Knowing quotes
3.9K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"Study is to study what cannot be studied. Undertaking means undertaking what cannot be undertaken. Philosophizing is to philosophize about what cannot be philosophized about. Knowing that knowing is unknowable is true perfection."
"Knowing so many people like myself who are singers and in traveling bands, the people you're in a relationship with feel slighted because they feel you're giving all your energy to your fans, and there's a lot of truth to that."
"The realization of ignorance is the first act of knowing."
"You think you can go into all those auditions not knowing who you are? The work came after I found my sense of self - when I wasn't so manic and desperate."
"Human vocabulary is still not capable, and probably never will be, of knowing, recognizing, and communicating everything that can be humanly experienced and felt."
"All along — not only since she left, but for a decade before — I had been imagining her without listening, without knowing that she made as a poor a window as I did. And so I could not imagine her as a person who could feel fear, who could feel isolated in a roomful of people, who could be shy about her record collection because it was too personal to share. Someone who might have read travel books to escape having to live in the town that so many people escape to. Someone who — because no one thought she was a person — had no one to really talk to."
"Because no matter what happened, I had the peace of mind of knowing that all of the chatter, the name-calling, the doubting -\-\ all of it was just noise. It did not define me. It didn’t change who I was. And most importantly, it couldn’t hold me back."
"Human intelligence is a reflection of the intelligence that produces everything. In knowing, we are simply extending the intelligence that comes to and constitutes us. We mimic the mind of God, so to speak. Or better, we continue and extend it."
"We humans have two great problems: the first is knowing when to begin; the second is knowing when to stop."
"I love my mother for all the times she said absolutely nothing.... Thinking back on it all, it must have been the most difficult part of mothering she ever had to do: knowing the outcome, yet feeling she had no right to keep me from charting my own path. I thank her for all her virtues, but mostly for never once having said, "I told you so."
"I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing what you really felt, rather that what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things which produced the emotion that you experienced."
"Knowing the importance of luck, you should be particularly suspicious when highly consistent patterns emerge from the comparison of successful and less successful firms. In the presence of randomness, regular patterns can only be mirages."
"Look for opportunities to help someone else, but don't give expecting something in return. Give knowing that if we give we receive."
"Strange is our situation here on earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to divine a purpose."
"She sat leaning back in her chair, looking ahead, knowing that he was as aware of her as she was of him. She found pleasure in the special self-consciousness it gave her. When she crossed her legs, when she leaned on her arm against the window sill, when she brushed her hair off her forehead - every movement of her body was underscored by a feeling the unadmitted words for which were: Is he seeing it?"
"We all look for happiness, but without knowing where to find it: like drunkards who look for their house, knowing dimly that they have one."
"[Aldous Huxley] compared the brain to a 'reducing valve'. In ordinary perception, the senses send an overwhelming flood of information to the brain, which the brain then filters down to a trickle it can manage for the purpose of survival in a highly competitive world. Man has become so rational, so utilitarian, that the trickle becomes most pale and thin. It is efficient, for mere survival, but it screens out the most wondrous part of man's potential experience without his even knowing it. We're shut off from our own world."
"Wisdom is knowing what you don't know."
"People search for joy everywhere not knowing that the Self is the source of all joy"
"The real art is knowing what to leave out, not what to put in."
