Quotes About Unknowable

...you can't rationalize suffering - it's indeterminate - the real unknowable variable God substitutes in...

The dead have nothing left to them but a silent faith in that unknowable infinity--even if theirs is an infinity that nothing waits but an infinity of infinities.

The essential object of fiction is not to explain. Explanation narrows. Explanation fixes. Explanation dissolves mystery. Explanation imposes artificial, arrogant order on human contradictions between fact and fact. The essential object of fiction is to embrace and widen and deepen all that is unknown and unknowable--who we are, why we are--and to offer us late-night company as we lie awake pondering our universal journey down the birth canal, and out into the light, and then toward the grave.

The thing about perfection is that it is unknowable, it's impossible, but its also right in front of us, all the time

Death belongs only to God. By what right to men tamper with a thing so unknowable?

A sphinx. A mystery. A blank. Unknown. Undefined. Unknowable. Indefinable. Those were all the words Brandy used to describe me in my veils. Not just a story that goes and then, and then, and then, and then until you die.

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal Name.

I cannot describe God in the same way that I cannot describe a picture I am holding millimeters from my eyes—the picture is made strange and unknowable not because it is distant but because it is so close.

Academicians of the arcane fall prey to the illusion that they can label and control that which will always be partially Unknowable, Fluid and Chaotic. To approach spirituality from an academic point of view may yield valuable information about the framework of the spiritual way, but never about the Alchemical Mysteries themselves.

Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable.

I think it's a wonderful fact about Judaism - at least about the approach to Judaism I most relate to: There are no universal answers. We don't have it all figured out. God is unknowable.

If atheism is to be used to express the state of mind in which God is identified with the unknowable, and theology is pronounced to be a collection of meaningless words about unintelligible chimeras, then I have no doubt, and I think few people doubt.

Perhaps life is actually more confusing and unknowable to an adult than a child, but grown-ups have learned to deceive themselves and act as if they understand what's going on; and some are elected to high office on the basis of their ability to create this impression.

No standard exists for the peculiarity and ridiculousness of things, not even one that is unspeakable or unknowable, words which are merely a front or a subterfuge. These qualities – the peculiar and the ridiculous – are immanent and absolute in all existence and would be in any conceivable existent order . . .

We must start from what seems a be a nullity, the unknowable, the inexpressible, the creative mystery wherein we are established. We cannot become more exact than this without introducing falsehood.

We stared out at the city that hummed and glittered like a computer chip deep in some unknowable machine, holding its secret like a poker hand

If the relativist claims that, since all reasoning is embodied in a particular social context, no claim to know the truth can be sustained, one has to ask for the basis on which this claim is made. It is, after all, a claim to know something about reality — namely that reality is unknowable.

Truth is singular and lies are plural, but history - the facts of what happened is both immutable and mostly unknowable.

There could only be a meeting of their mysteries if one surrendered to the other: the surrender of two unknowable worlds done with the trust with which two understandings might surrender to each other.

If the essence of things is unknowable, the misery of man cannot be fathomed.

Audley pats his arm. He wants to console him. But who can begin to do it? He si the inconsolable Master Cromwell: the unknowable, the inconstruable, the probably indefeasible Master Cromwell.

Lulled by his conversation, I let myself believe I had fooled him at the very moment he was fooling me. He was as deceptive as the rest of his family. More, maybe. He never let down his guard with me, not once. Too late, I understand what's terrifying about his charm. He seems entirely open when he is unknowable. Every smile is painted on, a mask.

Her tragedy hadn't made her more approachable, and in fact lent her the unknowable quality of a person who had suffered more than could be expressed.

The real, by which I mean God, continues to remain unfathomable.