Unknowability Quotes & Sayings

I'm concerned about the unknowability of other people. — Carol Shields

All of those stories are just tales told by people who lived lives before ours. What they say about humankind is true. — Brandon Sanderson

We should encourage governments to be sustained by citizens' taxes - that is, democracies. Democracies will be enduring allies of America. — Iqbal Quadir

If I were forced to sum up in one sentence what the Copenhagen interpretation says to me, it would be 'Shut up and calculate! — David Mermin

do you really think you're so much better than everybody else?' And what do you suppose she answered? 'Yes,' she said, 'I do. I wish I didn't have to.' But actually! — Ayn Rand

They're an impenetrable fortress of unknowability, really. — John Green

Judaism to me, as badly as I practiced it, what I've always loved about it was its total embrace of complexity, its admission of unknowability. — Ben Marcus

I think if there's any difference between me and a traditional CEO, it's that I've been unwilling to change myself or shape my personality around what's expected. — Andrew Mason

On January 18, 1915, six months into the First World War, as all Europe was convulsed by killing and dying, Virginia Woolf wrote in her journal, 'The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be, I think.' Dark, she seems to be saying, as in inscrutable, not as in terrible. We often mistake the one for the other. Or we transform the future's unknowability into something certain, the fulfillment of all our dread, the place beyond which there is no way forward. Be again and again, far stranger things happen than the end of the world. — Rebecca Solnit

But hope is not about what we expect. It is an embrace of the essential unknowability of the world, of the breaks with the present, the surprises. Or perhaps studying the record more carefully leads us to expect miracles - not when and where we expect them, but to expect to be astonished, to expect that we don't know. And this is grounds to act. — Rebecca Solnit

They learned to hate her unknowability, her untouchability, the collage of her. — Jonathan Safran Foer

The missingness of the missing. We know what that feels like. Every endeavor, every kiss, every stab in the heart, every letter home, every leaving, is a ransack of what's in front of us in the service of what's lost. — Jeanette Winterson

Hallaj points out Divine Compassion as another attribute which makes it possible for the personal "I," ana, to enter into a silent and contemplative dialog with God (Tasin 10:24). The unknowability of God is received as Divine Compassion by man. The human cry of isolation is answered by compassion. But the ascending path leading to Divine Compassion begins with man's unconditional yes to the Divine Will. — Gilani Kamran