up their kids, figuring out dinner. They're talking to one another in easy voices about things of great significance and things that don't mean much. The distance between us and all of that living feels insurmountable. — Nina LaCour

"Lawyers Are": By law's dark by-ways he has stored his mind with wicked knowledge on how to cheat mankind. — George Crabbe

For the middle majority of us all, knowledge of Negroes firsthand is probably limited - limited to the colored cleaning woman, who comes twice a week, limited to the colored baseball player who saves or loses a home game, limited to the garage mechanic, or dime-store clerk, or blues singer seen and heard on a Saturday night. To this white majority, the black man is as unknown as once was the heart of the Dark Continent of Africa. — Irving Wallace

Grief is love's alter ego, after all, yin to its yang, the necessary other; like night, grief has its own dark beauty. How may we know light without knowledge of dark? How may we know love without sorrow? "The disorientation following such loss can be terrible, I know" Wendell Berry wrote me on learning of Larry's death. "But grief gives the full measure of love, and it is somehow reassuring to learn, even by suffering, how large, and powerful love is. — Fenton Johnson

Now, Bella suspected by this time that Mr. Rokesmith admired her. Whether the knowledge (for it was rather that than suspicion) caused her to incline to him a little more, or a little less, than she had done at first; whether it rendered her eager to find out more about him, because she sought to establish reason for her distrust, or because she sought to free him from it; was as yet dark to her own heart. But at most times he occupied a great amount of her attention. — Charles Dickens

Hence the strong attraction which magic and science alike have exercised on the human mind; hence the powerful stimulus that both have given to the pursuit of knowledge. They lure the weary enquirer, the footsore seeker, on through the wilderness of disappointment in the present by their endless promises of the future: they take him up to the top of an exceeding high mountain and show him, beyond the dark clouds and rolling mists at his feet, a vision of the celestial city, far off, it may be, but radiant with unearthly splendour, bathed in the light of dreams. — James G. Frazer

I have seen the dark universe yawning
Where the black planets roll without aim,
Where they roll in their horror unheeded,
Without knowledge, or lustre, or name. — H.P. Lovecraft

He enjoyed the soft sound of night wind and the knowledge that he was the only boy - perhaps the only human being - out there in the dark on the windy, frozen-grass meadows on this night that smelled of coming snow, alienated from the lighted windows and the warm hearths, very aware that he was of the village but not part of it at that moment. It was a thrilling, almost erotic feeling - an illicit discovery of self separated from everyone and everything else in the cold and dark — Dan Simmons

Far must thy researches go
Wouldst thou learn the world to know;
Thou must tempt the dark abyss
Wouldst thou prove what Being is;
Naught but firmness gains the prize,
Naught but fullness makes us wise,
Buried deep truth e'er lies. — Friedrich Schiller

Every man is ultimately groping in the dark, believing he has some understanding. Perhaps it is better thus. Perhaps we would go mad to realize what a thin skein of atmosphere protects us from the emptiness of outer space, what a thin layer of reason protects us from a reality far beyond our comprehension. — James Rozoff

So if you, O subsequent ones, ever deign to look down at us from your summit of effortless superiority, remember that you have only scaled it on the back of our efforts. For it is thankless to grope in the dark and tempting to rest until the light of understanding shines upon us. But if we are led into this temptation, your kingdom will never come. — Guy Deutscher

Among Negroes of my generation there was not only little direct acquaintance or consciously inherited knowledge of Africa, but much distaste and recoil because of what the white world taught them about the Dark Continent. There arose resentment that a group like ours, born and bred in the United States for centuries, should be regarded as Africans at all. They were, as most of them began gradually to assert, Americans. My father's father was particularly bitter about this. He would not accept an invitation to a 'Negro' picnic. He would not segregate himself in any way. — W.E.B. Du Bois

We must, between periods of digging in the dark, endeavour always to transform our tears into knowledge. — Alain De Botton

But to declare his wishes only in some unknown corner of Asia, to choose the most double-dealing and the most superstitious of peoples as followers, and the vilest, most ridiculous, and most roguish working man as representative, to muddle up the message so much that it is impossible to comprehend, to teach it only to a tiny number of individuals while leaving everyone else in the dark, and to punish them for remaining there ... Oh, no, Therese, no, no, such atrocities cannot be our guide. I would rather die a thousand times than believe in them. When atheism wants martyrs, let it choose them and my blood is ready. — Marquis De Sade

I'm sorry I cannot say I love you when you say
you love me. The words, like moist fingers,
appear before me full of promise but then run away
to a narrow black room that is always dark,
where they are silent, elegant, like antique gold,
devouring the thing I feel. I want the force
of attraction to crush the force of repulsion
and my inner and outer worlds to pierce
one another, like a horse whipped by a man.
I don't want words to sever me from reality.
I don't want to need them. I want nothing
to reveal feeling but feeling - as in freedom,
or the knowledge of peace in a realm beyond,
or the sound of water poured into a bowl. — Henri Cole

Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.
He looked about at the dark forest in which they were bivouacked. He nodded toward the specimens he'd collected. These anonymous creatures, he said, may seem little or nothing in the world. Yet the smallest crumb can devour us. Any smallest thing beneath yon rock out of men's knowing. Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth. — Cormac McCarthy

Self-knowledge is essential not only to writing, but to doing almost anything really well. It allows you to work through from a deep place - from the deep, dark corners of your subconscious mind. — Meg Rosoff

You live in a world where economic, political, and social conditions can be extremely dark and depressing without the hope and knowledge of Christ's mission and message. — Sharon G. Samuelson

Youth!! Ah, what a word!! And how transitory! But, how grand! as long as it lasts. How many millions in gold would pour out for an ability to call it all back, as with our musical myth, Faust. During that magic part of a child's growth this world is just a gigantic inquiry box, containing many a topic for which a solution is paramount to a growing mind. And to whom can a child look, but us adults? Any man who "can't stop now" to talk with a child upon a topic which, to him is"too silly for anything," should look back to that day upon which that topic was dark and dubious in his own brain. A child who asks nothing will know nothing. That is why that "bump of inquiry" was put on top of our skulls. — Ernest Vincent Wright

The problem is, at a certain point you can't stop thinking even if you want to. I swear, sometimes you just wish you could go back into the dark like a primitive person. But you cant, that's the problem with evolution. Once you have a little bit of knowledge, more of it just keeps coming at you like birds around a bagel. Sometimes when I learn things, I wish I hadn't learned them. — Victor Lodato

The hardest thing of all is to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if there is no cat. — Confucius

What then, is dark fantasy? I would argue that it is a genre of fantasy whose protagonists inhabit the world of consensual mundane reality and learn otherwise, not by walking through a portal into some other world, or by being devoured or destroyed irrevocably, but by learning to live with new knowledge and sometimes with new flesh. — Roz Kaveney