Quotes About Limitation

Our knowledge is a little island in a great ocean of nonknowledge.

Perhaps he knew, as I did not, that the Earth was made round so that we would not see too far down the road.

No word is capable of carrying the impulses one wants to send with it

U?wiadomi?em sobie w?asne ograniczenia - powiedzia? mi. - W procesie lektury zachodzi co?, na co nie mam wp?ywu." Mog?em mu odpowiedzie?, ?e tej granicy nie mo?e przekroczy? nawet najbardziej wszechobecna policja ?wiata. Mo?emy zabroni? czytania, lecz w dekrecie zabraniaj?cym czytania da?oby si? wyczyta? co? z prawdy, której woleliby?my nigdy nie ujawnia?...

The world is reduced to a sheet of paper on which nothing can be written except abstract words.

words are always imperfect, words are just sounds we make with our mouths that point our minds to think of things that cannot be fully described in words anyway. I am a writer, so I know where words fail us. A name is not a person, it is just what we have agreed to call them.

You can only flap your arms so much before gravity catches up to you.

For even the very wise cannot see all ends.

The experience of seeing how our thought and our words and our ideas have been confined by the limitation of our experience is one which is salutary and is in a certain sense good for a man's morals as well as good for his pleasure. It seems to us [scientists] that this is an opening up of the human spirit , avoiding its provincialism and narrowness.

That was the trouble with numbers. They got so big you couldn't handle them and even if you could they got you nowhere.

In your case," Andrea told me, "that would be impossible." 12

You can't hammer a nail over the Internet.

Only recently did it dawn on me all the things I will never do: I will never have an apartment in Rome. I will never have another lover. I will never radically change my life again.

A fish in a bowl thinks to know it all, for it has never seen the ocean.

If you believed in the "mediocrity of the masses," as he put it, then mediocrity became the ceiling on what you could achieve.

Mini-sagas are extremely short stories—just fifty words long…no more, no less.

You want to know Ã¢â'¬Â¦ things. You want to know everything. But you can understand so little.

there's not enough ink and paper to say all I wanted.

This sense of time, the awareness that countless others have come before and that others will follow in endless generations, distinguishes man from other animals. With this discovery of the meaning of death—that man's own life is limited—the life of architecture begins. And so begins man the creator's effort to conquer time.

The problem with an implicit memory, especially of a painful or negative experience, is that when we aren't aware of it, it becomes a buried land mine that can limit us in significant and sometimes debilitating ways.

The great thing about vinyl is that if you wanted to get a decent-sounding cut, you could really only have 20 minutes max on each side.

I have a rule against saying something is impossible unless it violates laws of physics.

In the absence of a limitation on local enforcement powers, the states are bound by the Supremacy Clause of the United States Constitution to enforce violations of the federal immigration laws.

I don't have a visa for the U.S., and I don't want to apply for one. And I don't want to fly for that long.