Quotes About Incompleteness

We love only what we do not wholly possess.

I'll just get that condescending look all parents reserve for non-parents, to remind you that you're not yet a complete person.

In 1931, Kurt Godel proved in his famous second incompleteness theorem that there could be no finitary proof of the consistency of arithmetic. He had killed Hilbert's program with a single stroke. So should you be worried that all of mathematics might collapse tomorrow afternoon? For what it's worth, I'm not. I do believe in infinite sets, and I find the proofs of consistency that use infinite sets to be convincing enough to let me sleep at night.

And marking off time struck me as something like counting empty spaces—spaces you know can't ever be filled.

When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all.

Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation. We are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot.

Wir sind nicht fertig geworden miteinander. Und darum, glaube ich, haben wir uns trotz allem nicht trennen können. Der arme Monsieur Dmitritsch! Er könnte alle ersinnbaren Qualitäten eines Mannes haben, vergeblich, er würde nie aufkommen gegen das Vakuum, das uns verbindet.

We all have times when we go home at night and pull out our hair and feel misunderstood and lonely and like we're falling. I think the brain is such that there is always going to be something missing.

Loss. Thats what it was, a hole I could never fill. It would be bottomless.

No matter where i go, i still end up me. What's missing never changes. The scenery may change, but i'm still the same incomplete person. The same missing elements torture me with a hunger that i can never satisfy. I think that lack itself is as close as i'll come to defining myself.

My shadow is only half of what it should be. Everyone has their shortcomings.

What confused and disappointed me, though, was that I could never discover within her something special that existed just for me. A list of her good qualities far outstripped a list of her faults, and certainly far outshone my own, yet there was something missing, something absolutely vital.

It was just that, no matter where I found myself, I felt like there was a hole inside me, with the wind rushing through. I never felt satisfied. From the outside you wouldn't imagine I had any troubles.

It's like I'd been born with a blind spot, and was always missing something. And what I missed was always the most important thing of all.

I seriously believed I could escape myself–as long as I made the effort. But I always hit a dead end. No matter where I go, I still end up me. What's missing never changes. The scenery may change, but I'm still the same old incomplete person. The same missing elements torture me with a hunger that I can never satisfy. I guess that lack itself is as close as I'll come to defining myself.

Wir wissen hierzuland nur unvollkommen, Was in der Hölle Mod ist, Frau Brigitte

If self-absorption, vague yearnings, and a nagging sense of incompleteness are sins, then surely I will burn for all eternity, and I will save you a seat.

Andrej thought about it - the notion that the world was riddled with holes where certain people and animals were meant to be, but weren't.

By focusing on such a narrow slice of Nepali life, Ms. Spray and Mr. Velez have ceded any totalizing claim on the truth and instead settled for a perfect incompleteness.

To theorize' means, to see as a whole. The actual is a small part of the whole, or a single aspect of it, which, when taken by itself is, by reason of its incompleteness, both meaningless and comparatively unreal. To see the actual in its wholeness is to see it filled out with all that it implies, supplemented by that which gives it meaning.

two-thirds of the universe is still missing from the balance sheet

I am gone quite mad with the knowledge of accepting the overwhelming number of things I can never know, places I can never go, and people I can never be.

if medical science is geography, then mankind as a species has a map with three towns marked on it and a lot of blank space with drawings of sea serpents.

I don't know what it is, but I ache for it each day. It's as though I have eyes, but there are colors I cannot see. As though I have ears, but there's a range of notes I cannot hear.