Unknowability Quotes

“On January 18, 1915, six months into the First World War, as all Europe was convulsed by killing and dying, Virginia Woolf wrote in her journal, 'The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be, I think.' Dark, she seems to be saying, as in inscrutable, not as in terrible. We often mistake the one for the other. Or we transform the future's unknowability into something certain, the fulfillment of all our dread, the place beyond which there is no way forward. Be again and again, far stranger things happen than the end of the world.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power

“The king has great power, but he has no power to know me, except through what I say and what I do.”
― Hilary Mantel, The Mirror & the Light

“They have never had a harsh word till today, he thinks, and perhaps what has passed is less harsh than sad: that a son can think evil of his father as if he is a stranger and you cannot tell what he might do; as if he is a traveller on the road, who might bless your journey and cheer you on, or equally rob you and roll you in a ditch.”
― Hilary Mantel, The Mirror & the Light

“...there was no place as unknown as grief.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

“Continuous learning allows you to be both defensive and offensive in a fast-changing future filled with huge unknowns.”
― Douglass Hatcher, Win With Decency: How to Use Your Better Angels for Better Business

“There is great hazard in assuming one knows what 'It' is. The more you try to identify 'It' the more one confuses the issue. Beware of those who say they've bottled 'It' and sell so-called 'It'. 'It' is not for sale.”
― Laurence Galian, Beyond Duality: The Art of Transcendence