Knowing What We Want Quotes & Sayings

The real trouble comes from not knowing what we really want in the first place. — Charles De Lint

What is literature, and why do I try to write about it? I don't know. Likewise, I don't know why I go on living, most of the time. But this not knowing is precisely what I want to preserve. As readers, the closest way we can engage with a literary work is to protect its indeterminacy; to return ourselves and it to a place that precludes complete recognition. Really, when I'm reading, all I want is to stand amazed in front of an unknown object at odds with the world. — M. John Harrison

At all crucial moments in our lives we want to speak without knowing what to say. — Joyce Carol Oates

Thinking of someone else is what got me damned. It's a mistake I don't want to repeat. (Xypher)
You know sometimes it's by repeating our mistakes that we realize what went wrong the first time. Knowing that, we're able to fix the mistake and move past it. (Acheron) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

The heart of the matter is whether knowing evil (or sin or crime or whatever you want to call it) is random or purposeful. If it's purposeful, we can fight it, it's hard to defeat, but we have a chance, like two boxers in the same weight class, more or less. If it's random, on the other hand, we're fucked, and we'll just have to hope that God, if He exists, has mercy on us. And that's what it all comes down to. — Roberto Bolano

Aspiring only to second-place goals is a first-rate way to hedge our bets. Among the least appreciated reasons for doing superficial, second-rate work of any kind is the comfort of knowing that it's not our best that's on the line. Far more is at risk when we do what we really want to do rather than something less. I don't think we'll ever fully appreciate the role of not daring to risk a shattered dream in limiting people to second-choice careers and third-choice lives. — Ralph Keyes

I will be dying and so will you, and so will everyone here. That's what I want to explore. We're all hurtling towards death, yet here we are for the moment, alive. Each of us knowing we're going to die, each of us secretly believing we won't. — Charlie Kaufman

A voice spoke in his head, mellow and vast:

"Long have we watched you, little one."

"Who's there?" he quavered. "Who are you?"

"Your concepts are inadequate."

"Malfunction! Malfunction!" squalled the scouter.

"Shut up, it's not a malfunction. Who's talking to me?"

"You may call us: Rulers of the Galaxy."

The scouter was lunging wildly, buffeting him as it tried to escape the white grasp. Strange crunches, firings of unknown weapons. Still the white stasis held.

"What do you want?" he cried.

"Want?" said the voice dreamily. "We are wise beyond knowing. Powerful beyond your dreams. Perhaps you can get us some fresh fruit."

- 'Painwise — James Tiptree Jr.

Why is it that we claim to want certainty? Only fools and cowards seek certainty. Certainty is a dead end; it's a rich old widow living out the rest of her days on the Upper East Side with a little dog and big memories. Unless you are a senior citizen, you'll go nuts after a few weeks of knowing what the rest of your life will bring. You'll die of boredom. But uncertainty is what keeps us alive. It is that flip of a coin, that brief moment when it's in the air or spinning on its side, that snaps us out of our daily stasis. Some invisible Odds Gods are giving you a chance to become better, smarter, richer. What fun it is to get paid if you earned it by the skin of your teeth, by the close call. And how dreadful it is to shoot fish in a barrel. Exposure to uncertainty earns you membership in a select tribe: You are a Padawan mastering the Force. Once the trade is on, once the die has been cast, you're in a parallel, auspicious universe. — Katya G. Cohen

Human beings have a drive for security and safety, which is often what fuels the spiritual search. This very drive for security and safety is what causes so much misery and confusion. Freedom is a state of complete and absolute insecurity and not knowing. So, in seeking security and safety, you actually distance yourself from the freedom you want. There is no security in freedom, at least not in the sense that we normally think of security. This is, of course, why it is so free: there's nothing there to grab hold of. — Adyashanti

What I want to say is that we still don't know each other, that we're still discovering each other, and of course because it's no longer the beginning it isn't always, or even mostly, a romantic proposition--the not knowing, the wanting to know--but there is the wanting. Certainly there are times when I think maybe it's one-sided, that he knows just about all of me that he cares to, and that I'm the one who's still deciphering, which can be its own source of resentment. — Adam Haslett

Knowing how you want to use music is extremely important, as is understanding the potential psychological and physiological effects that are inherent in the music. Slow pulsed New Age music is excellent, of course, for relaxation but it's not ideal for dancing. Yet, if dancing (and the extraordinary energy release found by dancing) is desired, slow New Age music is not ideal. What is your purpose for using a specific piece of music? Is it for meditation, guided imagery, dance, deep recollection, or for emotional release?

Realizing that every type of music has the ability to resonate with us on many different levels, it is possible that any type of music can have positive results. We should be open-minded about all music and the possible transformative and therapeutic results that can occur from it. — Jonathan Goldman

Good enough is not about aiming lower or doing less or slacking off. It's about knowing that what's good enough for one woman isn't necessarily what's good enough for another. And that if we're living up to our own standards, there isn't anything more to want. Some people call this perfect. We call it the New Perfect."8 — Jessica N. Turner

[On Paris:] It exists, constant, eternal, surrounding us who live in it, and it is in us. We love it or hate it, but we cannot escape it. It is a circle of associations in which man exists, being himself a circle of associations. Having entered it and come out of it we are not what we were before knowing it: it devoured us, we devoured it, and the problem is not did we or didn't we want it. We consumed each other. It courses in our blood. — Nina Berberova

Kaushik, what about a picture?" my father suggested. I shook my head. I had left my camera, my father's old Yashica, at school. "But you always have it with you." That look of irritated disappointment, the one that had appeared the day my mother died and was missing now that he'd married Chitra, passed briefly across my father's face. "I forgot it," I said. It was true, I did always have the camera with me. Even on quiet weekends when I came home and my father and I saw no one I would bring it, taking it with me on walks. This time I had left it behind, knowing that I would not want to document anything. "I don't understand," my father said. "Neither do I," I replied. "You haven't wanted a picture of anything in years." "That's not true." "It is." We were stating facts and at the same time arguing, an argument whose depths only he and I could fully comprehend. — Jhumpa Lahiri

My point is that you could think of the people you meet in your life as questions, there to help you figure out who you are, what you're made of, and what you want. In life, as in our new version of the game, you start off not knowing the answer. It's only when the particles rub against each other that we figure out their properties. It's the strangest thing, this idea in quantum physics, and yet somehow unsurprising when you consider it as a metaphor. It's when the thing interacts that its properties are revealed, even resolved. — Zia Haider Rahman

I found that most people don't really want to know the truth. There are plenty of people who want to know the truth on their terms or require that the truth be contained within certain boundaries of comfort. But truth can never be known this way. You have to seek truth from a place of not knowing, and that can be a very threatening place because we think we already know the truth or we are afraid of what the truth might be. — Jim Palmer

And if I get a little chemically imbalanced in the head, like we all know I tend to get sometimes, and I don't want my parents or brother knowing, Will's like, 'We'll deal with it.' He's never said, 'I'll fix it up.' He just says, 'You're not up to going back to uni to finish your Honours this year? Big deal. There's next year. We'll deal with it.'" She nods. "That's what he does well. — Melina Marchetta

The real difficulty is that people have no idea of what education truly is. We assess the value of education in the same manner as we assess the value of land or of shares in the stock-exchange market. We want to provide only such education as would enable the student to earn more. We hardly give any thought to the improvement of the character of the educated. The girls, we say, do not have to earn; so why should they be educated? As long as such ideas persist there is no hope of our ever knowing the true value of education. — Mahatma Gandhi

There are no rules or formulas for success. You just have to live it and do it. knowing this gives us enormous freedom to experiment toward what we want. Believe me, it's a crazy, complicated journey. It's trial and error. It's opportunism. It's quite literally, "Let's try lots of this stuff and see how it works." — Anita Roddick

Who we are is what comes out when shit goes bad. You can't tell anything about a person when things are great. If you want to really know someone, be there when everything goes to hell. — Eileen Cook

I definitely think there's a lot of pressure for teenaged girls and guys to hook up on prom. I think it comes with the belief that you have to lose your virginity before you go to college. It's a coming of age thing. I think it's really sad because it has nothing to do with what you want and everything to do with peer pressure. But it comes with the territory of prom. Thankfully more and more kids are knowing their limits, and I think we're raising kids to be really good people, and they're realizing that they don't need to do it just because. — Brittany Snow

Liberation, I guess, is everybody getting what they think they want, without knowing the whole truth. Or in other words, liberation finally amounts to being free from things we don't like in order to be enslaved by things we approve of. Here's to the eternal tandem. — Robert Fulghum

The answers we seek aren't always the answers we want, are they? But knowing the truth is what helps us sleep at night. — Karen White

We always think we know what we want: when in truth there is nothing we are less likely to know. — Jude Morgan

At one A.M. we are learning over a bar, Jim and I, and I am stressing the primary importance of the wish. Not knowing what we want, not wishing for it , keeps us navigating along peripheries and tributaries formed and shaped by external influences. I said: Forget about the probable and improbable. Just a few hours ago I met Shirley Clark. She had no money at all but wanted to go to India. She is a film maker. The wish was the orientation. When an offer came to make a film about French children for UNESCO, she accepted, and it led to her being asked to make film on an Indian dancer. Her wish, for years, was the beacon. The probable and improbable are only negative concepts we have to transcend, not accept. — Anais Nin

We are too kind, too willing
too unwilling too
reaching out blindly with a grasping hand but not knowing how to ask for what we don't even know we want. — Carol Shields

She waved, laughing, waiting for him to go zooming past her. Instead he slowed, then came to a stop right in front of her.
"What are you doing?" she demanded, as he put his foot on the asphalt. She pointed to the finish line, a scant hundred yards away. "Go."
People around them started screaming. Josh ignored them all.
He pulled off his glasses. "How you doing?"
"Josh! This isn't funny. Move." She glanced over his shoulder, knowing the other racers would appear at any second. "Just finish. You can win. Then we'll talk."
"We can talk now."
She shrieked. "No! I said I was wrong. I said I loved you. What more do you want?"
"You," he said. "For always."
"Yes, yes. You can have that. Now go. Cross the finish line. It's right there. Can't see it? Hurry."
"You'll marry me?"
The man next to her turned. "For God's sake, lady. Marry him already. — Susan Mallery

It's really important to have life strategies and part of that is sort of knowing where you want to go so you can have a map that helps you to get there. And the traditional way tells us oh we get into school and someone else advises us, helps us, but that often does not work for African Americans female and male. Because what works for the dominant culture often does not work for us. — Bell Hooks

Girl in the wind
blowing wide open
the closed doors of my life -
which way are we going?

Standing against the lurid sky
on the stark brink of ocean
arms outstretched
as if your love and hunger
would embrace the world
and I in my inner room
playing my poetic premutations
can only look and ask the unanswerable.

Brave and cunning I speak to my typewriter
knowing it will not answer back
knowing it will not reply
what I ask and do not want to hear
as you with the vast sunset merge
a multitude of dreams away
uniquely alone and outside of me
in the purity and rarity of this moment
immeasurably beyond my love and my rage

and with the dying call of gulls
the echo resounds:

Girl in the wind
throwing aside
the tight shutters of my life -
which way are we going? — Christy Brown

There's the anti-intellectual movement in society and I don't blame them entirely for feeling that way because we all know people, I have many colleagues where you try to hang out with them and they make you feel bad for not knowing what they know. If that's how you interact with people, why would anyone want to be that. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

But knowing that the world had come full circle to our Depression story didn't change the way we worked on it, or encourage us to change our thrust. I want people to be able to pick up this book in the future no matter what's going on in the world, and appreciate it on its own merits, not for any perceived winks at the headlines. — James Vance

I believe in forever, and that's what you and I are. We define eternity. This may sound cheesy, but you make me go there. You give me butterflies, Emily Cooper. I've never had that before, and I don't want to let that go for anything. Ever. I asked you once to crash with me, and you did. Now ... I'm asking you to take the full ride. Walk with me the rest of the way until we're old, sitting in our rocking chairs and watching our sugar-high grandchildren play in our yard. I've seen this world a million times over, but I've never seen it with you by my side. I want you, no, I need you to be my wife. I need to wake up every morning knowing you're Mrs. Emily Michelle Blake." He paused, and Emily could see his eyes misting over. "Please. Take this last step with me. — Gail McHugh

Unhappiness is not knowing what we want and killing ourselves to get it. — Don Herold

Working with Jim Sheridan for instance, we did this movie Brothers. Jim will ask anybody - we'll get a delivery on set, and like the poor delivery guy will be like, "Here's your pizza," and he'll be like, "Come over here. Come here. I want to ask you a question. Do you think this is real? What do you think? Should we do another take?" And they're like, "I, uh, you want your pizza?" There's no shame in everybody's ideas. There's no shame in somebody not knowing. — Jake Gyllenhaal

When we unloaded the last box Vincent surprised me by taking my hand and placing a kiss on my knuckles. His deep chocolate eyes gazed into mine as he spoke with an air of knowing wisdom, "If I ever cheated on my wife I think she'd have cut my balls off. If you don't want to castrate this guy after what he's done then he's not the one for you." he nodded as though affirming the truth of his words. — Penny Reid

With the Special Ops Warrior Foundation's help, we put 266 kids through college last year. And that's what keeps me going. I'll be honest, I don't like running. I don't like biking. I don't like swimming. I do it to raise money. But, now that I'm in this sport, I want to see how far I can push myself. What makes me tick is that pain you feel when you do these ultramarathons. I love knowing that everyone's suffering because I know I can suffer just a little bit more. I can take a lot of pain. — David Goggins

as though frustration were an unbearable form of self-doubt, a state in which we can so little tolerate not knowing what we want, not knowing whether it is available, and not having it that we fabricate certainties to fill the void (we fill in the gaps with states of conviction). The frustration is itself a temptation scene, one in which we must invent something to be tempted by. — Adam Phillips

I know that I'm very susceptible to getting caught up in storylines like, "I want him to be different. I want him to be more open. I want him to call." We have all of these storylines that kind of take over sometimes, and I think there's real grace and a peaceful heart at the center of just accepting what is, and knowing that everything's OK. The good, the bad, the ugly, the pain, the hurt, the frustration - all of that is valuable and part of this human experience, so we should lean in to all of it. — Sara Bareilles

Dogs are born knowing exactly what they want to do: eat, scratch, roll in disgusting stuff, sniff and squabble with other dogs, roam, sleep, have sex. Little of this is what we want them to do, of course. We ask them to sit, stay, smell peasant, practice abstinence, and be accommodating. — Jon Katz

At the same time, if we were feeling a knot of guilt about our decision re: dying, it might have been because we regretted our failure to achieve a certain kind of wisdom born from certain kinds of life experiences...Our skittishness when it came to any crisis, the preference we had for deflecting important conversations with jokes, rather than facing them head-on. It was fine, we agreed, not to want to grow old. Fine, too, to take steps to ensure we didn't grow old. But we'd also avoided growing up. We'd lived our lives like perpetual children, hiding in corners, never knowing what to say, never knowing what to do. If our plan to die was problematic, it was problematic in that it eliminated the possibility of our ever becoming serious, capable women. — Judith Claire Mitchell

Why do we protect children from life? It's no wonder that we become afraid to live. We're not told what life really is. We're not told that life is joy and wonder and magic and even rapture, if you can get involved enough. We're not told that life is also pain, misery, despair, unhappiness, and tears. I don't know about you, but I don't want to miss any of it. I want to embrace life, and I want to find out what it's all about. I wouldn't want to go through life without knowing what it is to cry. — Leo Buscaglia

What we often feel in ecstatic moments in this world - 'I don't ever want this to stop' - will be the constant thought of our hearts in that world. We shall think it, knowing that in fact it never WILL stop. — J.I. Packer

I just want fans to walk away knowing that no matter what's going on, no matter how happy you are, no matter how sad you are, we did it. We're strong in this. We've come a long way, and life is not just one thing. — Mary J. Blige

Writers are taught to "write what you know about." The same advice applies to the quest for the power of the soul: be good at what you're good at. Many of us spend time and energy trying to be something that we are not. But this is a move against soul, because individuality rises out of the soul as water rises out of the depths of the earth. We are who we are because of the special mix that makes up our soul. In spite of its archetypal, universal contents, for each individual the soul is highly idiosyncratic. Power begins in knowing this special soul, which may be entirely different from our fantasies about who we are or who we want to be. A — Thomas Moore

I think, knowing full well that we always try to interpret things in accordance with what we want ant as they are. — Paulo Coelho

People always want to know how you know. And knowing in your heart is very hard to describe. I think so often, we're trying to understand something with our mind. But, actually, the Bible teaches us that much of what God does in our life will be difficult to understand with the mind. — Joyce Meyer

My favorite thing about being engaged is your partner knowing what you want. For us, we love going out to eat. — Waka Flocka Flame

I think the meaning of life is life itself. We don't necessarily want to know what it is, but we want to live it. Hopefully, we'll go out fast without knowing it. — Mads Mikkelsen

I don't want to ruin our friendship and what we have but I cannot for another minute stand in front of you without you knowing exactly how I feel. Because I can't see past you. You are everything to me. — Elizabeth Eulberg

Why don't we just say it already?" He smirked. "I mean come on now."
I eyed him carefully not knowing where to step. "What is it you think we want to say?"
"That we love each other. I kick myself every time I stopped myself from saying it. And I know you love me and that's all that matters," he said, pulling me close instead of away this time. We stared at the water in a shared silence.
My mind wished I could say the same thing, but knowing if I wanted to was the problem. Did I even know how? — Holly Hood

Lily, if you left this earth and left me behind, I'd be miserable. I probably wouldn't want to live. But you know what? If you left me with our baby girl, I'd spend my whole life raising her the best I could. Making sure I did right by her and by you. Making sure that everything I did would make you happy and proud of me. You'd leave this earth knowing that I would give our children everything. You would have no doubt about that. Not doing that, not taking care of the babies we made together, would mean that I didn't love you, that you didn't mean the world to me. Because if something means that much to you, then it means that much to me. If I were him, I'd grab hold of anything that reminded me of the woman I loved. — Alexa Riley

There's a difference between knowing what to do when you're rehearsing it, and being able to do it once you're adrenalized and emotional. That's when the injuries occur. Actors all want to try to pretend that they're experts at everything, but we're not. — Antony Starr

She had discovered early that what we want out of life can change; that the important thing is to learn to recognize or even simply just to admit what we really want, and then to have the courage to reach for it. — Candice Proctor

I say go, go, be led. particularly If you're in your twenties, which I suspect a lot of you are in. I tell my kids it's a question Mark decade in a sense. and we're told we should know what we want to do. It's a terrible thing. 'what are you going to do?' 'what are you going to be?' 'how can you make a living at that' no, no, no, no, no it's your question mark. You're never gonna have this luxury again of not knowing and it is a luxury not to know. You can play, you can do that, you must because it's your only way not to go crazy. Because if you're- meaning if you're gonna wait for the job, you're gonna die — Dustin Hoffman

Then why do you want to know?"
"Because learning does not consist only of knowing what we must or we can do, but also of knowing what we could do and perhaps should not do. — Umberto Eco

I want to sleep with people, steal, get run out of town, leave my fingerprints on every scene. We have a name for it, our generation. It's our Baghdad."
"Your what?"
"My Baghdad," Tommy said laughing, knowing it was dumb, savoring the dumbness, and maybe also its truth. "The situation you get into knowing it's fucked-up but you keep doing it anyway, making it an even bigger disaster. Everyone gets one, but that's how you learn. It builds character, makes you dirty and real. You know you're a superpower when you can lose every war and still be a superpower. Maybe you're a superpower because you can afford to lose them. Same here. There should be a Web site that records all the risks a person has taken, all the famous people they've met, all their gnarly trips and bad decisions. Like a Web site that ranks who's lived the most."
"Isn't that called Facebook?" Mills asked. — Christopher Bollen

I want to believe him. I know stuff happens to people and they can't always be who they were or who they think they're supposed to be. But knowing that doesn't mean I'm okay with it. It's more like what Mr. Krueger says about black holes: We can't wish them away, so we'd better learn as much as we can about where they are and how they work so we don't get sucked in. — R. Dean Johnson

Venus has a runaway greenhouse effect. I kind of want to know what happened there because we're twirling knobs here on Earth without knowing the consequences of it. Mars once had running water. It's bone dry today. Something bad happened there as well. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

As we've grown 'The Daily Muse' and met contacts who want to collaborate with us, knowing who does what has helped us be clear on who we want our partners to connect with - and makes us look buttoned up, too. SEO firm? Talk to our COO. An editor from the 'Huffington Post?' Meet our Editor-in-Chief. — Kathryn Minshew

Knowing is a vital part of learning and sharing a vision of what we want to create together. But "how" questions are on the doing side of the model. As in playing tennis, we learn how by doing. There is no other way. We can read books on tennis techniques and strategies. We can get a good tennis player to show us how he or she does it. We can watch players on TV for hours and analyze every stroke. But only by doing will we ever be able to learn how to do it. We may make mistakes but mistakes actually teach us more than our successes. — Fred Lee

The poet dreams of the mountain
Sometimes I grow weary of the days, with all their fits and starts.
I want to climb some old gray mountains, slowly, taking
The rest of my lifetime to do it, resting often, sleeping
Under the pines or, above them, on the unclothed rocks.
I want to see how many stars are still in the sky
That we have smothered for years now, a century at least.
I want to look back at everything, forgiving it all,
And peaceful, knowing the last thing there is to know.
All that urgency! Not what the earth is about!
How silent the trees, their poetry being of themselves only.
I want to take slow steps, and think appropriate thoughts.
In ten thousand years, maybe, a piece of the mountain will fall. — Mary Oliver

I looked at her quizzically. "No, why would you think so?"
She gave me a knowing smile. "'Cause he's never brought a girl here before, child. Not one who didn't need my help, leastways."
Oh! That pleased me, but I quashed it. "It's not like that. We, ah, we kind of work together. I'm not his, er, what I mean is, he's all yours if you want him!" I finished in an insane babble.
There was a disgruntled grunt from upstairs that didn't come from the girl. I cringed, but it was too late to take it back. — Jeaniene Frost

Because orgasmic sex would lead to women's autonomy, knowing who you are and what we want: Women are not going to follow what some jackass tells us we must do. Not all women are going to get married, be monogamous and raise a family. It will destroy the current social structure based on a sexual double standard that we're currently living under. — Betty Dodson

We're not really good at knowing what we want, and we are quick to say 'this sucks'. That's where the opportunity lies. — Gary Vaynerchuk

True strength lies in our knowing, individually, what we are, who we are, and what we want. — Paget Brewster

Sometime we don't always get what we want!" shouted Evie, not knowing herself. "That's life!" ... The Captain, still looking at her, raised his eyebrows in surprise. He was proud of her for being brave enough to shout at (the villain), but he said softly to her, "Usually men with knives at your friend's neck get what they want, Evelyn. — Elizabeth Newton

And when all feels hopeless, remember that you are in charge of what goes into your body, you don't answer to anyone, and you are allowed to eat anything you want. Often just knowing we can eat whatever we want is enough to keep us from eating whatever we want. We're so rebellious. — Rory Freedman

The River ... It's my world, and I don't want any other. What it hasn't got is not worth having, and what it doesn't know is not worth knowing. Lord! the times we've had together! — Kenneth Grahame

And what do you do in the face of this powerlessness? As a parent?"

"You get to be obsessed and angry," Tom said. "And they get to be the age they are, and act like teenagers if they want to. There is a zero-percent chance you will change them. So we breathe in, and out, talk to friends, as needed. We show up, wear clean underwear, say hello to strangers. We plant bulbs, and pick up litter, knowing there will be more in twenty minutes. We pray that we might cooperate with any flicker of light we can find in the world. — Anne Lamott

Knowing what we know, how much more do we want to give Him something? But He seems to have everything. Well, not quite. He doesn't have you with Him again forever, not yet. I hope you are touched by the feelings of His heart enough to sense how much He wants to know you are coming home to Him. You can't give that gift to Him in one day, or one Christmas, but you could show Him today that you are on the way. You could pray. You could read a page of scripture. You could keep a commandment. If you have already done these, there is still something left to give. All around you are people He loves but can help only through you and me. One of the sure signs that we have accepted the gift of the Savior's atonement is that we give gifts to others. — Henry B. Eyring

But as much as life is sometimes about knowing what you want and going after it and finishing, maybe other times it's about slowing down and shutting up and waiting. There's not always a clear beginning and obvious end. Sometimes we're in the middle . . . and it's okay to camp out there for a while. — Melissa Tagg

Having your beautiful woman free and uncovered, for all to see, with everyone knowing that she's with who she chooses - you - and that no one else, no matter how much they want her or lust for her, can lay a finger on her." He focussed on Mae. "Tell Hansen what you studied in school."
She wasn't expecting the question and presumed he wasn't talking about her military training. "Music," she said.
Hansen, however, was one step behind. "You went to school?"
"All our women do," said Justin. "They can learn what they want, take on what professions they want, and be with the men they want. We don't cover them up either. We let them show off their beauty. And we don't let men who are full of themselves crush others who've done the work. A man who serves gets his rewards. They aren't snatched up by others. — Richelle Mead

[Wagner] But the world, the hearts and minds of humankind,
Are subjects all men want to know about.
[Faust] What they call knowing, that I do not doubt.
But who dares speak his honest mind?
The few who ever did know anything
And we're such fools they gave their hearts free rein
And showed the mob what they had felt and seen,
Death on the cross they got or death by burning. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

1:354-355
BEING TAKEN

When you begin to surrender, forget yourself. Become senseless with no motive, so you can be blown from east to west and back without knowing anything, or caring either. It would not be surprising if in such mindlessness your essential being went hundreds of miles without you being aware of it.

We see such wandering in the clouds and the waters. The forests and the crops too in their ways travel with caravans of people along the earth. God takes our souls on journeys he knows nothing of. Why? We don't know, being as we are the passed-out reveler laid in a wagon and driven elsewhere. What we love, what we want, is this being held in the presence, this being taken. That is the satisfaction, not learning why or how or where we are, or when we'll arrive somewhere else. — Bahauddin

Do you see, Harry? Do you see the flaw in my brilliant plan now? I had fallen into the trap I had foreseen, that I had told myself I could avoid, that I must avoid."
"I don't - "
"I cared about you too much," said Dumbledore simply. "I cared more for your happiness than your knowing the truth, more for your peace of mind than my plan, more for your life than the lives that might be lost if the plan failed. In other words, I acted exactly as Voldemort expects we fools who love to act.
"Is there a defense? I defy anyone who has watched you as I have - and I have watched you more closely than you can have imagined - not to want to save you more pain than you had already suffered. What did I care if numbers of nameless and faceless people and creatures were slaughtered in the vague future, if in the here and now you were alive, and well, and happy? I never dreamed that I would have such a person on my hands. — J.K. Rowling

But what if
I realize that I don't want him to disappear. I may not fully believe he's real; I may not understand why I can hear him speaking to me
but I sort of like it. I like knowing that of all the people in the world, I'm the only one listening to what he has to say. It makes me feel like we've been destined for each other. — Jodi Picoult

It is the feeling of never knowing what we want that truly drives us all mad.... Holding things because we think in a moment we love them only to uncurl our fingers later and softly give them back to the earth. — Christopher Poindexter

I had a friend at Princeton, a Russian graduate student. He had a cute message on his answering machine, delivered in his thick Russian accent: Who are you and what do you want? Some people spend a lifetime trying to answer these questions. You, however, have thirty seconds. My father and I chuckled. What happened to him? Gone. My point is that you could think of the people you meet in your life as questions, there to help you figure out who you are, what you're made of, and what you want. In life, as in our new version of the game, you start off not knowing the answer. It's only when the particles rub against each other that we figure out their properties. — Zia Haider Rahman

We all want to be in the center of God's will. That's why we shouldn't pursue a career, move to another place, or make any major life change without knowing that it is the will of God. The way we find out is to regularly ask God to show us what His will is and then ask Him to lead us in it. When you ask Him to speak to your heart, He will do that. He will give you peace about a certain thing and lack of peace about others. What joy to have peace that as we confidently set foot in a certain direction, God is leading us on that particular path. We can be confident that whatever happens along the way, we don't have to worry because we are right where God wants us to be. — Stormie O'martian

We are all victims of what is done to us. We can either use that as an excuse for failure, knowing that if we fail it isn't really our fault, or we can say, 'I want something better than that, I deserve something better than that, and i'm going to try to make myself a life worth living. — Howard Dully

To be inspired is to feel God funnelling into one's work. We always want light from the darkness. We know something is there before we see it. The objective for a writer is to try to get some part of the face of a God on a piece of paper. It is a fearful undertaking going into something profound without knowing what you are looking for. Beauty is incomprehensible. Isn't that what God is? Witnessing the loss of beauty and the enduring effort to restore beauty, isn't this God? — Barry Lopez

Growing up means letting go of the dearest megalomaniacal dreams of our childhood. Growing up means knowing they can't be fulfilled. Growing up means gaining the wisdom and the skills to get what we want within the limitations imposed by reality - a reality which consists of diminished powers, restricted freedoms and, with the people we love, imperfect connections. — Judith Viorst

Well, we're all dying in increments. I don't mind people knowing what I look like, but I don't want them thinking I'm dying. — Roger Ebert

Sometimes being vulnerable as a child is not knowing what lies ahead. We think our choices will make a huge difference in our lives because our parents and other elders spend so much time making sure we think before we act and make our minds up about what we want to be "when we grow up". Some are already at that stage early on, some are not. We learn the ways of the world all in good time, but being vulnerable is to be human. We never stop. — Cyndi Goodgame

Today, what's normal is being redefined: from vaginal birth to surgical birth; from 'My water broke,' to 'Let's break your water;' from 'It's time' to 'It's time for the induction.' As medical anthropologist Robbie Davis-Floyd writes, 'in the early twenty-first century, we do not know what normal birth is.' Most practicing obstetricians have never witnessed an unplugged birth that wasn't an accident. Women are even beginning to deny normal birth to themselves: if 'normal' means being induced, immobilized by wires and tubes, sped up with drugs, all the while knowing that there's a good chance of surgery, well, might as well just cut to the chase, so to speak. 'Just give me a cesarean,' some are saying. And who can blame them? They want to avoid what they think of as normal birth. — Jennifer Block

The simple question 'What color do you want to paint that upstairs room?' might, if we follow things to their logical conclusions, be stated: 'How do I live, knowing that I will one day die and leave you? — Donald Antrim

But knowing what we want means, in essence, being able to anticipate accurately how one choice or another will make us feel, and that is no simple task. — Barry Schwartz

The social dimension of reticence and nonacknowledgment is most developed in forms of politeness and deference. We don't want to tell people what we think of them, and we don't want to hear from them what they think of us, though we are happy to surmise their thoughts and feelings, and to have them surmise ours, at least up to a point. We don't, if we are reasonable, worry too much what they may say about us behind our backs, just as we often say things about a third party that we wouldn't say to his face. Since everyone participates in these practices, they aren't, or shouldn't be, deceptive. Deception is another matter, and sometimes we have reason to object to it, though sometimes we have no business knowing the truth, even about how someone really feels about us. — Thomas Nagel

We want to get behind the beauty, but it is only a surface. It is like a mirror that reflects to us our own desire for good. It is a sphinx, an enigma, a sorrowfully irritating mystery. We want to feed on it, but it is only an object we can look on; it appears to us from a certain distance. The great sorrow of human life is knowing that to look and to eat are two different operations. Only on the other side of heaven, where God lives, are they one and the same operation. Children already experience this sorrow when they look at a cake for a long time and nearly regret eating it, but are powerless to help themselves. Maybe the vices, depravities and crimes are nearly always or even always in their essence attempts to eat beauty, to eat what one can only look at. Eve initiated this. If she lost our humanity by eating a fruit, the reverse attitude - looking at a fruit without eating it - must be what saves. — Simone Weil

When you believe in your way, enlightenment is there. But when you cannot believe in the meaning of the practice which you are doing in this moment, you cannot do anything. You are just wandering around the goal with your monkey mind. You are always looking for something without knowing what you are doing. If you want to see something, you should open your eyes. When you do not understand Bodhidharma's Zen, you are trying to look at something with your eyes closed. We do not slight the idea of attaining enlightenment, but the most important thing is this moment, not some day in the future. We have to make our effort in this moment. This is the most important thing for our practice. — Shunryu Suzuki