Unknowing Quotes

“Every word, every image used for God is a distortion more than a description.”
― Anthony de Mello, One Minute Wisdom

“The Master made it his task to destroy systematically every
doctrine, every belief, every concept of the divine, for these
things, which were originally intended as pointers, were now
being taken as descriptions.

He loved to quote the Eastern saying "When the sage points
to the moon, all that the idiot sees is the finger.”
― Anthony de Mello

“The positivists have a simple solution: the world must be divided into that which we can say clearly and the rest, which we had better pass over in silence. But can anyone conceive of a more pointless philosophy, seeing that what we can say clearly amounts to next to nothing? If we omitted all that is unclear, we would probably be left completely uninteresting and trivial tautologies.”
― Werner Heisenberg

“I know not what tomorrow will bring.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“I didn't know where it would lead. I wanted things to develop naturally.”
― Earl Lovelace

“And in that moment, I felt my own ignorance spread suddenly out behind me like a pair of wings, and every single thing I didn’t know was a feather on those wings. I could feel them tugging at the air, restless to be airborne.”
― Frank Cottrell Boyce, The Unforgotten Coat

“I’m not sure of anything,” she said. “Which is almost wonderful.”
― Peter Heller, Celine

“Many people are willing to learn techniques that help them live their lives. But the person who seeks to confirm their life at its roots by reaching beyond technique to the fundamentals—to true religion—is exceedingly rare. I find this state of affairs most regrettable. That is why I can’t help but urge you to refrain from evaluating your daily life on the basis of what you think you know, on the basis of collected data.”
― Soko Morinaga, Novice to Master: An Ongoing Lesson in the Extent of My Own Stupidity

“Because I thought it was still possible everything was all right. Why did I think that? Because I had not heard otherwise. I was in the middle of a mystery.”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“In the end, only something endowed with mystery is worthy of love. It is impossible to love something stripped of mystery; at best it would be a thing one uses as one sees fit.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar

“I’m not surprised that in a time of hideous precarity so many of us would find ourselves tempted by the false grandiosities of certainty. But we must not confuse certainty with safety — in fact, certainty is the end of the imagination and therefore the definition of unsafety. Nor should we confuse unknowing with ignorance. To unknow is to admit limits, to acknowledge that others might have answers you lack, to recognize our exquisite interdependence as people, and best of all to seek within. To dwell in unknowing is to put your phone away and be for a brief moment completely, imperfectly, human.

In times like ours unknowing is excellent proof against our society’s inhumanity, against the lizard supremacy of certainty.

There is wisdom in the question deferred, the question without an immediate answer. Tolerance and unity, too.

And art, as well, if we can tolerate the fact that we are all forever a question without answers, a beautiful unknown, an infinite unknowing.”
― Junot Díaz

“This unknowing is one more definition of love: committing to a story you can't fully imagines when it begins.”
― Leslie Jamison, Make It Scream, Make It Burn

“Trust in the wisdom of your undecided heart.
Trust in your unknowing, love.
Have faith in the space of indecision.
There is wisdom here,
just as there is when you are bold
and steady and sure.
Take your time here.
Be gentle.
Coax out your truth,
and be willing to wait
for the answer to come.
It will.
It always does.
Until then, even the indecision
has lessons to teach.”
― Jeanette LeBlanc

“Explanations come to an end somewhere”
― Wittgenstein Ludwig

“I hear talk of that slippery slope, and my heart catches for a beat. But there is the musky truth I'm standing in that I can't deny, and it tastes of so much holy. That old way, the narrow line, I see now that was a slippery, saccharine surface where my soul could gain no purchase. For the first time, my feet feel sure beneath me, and that sense is twining its way up from my ankles, racing toward my knees, my thighs, my secret places, my heart. It's in my blood now, and I can't deny it. I can't deny it.

I open my eyes, because I could see even through my clutched-closed lids that the darkness is light, that the blindness has given way to searing vision.

I can't deny it.”
― Beth Morey, Night Cycles: Poetry for a Dark Night of the Soul

“. Could it be true that knowing always requires some level of unknowing? When we give up our death grip on certainty, we open the door expanding our understanding and deepening our consciousness. I know it is scary, but good adventures tend to be like that.”
― Karl Forehand, The Tea Shop

“You don't have to know the right first step. You just have to be ready and willing to walk into the unknowing with all of your hope and all of your fear and all of your doubt and all of your bravery.”
― Jeanette LeBlanc

“I still can’t say what life is for, but it can’t be to pretend
that every part of it is knowable, or that what appears to be
to the naked eye or in the middle ground or documented on paper
approximates a person any better than a daisy does our sun.”
― Timothy Donnelly

“we are left
together on this side of unknowing, stack like throwing bricks

all the finite seasons we have
& will spend without them.”
― Khadijah Queen

“These old stories are like blood. They run through people, even when they don't know it or think about it. He considered this idea for a moment. But even if you don't think about them, when the bad times come, the old stories come out on every side. And that's just like blood, too.”
― Tad Williams, Stone of Farewell