Quotes About Unknowable

If God is completely beyond our knowing, how can we know that he is unknowable?

What is imponderable in the world is greater than what we can handle.

Why is a useless question, an unknowable object. But to suspend thought is impossible. The mind is made perfectly of possibilities.

the Egyptian capital remained a deeply exotic and mysterious place, unknowable in the way of all truly grand cities.

researchers argue that it's of utmost importance to unravel the nature of black holes, lest we someday begin to worship them. Sounds ridiculous, but whole segments of humankind have often revered the unknowable, venerating that which cannot be tested experimentally. Come to think of it, many still do in twenty-first-century society.

Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.

Explanation is a luxury we can't afford these days, and reality doesn't care for it, being far too busy following its own unknowable course.

It is the human condition to ask questions like Anne's last night and to receive no plain answers, he said. Perhaps this is because we can't understand the answers, because we are incapable of knowing God's ways and God's thoughts. We are, after all, only very clever tailless primates, doing the best we can, but limited. Perhaps we must all own up to being agnostic, unable to know the unknowable.

In science, all sensibly phrased questions are at least potentially answerable, while answers to the questions of faith are, by their very definition, unknowable. With The Sparrow, I hoped to show that both kinds of questions are worth asking, and worth thinking deeply about.

The conversation progressed, bumper-car style, to a very heated discussion about death and the survival of the soul. It amazes me that we, as a species, can argue so fervently over something that is, when all is said and done, unknowable and unprovable. Nonetheless, we all arrive at conclusions and cleave to our certainties: that there is nothing but the Void; or that we will find ourselves writing an admissions exam at the Pearly Gates.

It is existentially, hyperbolically, quintessentially unknowable.

Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops

Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.

It is this belief in a power larger than myself and other than myself which allows me to venture into the unknown and even the unknowable.

a craving for the cloud of unknowing beyond knowledge and for the silence beyond speech

Knowledge of what? If, as Epicurus insisted, the what is unknowable, Walt's knowledge is a personal gnosis, in which the knower himself is known by whatever can be known.

Such, then, is our God: unknowable in his essence, yet known in his energies; beyond and above all that we can think or express, yet closer to us than our own heart.

O world invisible, we view thee,O world intangible, we touch thee,O world unknowable, we know thee.

You are the unknowable. You are here just to be in this moment, in this dream. Being has nothing to do with knowledge. It's not about understanding. You don't need to understand. It's not about learning. You are here to unlearn, and that's it, until one day you realize you know nothing.

But one wants the idea of Death, you know, as something large and unknowable, something that allows a person to stretch himself out. Especially one wants it if one is tired. Or perhaps what one wants is simply a release from sensation, from all consciousness for ever....

Even the most carefully defined philosophical or mathematical concept, which we are sure does not contain more than we have put into it, is nevertheless more than we assume. It is a psychic event and as such partly unknowable. The very numbers you use in counting are more than you take them to be. They are at the same time mythological elements (for the Pythagoreans, they were even divine); but you are certainly unaware of this when you use numbers for a practical purpose.

Even the most carefully defined philosophical or mathematical concept, which we are sure does not contain more than we put into it, is nevertheless more than we assume. It is a psychic event and as such partly unknowable. The very numbers you use in counting are more than you take them to be. They are at the same time mythological elements (for the Pythagoreans, they were even divine); but you are certainly unaware of this when you use numbers for practical purpose.

There's no way we can raise a positronic brain one inch above the level of perfect materialism. "We can't, damn it, we can't. Not as long as we don't understand what makes our own brains tick. Not as long as things exist that science can't measure. What is beauty, or goodness, or art, or love, or God? We're forever teetering on the brink of the unknowable, and trying to understand what can't be understood. It's what makes us men.

Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops.