Quotes About Not-knowing

34. Beneath Each Knowing There is mystery because there is not-knowing. Yet beneath each knowing is the next not-knowing. So each knowing deepens the mystery. Yet even in knowing there is the mystery of knowing.

The real quest begins when this not-knowing ceases to be an agnostic concept and becomes a living experience.

CULTIVATING NOT-KNOWING Though not-knowing is natural to us and not all that unfamiliar—as when we wordlessly resonate and interact with the radiant presence emanating through a baby's eyes—the capacity for it gets easily pushed into the background by our conditioned knowing.

That which dies shall still know life in death for all that decays is not forgotten and reanimated it shall walk the world in the bliss of not-knowing. And then there shall be a fire that knows the naming of you, and in the presence of the strangling fruit, its dark flame shall acquire every part of you that remains.

Here is something you have to understand about stories: They point you in the right direction but they can't take you all the way there. Stories are crescent moons; they glimmer in the night sky, but they are most exquisite in their incomplete state. Because people crave the beauty of not-knowing, the excitement of suggestion, and the sweet tragedy of mystery.

In the end, I learned that the practice of Not-Knowing is the very ground of altruism, because it opens us up to a much wider horizon than our preconceptions could ever afford us and can let in connection and tenderness.

I had His peace in the not knowing. Christ offers peace in the not-knowing seasons.

We have allowed ourselves very little space for not-knowing. Very seldom do we have the wisdom not-to-know, to lay the mind open to deeper understanding. When confusion occurs in the mind, we identify with it and say we are confused…Confusion arises because we fight against our not-knowing, which experiences each moment afresh without preconceptions or expectations.

People who were only ever half right about things drove me mad. I hated the flood of opinion, the certainty, the easy talk about Cuba and Russia and the economy, because beneath the hard structure of words was an abyss of ignorance and not-knowing; and, in a sense, of not wanting to know.

Everything was about not-knowing, the whole future, and who could even make sense enough of the past to think they really knew everything and so, knowing everything, know everything to come?

It's possible to let technology absorb what we know and then re-express it in intricate mechanisms - parts and circuit boards and software objects - mechanisms we can use but do not understand in crucial ways. This not-knowing is fine while everything works as we expected.

In the imperishable, infinite, highest Brahman, two things are hidden: knowing and not-knowing. Not-knowing perishes, knowing is immortal; but he who controls both knowing and not-knowing is another.51

That is how science and medicine are practiced best, though—we are best when we admit our ignorance up front, and then attempt to fill the darkness of not-knowing with the light of information and knowledge.

I don't get the obsession with strangers, her first husband, Sol, once said to her, and Frances had struggled to explain that strangers were by definition interesting. It was their strangeness. The not-knowing. Once you knew everything there was to know about someone, you were generally ready to divorce them.