Unknowable Knowledge Quotes & Sayings

Kant ... stated that he had "found it necessary to deny knowledge ... to make room for faith," but all he had "denied" was knowledge of things that are unknowable, and he had not made room for faith but for thought. — Hannah Arendt

I don't feel the need to define nothin' to nobody, because I'm always changing. Why say that I'm this or that when I might not be tomorrow? I'm gonna follow my own feelings and my own heart. — Keke Palmer

I do not expect anyone will ever have the opportunity of constructing another course like Cypress Point, as I do not suppose anywhere in the world is there such a glorious combination of rocky coast, sand dunes, pine woods and cypress trees. — Alister MacKenzie

I'm a Helian, and you're an Arcan. We're just made that way. I don't think we would ever be able to really understand each other. — Heather James

Success is too often measured by the size of one's bank account or the degree of their celebrity. Yet, neither can truly represent the size of one's character or the depth of their soul. — Charles F. Glassman

I've always been really artistic. I went to an all-girls private Catholic school, and one of their biggest things was musical theater. — Daniela Bobadilla

Study is to study what cannot be studied. Undertaking means undertaking what cannot be undertaken. Philosophizing is to philosophize about what cannot be philosophized about. Knowing that knowing is unknowable is true perfection. — Zhuangzi

The four points of the compass be logic, knowledge, wisdom and the unknown. Some do bow in that final direction. Others advance upon it. To bow before the one is to lose sight of the three. I may submit to the unknown, but never to the unknowable. The man who bows in that final direction is either a saint or a fool. I have no use for either. — Roger Zelazny

Unless you are intellectually numb, you can't escape the allure of the quantum, the tantalizing possibility that we are immersed in mystery, forever bound within the shores of the Island of Knowledge. Unless you are intellectually numb, you can't escape the awe-inspiring feeling that the essence of reality is unknowable. — Marcelo Gleiser

The gospel of Truth is holy word of God. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Tatted like a Mexican, fresher than a freshman. — Wiz Khalifa

Stop." Seth gripped my arms. "Come on, Angel, stop. — Jennifer L. Armentrout

The tiniest mite has an inner life of which we can know nothing. — Marty Rubin

[ ... ] it is a strange thing that most of the feeling we call religious, most of the mystical outcrying which is one of the most prized and used and desired reactions of our species, is really the understanding and the attempt to say that man is related to the whole thing, related inextricably to all reality, known and unknowable. This is a simple thing to say, but the profound feeling of it made a Jesus, a St. Augustine, a St. Francis, a Roger Bacon, a Charles Darwin, and an Einstein. Each of them in his own tempo and with his own voice discovered and reaffirmed with astonishment the knowledge that all things are one thing and that one thing is all things - plankton, a shimmering phosphorescence on the sea and the spinning planets and an expanding universe, all bound together by the elastic string of time. It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again. — John Steinbeck

It is evident that we are hurrying onward to some exciting knowledge - some never-to-be-imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction. — Edgar Allan Poe

People always had one kind of animal or another inside them. — Paul Russell

Wouldn't it be wonderful if we had a world where everybody said, 'We don't know?' The fact is that you're surrounded -God and you don't see God, because you KNOW ABOUT God. The final barrier to the vision of God is your God concept. You miss God because you think you know. The highest knowledge of God is to know God as unknowable. All revelations, however divine, are never any more than a finger pointing at the moon. As we say in the East, 'When the sage points to the moon, all the idiot sees is the finger'. — Anthony De Mello

Among the many things that made the Professor an excellent teacher was the fact that he wasn't afraid to say 'we don't know.' For the Professor, there was no shame in admitting you didn't have the answer, it was a necessary step toward the truth. It was as important to teach us about the unknown or the unknowable as it was to teach us what had already been safely proven. — Yoko Ogawa

A true religion will have the humbleness to admit that only a few things are known, much more is unknown, and something will always remain unknowable. That 'something' is the target of the whole spiritual search. You cannot make it an object of knowledge, but you can experience it, you can drink of it, you can have the taste of it - it is existential. — Rajneesh

In a very real sense my science does inform my knowledge of God. If you would allow me to say that we never know God, because if I claim that I know God, I know something other than God, because God is not knowable, he is unknowable. So we have to approach it in that sense first, that my knowledge of God is always limited. — George Coyne

If nothing else, school teaches that there is an answer to every question; only in the real world do young people discover that many aspects of life are uncertain, mysterious, and even unknowable. If you have a chance to play in nature, if you are sprayed by a beetle, if the color of a butterfly's wing comes off on your fingers, if you watch a caterpillar spin its cocoon
you come away with a sense of mystery and uncertainty. The more you watch, the more mysterious the natural world becomes, and the more you realize how little you know. Along with its beauty, you may also come to experience its fecundity, its wastefulness, aggressiveness, ruthlessness, parasitism, and its violence. These qualities are not well-conveyed in textbooks. — Michael Crichton

Maybe the Truth of the Meaning of Life, Ancient and Arcane Knowledge of the Great Unknowable Universe is handed down only to persons presenting with the correct brand-name footwear. If you turn up wearing Shoe City knock-offs, you don't get to pass Go and collect Infinite Enlightenment. — Tracy Engelbrecht

We don't have a monopoly. We have market share. There's a difference. — Steve Ballmer

Elden started toward me, "I think that's enough!"
The man I almost knocked down bolted from his chair and shouted, "Let her speak!"
Yield, rat boy! — Joan Bauer

Contemporary philosophers have exercised themselves with the problem of our knowledge of other minds. Enmeshed in the dogma of the ghost in the machine, they have found it impossible to discover any logically satisfactory evidence warranting one person in believing that there exist minds other than his own. I can witness what your body does, but I cannot witness what your mind does, and my pretensions to infer from what your body does to what your mind does all collapse, since the premises for such inferences are either inadequate or unknowable. — Gilbert Ryle

Beware of the philosophy that leads people to say, "What can I do? What's the use of praying? What good is it to worry? If it's predestined, it must happen." Yes, it's true that what is predestined will happen. However, we aren't commanded to know what is predestined. In fact, we are forbidden to know it. We test God when we delve into unknowable matters. God has given Scripture to us so that we can know what we should and shouldn't do. He expects us to act on this knowledge. What we cannot know, we should leave to God. We should stick to our responsibilities, vocation, and position in life. God and God alone knows what is predestined. You aren't supposed to know. — Martin Luther

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

It is therefore an analogical knowledge: a knowledge of a being who is unknowable in himself, yet able to make something of himself known in the being he created. Here, indeed, lies something of an antinomy. Rather, agnosticism, suffering from a confusion of concepts, sees here an irresolvable contradiction in what Christian theology regards as an adorable mystery. It is completely incomprehensible to us how God can reveal himself and to some extent make himself known in created beings: eternity in time, immensity in space, infinity in the finite, immutability in change, being in becoming, the all, as it were, in that which is nothing. This mystery cannot be comprehended; it can only be gratefully acknowledged. — Anonymous

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

I should have a gun."
"And you think I can provide it?"
"Ask your biker gang buddies."
"They prefer the term 'motorcycle club.'"
"I'm sure they do. — Kelley Armstrong

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

When the atheist is told that God is unknowable, he may interpret this claim in one of two ways. He may suppose, first, that the theist has acquired knowledge of a being that, by his own admission, cannot possibly be known; or, second, he may assume that the theist simply does not know what he is talking about. — George H. Smith

A bridge can still be built, while the bitter waters are flowing beneath. — Anthony Liccione

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

The problem with the religious solution [for mysteries such as consciousness and moral judgments] was stated by Mencken when he wrote, "Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing." For anyone with a persistent intellectual curiosity, religious explanations are not worth knowing because they pile equally baffling enigmas on top of the original ones. What gave God a mind, free will, knowledge, certainty about right and wrong? How does he infuse them into a universe that seems to run just fine according to physical laws? How does he get ghostly souls to interact with hard matter? And most perplexing of all, if the world unfolds according to a wise and merciful plan, why does it contain so much suffering? As the Yiddish expression says, If God lived on earth, people would break his window. — Steven Pinker

I had never expected medicine to be such a lawless, uncertain world. I wondered if the compulsive naming of parts, diseases, and chemical reactions - frenulum, otitis, glycolysis - was a mechanism invented by doctors to defend themselves against a largely unknowable sphere of knowledge. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

The Unknown is not the Unknowable; it need not remain the unknown for us, unless we choose ignorance or persist in our first limitations. For to all things that are not unknowable, all things in the universe, there correspond in that universe faculties which can take cognisance of them, and in man, the microcosm, these faculties are always existant and at a certain stage capable of development. We may choose not to develop them; where they are partially developed, we may discourage and impose on them a kind of atrophy. But, fundamentally all possible knowledge is knowledge within the power of humanity. And since in man there is the inalienable impulse of Nature towards self-realisation, no struggle of the intellect to limit the action of our capacities within a determined area can for ever prevail. — Sri Aurobindo

Appearance gives rise to interpretation Interpretation gives rise to comparison Comparison gives rise to preference Preference gives rise to disappointment — Ramon Bachty

They came generally from people writing theses on fantasy or on the Dark Is Rising books. They were full of questions I'd never thought about and false assumptions that I didn't want to think about. They would ask me in great detail for, say, the specific local and mythical derivations of my Greenwitch, a leaf-figure thrown over a Cornish cliff as a fertility sacrifice, and I would have to write back and say, "I'm terribly sorry; I made it all up." They told me I echoed Hassidic myth, which I hadn't read, and the Mormon suprastructure, which I'd never even heard of. They saw symbols and buried meanings and allegories everywhere. I'd thought I was making a clear soup, but for them it was a thick mysterious stew.

from "In Defense of the the Artist" in Signposts to Criticism of Children's Literature (1983) — Susan Cooper