Unknowable Quotes

“Take from the church the miraculous, the supernatural, the incomprehensible, the unreasonable, the impossible, the unknowable, the absurd, and nothing but a vacuum remains.”
― Robert G. Ingersoll, The Ghosts and Other Lectures

“Human beings are unknowable. You can never know a single person fully, not even yourself. Even if you think you know yourself in your safe glass castle, you don’t know yourself in the dirt. Even if you hustle and make in the rough, you have no idea if you would thrive or die in the light of real riches, if your cleverness would outlive your desperation.”
― Micaiah Johnson, The Space Between Worlds

“I loved her for what I couldn't understand about her. Love searches for the mystery in the beloved, seeks the unknowable.”
― John Dufresne, Love Warps the Mind a Little

“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.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“One can be too ingenious in trying to search out the truth. Sometimes one must simply respect its veiled face. Of course this is a love story.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“It is natural that people should differ most, and most violently, about the unknowable . . . There is all the room in the world for divergence of opinion about something that, so far as we can realistically perceive, does not exist.”
― E. Haldeman-Julius

“Miller: "You are so determined to be unknowable."
Wallace: "We are always unknowable.”
― Brandon Taylor, Real Life

“Foggy road is a blessing because it is full of surprises and life is such a road! We are incredibly lucky that we all have an unknowable future!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Even what we are most certain of we know only in an illusory form.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good

“Time refuses to be simplified and reduced. You cannot say that it is found only in the mind or only in the universe, that it runs only in one direction, or in every one imaginable. That it exists only in biological substructure, or is only a social convention. That it is only individual or only collective, only cyclic, only linear, relative, absolute, determined, universal or only local, only indeterminate, illusory, totally true, immeasurable, measurable, explicable, or unapproachable. It is all of these things.”
― Peter Høeg, Borderliners

“Of course one never knows about other people's loves, and I would certainly never know about James's.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“I have battered destructively and in vain upon the mystery of someone else's life and must cease at last.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“But these speculations are too nightmarish. Better to feel 'I shall never know'.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“She couldn't know anyone, but someone still needed her. She couldn't be anyone, but she could still love.”
― Sandra Newman, The Heavens

“Of course we have an 'unconscious mind' and this is partly what my book is about. But there is no general chart of that lost continent. Certainly not a 'scientific' one.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“Swallowed up in the belly of the whale of infatuation, I now needed to distract myself in order to stay happy. Because our unknowable future shadowed the countenance of my soul.”
― Aspen Matis, Your Blue Is Not My Blue: A Missing Person Memoir

“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.”
― Holly Black, The Stolen Heir

“I wanted to buy a T-shirt that read: I AM UNKNOWABLE.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz

“The universe no longer seems to me a scene, at least in front of the great, blank curtain of the unknowable, filled by an orderly progress of more or less cognizable and predictable occurrences, depending upon interrelated causes; it seems the playground of the irresponsible, prankish, malevolent somethings, productive of incalculabilities.”
― Edward Lucas White, The Stuff of Dreams: The Weird Stories of Edward Lucas White

“A person must shrug off lies, embrace the unknown and unknowable, and control personal terror in order to do to discover the right path for leading a worthy life. Dare to be an original. Make your life a vivid example for other people how to live splendidly.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“It is to my comfort that I entertain stories of ghosts, of discarnate spirits, of angels, of relatives returning to this realm to speak to us... speaking to us in our thoughts and in our dreams. I take comfort in these because no matter how advanced we humans may be... no matter how civilized, how cultured, there will always be some aspect of the spiritual realm that not even the greatest living genius can truly comprehend or explain.”
― Gerald Maclennon, Wrestling with Angels: An Anthology of Prose & Poetry 1962-2016 Revised

“A modern man, I do not make undue connections though my heart wrenches daily against the unknowable, almighty throb and heave of the universe against my skin that sings a song for which we haven't quite found the words.”
― Jim Harrison

“And so Rebecca consigned herself to, not ignorance, but a judicious incuriosity: she decided, for the time being, to live with the constant, cryptic reminders that the scope of another person's soul could never be fully surveyed.”
― Dexter Palmer, Version Control

“Identity confusion... is as if somebody lost their mental road map and has no appreciation of who they are or what is going on in their life. They may know they know but become blustered or baffled as to why they don't. The information is inaccessible and likely would remind a person about things that have gone on in their life that are simply unacceptable and unknowable, in a given moment, because of the emotional gravity involved.”
― Richard A. Chefetz, Intensive Psychotherapy for Persistent Dissociative Processes: The Fear of Feeling Real

“By necessity there are other characteristics that are not accounted for, that are not measured, and that remain hidden and occulted. Anything that reveals itself does not reveal itself in total. This remainder, perhaps, is the "Planet". In a literal sense the Planet moves beyond the subjective World, but it also recedes behind the objective Earth. The Planet is a planet, it is one planet among other planets, moving the scale of things out from the terrestrial into the cosmological framework. Whether the Planet is yet another subjective, idealist construct or whether it can have objectivity and can be accounted for as such, is an irresolvable dilemma. What's important in the concept of the Planet is that it remains a negative conceit, simply that which remains "after" the human. The Planet can thus be described as impersonal and anonymous.”
― Eugene Thacker, Starry Speculative Corpse

“Why indeed does the hand experience such difficulty in rendering itself? ...It is a tragedy, or perhaps a boon, that the form should never know itself or approach anything resembling itself without warping the parameters of its being. Awareness is thusly obliteration and through reproduction of this intuitive knowing, the self is contaminated, and thereby annihilated.”
― Ashim Shanker, Inward and Toward

“One. The Clear. The Obvious. The Infinitely Pre-Existent. The Living. The Reality. The Mighty Splendor. The Knower of the Most Subtle Mysteries. We put our trust only in Allah. IT's Essence is unknowable, as IT IS. They asked Abu 'l-'Abbas al-Dinawari, 'How do you know God?' He replied, 'By the fact that I do not know Him.' No book, speech, wisdom, or religion can fully explain Allah. For Allah is Endless and Fathomless. IT is the beginning and the end. However, there is no beginning to IT's beginning and no end to IT's end.”
― Laurence Galian, The Sun at Midnight: The Revealed Mysteries of the Ahlul Bayt Sufis

“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

“More you know things, closer you come to the unknowable. With knowledge, the courage to face the unknowable must also develop. Otherwise you will keep circling within theories and stories to avoid facing Him.”
― Shunya

“An eye awake in voiceless heights of trance,
A mind plucking at the unimaginable,
Overleaping with a sole and perilous bound
The high black wall hiding superconscience,
She broke in with inspired speech for scythe
And plundered the Unknowable’s vast estate.

01.03_008:008”
― Sri Aurobindo, Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol