the Unknowable

1:The Unknown is not the Unknowable. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Two Negations, The Materialist Denial,

2:By its breath of grace our lives abide. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Pursuit of the Unknowable,

3:A cave of darkness guards the eternal Light. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Pursuit of the Unknowable,

4:The One by whom all live, who lives by none, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Pursuit of the Unknowable,

5:And plundered the Unknowable's vast estate.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Yoga of the King The Yoga of the Souls Release,

6:There was no second, it had no partner or peer;
Only itself was real to itself. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Pursuit of the Unknowable,

7:The separate self must melt or be reborn
Into a Truth beyond the mind's appeal. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Pursuit of the Unknowable,

8:Its absence left the greatest actions dull,
Its presence made the smallest seem divine. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Pursuit of the Unknowable,

9:There was no act, no movement in its Vast:
Life's question met by its silence died on her lips, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Pursuit of the Unknowable,

10:It met her as the uncaught inaudible Voice
That speaks for ever from the Unknowable. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Nirvana and the Discovery of the All-Negating Absolute

11:He stood compelled to a tremendous choice.
All he had been and all towards which he grew
Must now be left behind or else transform
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Pursuit of the Unknowable, [T5],

12:It wore the guise of an indiscernible Vast,
Or was a subtle kernel in the soul:
A distant greatness left it huge and dim,
A mystic closeness shut it sweetly in: ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Pursuit of the Unknowable,

13:Voice of the unknowable
This void held more than all the teeming worlds,
This blank felt more than all that Time has borne,
This dark knew dumbly, immensely the Unknown. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Finding of the Soul,

14:The darkness of prayer is not the result of a gap between what we can know as creatures and the unknowable depths of God...It is our assimilation into the infinite's self-unveiling in the dark places of the finite world, in the wordless helplessness of the cross. ~ Rowan Williams,

15:Thought's long far-circling journey touched its close
And ineffective paused the actor Will.
The symbol modes of being helped no more,
The structures Nescience builds collapsing failed,
All glory of outline, sweetness of harmony,
Rejected like a grace of trivial notes,
Expunged from Being's silence nude, austere,
Died into a fine and blissful Nothingness.
The Demiurges lost their names and forms,
The great schemed worlds that they had planned and wrought
Passed, taken and abolished one by one.
The universe removed its coloured veil,
And at the unimaginable end
Of the huge riddle of created things
Appeared the far-seen Godhead of the whole,
His feet firm-based on Life's stupendous wings,
Omnipotent, a lonely seer of Time,
Inward, inscrutable, with diamond gaze.
Attracted by the unfathomable regard
The unsolved slow cycles to their fount returned
To rise again from that invisible sea.
All from his puissance born was now undone;
Nothing remained the cosmic Mind conceives.
Eternity prepared to fade and seemed
A hue and imposition on the Void,
Space was the fluttering of a dream that sank
Before its ending into Nothing's deeps.
The spirit that dies not and the Godhead's self
Seemed myths projected from the Unknowable;
From It all sprang, in It is called to cease.
But what That was, no thought nor sight could tell.
Only a formless Form of self was left,
A tenuous ghost of something that had been,
The last experience of a lapsing wave ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, 3:1,

16:This inner Guide is often veiled at first by the very intensity of our personal effort and by the ego's preoccupation with itself and its aims. As we gain in clarity and the turmoil of egoistic effort gives place to a calmer self-knowledge, we recognise the source of the growing light within us. We recognise it retrospectively as we realise how all our obscure and conflicting movements have been determined towards an end that we only now begin to perceive, how even before our entrance into the path of the Yoga the evolution of our life has been designedly led towards its turning point. For now we begin to understand the sense of our struggles and efforts, successes and failures. At last we are able to seize the meaning of our ordeals and sufferings and can appreciate the help that was given us by all that hurt and resisted and the utility of our very falls and stumblings. We recognise this divine leading afterwards, not retrospectively but immediately, in the moulding of our thoughts by a transcendent Seer, of our will and actions by an all-embracing Power, of our emotional life by an all-attracting and all-assimilating Bliss and Love. We recognise it too in a more personal relation that from the first touched us or at the last seizes us; we feel the eternal presence of a supreme Master, Friend, Lover, Teacher. We recognise it in the essence of our being as that develops into likeness and oneness with a greater and wider existence; for we perceive that this miraculous development is not the result of our own efforts; an eternal Perfection is moulding us into its own image. One who is the Lord or Ishwara of the Yogic philosophies, the Guide in the conscious being ( caitya guru or antaryamin ), the Absolute of the thinker, the Unknowable of the Agnostic, the universal Force of the materialist, the supreme Soul and the supreme Shakti, the One who is differently named and imaged by the religions, is the Master of our Yoga.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Four Aids, 62 [T1],

17:In our world error is continually the handmaid and pathfinder of Truth; for error is really a half-truth that stumbles because of its limitations; often it is Truth that wears a disguise in order to arrive unobserved near to its goal. Well, if it could always be, as it has been in the great period we are leaving, the faithful handmaid, severe, conscientious, clean-handed, luminous within its limits, a half-truth and not a reckless and presumptuous aberration.
A certain kind of Agnosticism is the final truth of all knowledge. For when we come to the end of whatever path, the universe appears as only a symbol or an appearance of an unknowable Reality which translates itself here into different systems of values, physical values, vital and sensational values, intellectual, ideal and spiritual values. The more That becomes real to us, the more it is seen to be always beyond defining thought and beyond formulating expression. "Mind attains not there, nor speech."3 And yet as it is possible to exaggerate, with the Illusionists, the unreality of the appearance, so it is possible to exaggerate the unknowableness of the Unknowable. When we speak of It as unknowable, we mean, really, that It escapes the grasp of our thought and speech, instruments which proceed always by the sense of difference and express by the way of definition; but if not knowable by thought, It is attainable by a supreme effort of consciousness. There is even a kind of Knowledge which is one with Identity and by which, in a sense, It can be known. Certainly, that Knowledge cannot be reproduced successfully in the terms of thought and speech, but when we have attained to it, the result is a revaluation of That in the symbols of our cosmic consciousness, not only in one but in all the ranges of symbols, which results in a revolution of our internal being and, through the internal, of our external life. Moreover, there is also a kind of Knowledge through which That does reveal itself by all these names and forms of phenomenal existence which to the ordinary intelligence only conceal It. It is this higher but not highest process of Knowledge to which we can attain by passing the limits of the materialistic formula and scrutinising Life, Mind and Supermind in the phenomena that are characteristic of them and not merely in those subordinate movements by which they link themselves to Matter.
The Unknown is not the Unknowable; it need not remain the unknown for us, unless we choose ignorance or persist in our first limitations. For to all things that are not unknowable, all things in the universe, there correspond in that universe faculties which can take cognisance of them, and in man, the microcosm, these faculties are always existent and at a certain stage capable of development. We may choose not to develop them; where they are partially developed, we may discourage and impose on them a kind of atrophy. But, fundamentally, all possible knowledge is knowledge within the power of humanity. And since in man there is the inalienable impulse of Nature towards self-realisation, no struggle of the intellect to limit the action of our capacities within a determined area can for ever prevail. When we have proved Matter and realised its secret capacities, the very knowledge which has found its convenience in that temporary limitation, must cry to us, like the Vedic Restrainers, 'Forth now and push forward also in other fields.'
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine,

* WISDOM TROVE *

1:Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing. ~ h-l-mencken, @wisdomtrove

2:A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable. ~ ambrose-bierce, @wisdomtrove

3:We're forever teetering on the brink of the unknowable, and trying to understand what can't be understood. ~ isaac-asimov, @wisdomtrove

4:Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops ~ h-l-mencken, @wisdomtrove

5:It is this belief in a power larger than myself and other than myself which allows me to venture into the unknown and even the unknowable. ~ maya-angelou, @wisdomtrove

6:Science is the art of creating suitable illusions which the fool believes or argues against, but the wise man enjoys for their beauty or their ingenuity, without being blind to the fact that they are human veils and curtains concealing the abysmal darkness of the unknowable. ~ carl-jung, @wisdomtrove

7:There is the unknown and the unknowable which propounds all creation. This we cannot love , we can only accept it as a term of our own limitation and ratification. We can only know that from the unknown, profound desires enter in upon us, and that the fulfilling of these desires is the fulfilling of creation. ~ d-h-lawrence, @wisdomtrove

* NEWFULLDB 2.4M *

1:Now I am the unknown, the unknowable. ~ Maggie Stiefvater,

2:The unknowable creates the greatest controversies. ~ Mason Cooley,

3:Why "revere" the unknowable? Why not find out what it is? ~ Barbara Ehrenreich,

4:Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable. ~ Leonard Bernstein,

5:By its breath of grace our lives abide. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Pursuit of the Unknowable,

6:Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing. ~ H L Mencken,

7:A cave of darkness guards the eternal Light. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Pursuit of the Unknowable,

8:The One by whom all live, who lives by none, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Pursuit of the Unknowable,

9:Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. ~ Carl Sandburg,

10:Religion. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable. ~ Ambrose Bierce,

11:The Unknown is not the Unknowable. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Two Negations, The Materialist Denial,

12:RELIGION, n. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable. ~ Ambrose Bierce,

13:Religion, n. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable. ~ Ambrose Bierce,

14:We're forever teetering on the brink of the unknowable, and trying to understand what can't be understood. ~ Isaac Asimov,

15:And plundered the Unknowable's vast estate.
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Yoga of the King The Yoga of the Souls Release,

16:Something about the memory caused him to tear up, to think again about the unknowable nature of the people we love. ~ Jess Walter,

17:He understood in that moment that he was smaller than he had ever known, and the realm of the unknowable was bigger. ~ Laini Taylor,

18:Because of the unknowable, life means something. When everything is known, then everything is flat. You will be fed up, bored. ~ Osho,

19:Religion, n. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable. ~ Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary,

20:I loved her for what I couldn't understand about her. Love searches for the mystery in the beloved, seeks the unknowable. ~ John Dufresne,

21:Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops ~ H L Mencken,

22:I never get used to it, the unknowable mystery of a person so suddenly, totally closed, snapped shut like a half-read novel. ~ Linda Barnes,

23:There was no second, it had no partner or peer;
Only itself was real to itself. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Pursuit of the Unknowable,

24:The separate self must melt or be reborn
Into a Truth beyond the mind’s appeal. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Pursuit of the Unknowable,

25:Life is the unknown and the unknowable, except that we are put into this world to eat, to stay alive as lone as we possibly can. ~ Richard Bach,

26:Music, because of its specific and far-reaching metaphorical powers, can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable. ~ Leonard Bernstein,

27:We’re forever teetering on the brink of the unknowable, and trying to understand what can’t be understood. It’s what makes us men. ~ Isaac Asimov,

28:How important to set aside time each day for the unknowable. How important to reach out: it doesn't matter that I don't yet believe. ~ Sy Safransky,

29:Its absence left the greatest actions dull,
Its presence made the smallest seem divine. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Pursuit of the Unknowable,

30:To blaspheme the earth is now the most dreadful sin, and to rate the heart of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth! ~ Friedrich Nietzsche,

31:It is this belief in a power larger than myself and other than myself which allows me to venture into the unknown and even the unknowable. ~ Maya Angelou,

32:There was no act, no movement in its Vast:
Life’s question met by its silence died on her lips, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Pursuit of the Unknowable,

33:We really wanted to know all the unknowable things about each other and how we were the same and how we were different, if we even were, maybe nobody is. ~ Miranda July,

34: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,

35:Each of us lives only now, in this brief instant. The rest of our life has been lived already, or is impossible to see because it lies in the unknowable future. ~ Marcus Aurelius,

36:Mysticism requires the notion of the unknowable, which is revealed to some and withheld from others; this divides men into those who feel guilt and those who cash in on it. ~ Ayn Rand,

37:For us scientists, on the other wing, life is not quite so simple. Because we learn the unknown. Unlike, hah-hah, our esteemed friends the philosophers, who learn the unknowable. ~ Ken MacLeod,

38:your body, was as good as anyone’s, because your blood was as precious as jewels, and it should never be sold for magic, for spirituals inspired by the unknowable hereafter. ~ Ta Nehisi Coates,

39: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,

40:I studied him and realized that madness is the last defence of the mind when it can't hope to reconcile itself with events; I too was standing between routine and the unknowable. ~ Derek Raymond,

41: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 Green Ingersoll,

42:He stood compelled to a tremendous choice.
All he had been and all towards which he grew
Must now be left behind or else transform
~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Pursuit of the Unknowable, [T5],

43:The unknowable is the beauty, the meaning, the aspiration, the goal. Because of the unknowable, life means something. When everything is known, then everything is flat. You will be fed up, bored. ~ Osho,

44:He acquired the unknowable, variable depths; he could be anyone he wanted to be, and if he didn’t like who he became, he could switch again, going in, going out. And who the fuck are you? ~ Aleksandar Hemon,

45:Audley pats his arm. He wants to console him. But who can begin to do it? He si the inconsolable Master Cromwell: the unknowable, the inconstruable, the probably indefeasible Master Cromwell. ~ Hilary Mantel,

46:I view it as one of the greatest crimes to shadow the minds of the young with these gloomy superstitions, and with fears of the unknown and the unknowable to poison all their joy in life. ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton,

47:Reason is an effort to know the unknown and intuition is the happening of the unknowable. To penetrate the unknowable is possible, but to explain it is not. The feeling is possible, the explanation is not. ~ Osho,

48:We must start from what seems a be a nullity, the unknowable, the inexpressible, the creative mystery wherein we are established. We cannot become more exact than this without introducing falsehood. ~ D H Lawrence,

49:Our civilization ... is not devaluing its awareness of the unknowable; nor is it deifying it. It is the first civilization that has severed it from religion and superstition. In order to question it. ~ Andre Malraux,

50:It wore the guise of an indiscernible Vast,
Or was a subtle kernel in the soul:
A distant greatness left it huge and dim,
A mystic closeness shut it sweetly in: ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Pursuit of the Unknowable,

51:Campbell said, “All religions are true in that the metaphor is true.” I think this means that religions are meant to be literary maps, not literal doctrines, a signpost to the unknowable, a hymn to the inconceivable. ~ Anonymous,

52:No matter how careful you planned or did your research, the unknowable things would rise up out of the deep and overturn everything. But that was what had drawn him in, wasn't it? The depths of what we don't know? ~ Sharon Guskin,

53:Jim's father possessed such certain knowledge of the Unknowable as made for the righteousness of people in cottages without disturbing the ease of mind of those whom an unerring Providence enables to live in mansions. ~ Joseph Conrad,

54:You preserved your life because your life, your body, was as good as anyone’s, because your blood was as precious as jewels, and it should never be sold for magic, for spirituals inspired by the unknowable hereafter. ~ Ta Nehisi Coates,

55:She knew there was enormous penalty for what they had done to her - but she could not conceive of that, did not require that: she only wanted a little comfort, a bit of charity; with the awfulness, the unknowable, removed. ~ John Hawkes,

56:History can’t harm you; the “chance” of having survived the last x minutes is one hundred per cent, once you’ve done it. As the unknowable future becomes the unchangeable past, risk must collapse into certainty, one way or another. ~ Greg Egan,

57: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,

58:Once the sin against God was the greatest sin; but God died, and these sinners died with him. To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful thing, and to esteem the entrails of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche,

59:There are three ingredients in the good life: learning, earning, and yearning. A man should be learning as he goes; and he should be earning bread for himself and others; and he should be yearning, too: yearning to know the unknowable. ~ Christopher Morley,

60:There was so much we had done to ourselves, so much we said in our sessions that our hearts were rent with sorrow. There is so much that happens to the human heart that is in the realm of the unthinkable, the unknowable, the unbearable. (95) ~ Robert Goolrick,

61:Nothing can temper the spirit of a warrior as much as the challenge of dealing with impossible people in positions of power. Only under those conditions can warriors acquire the sobriety and serenity to withstand the pressure of the unknowable. ~ Carlos Castaneda,

62:If atheism is to be used to express the state of mind in which God is identified with the unknowable, and theology is pronounced to be a collection of meaningless words about unintelligible chimeras, then I have no doubt, and I think few people doubt. ~ Leslie Stephen,

63:All pain must be faced
and embraced as the true countenance of
your beloved

All fear must be met
and recognized as the thrill of tasting
the unknowable

All joy must be surrendered
and acknowledged as a gift with
no giver ~ Nirmala,

64:Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away. ~ Carl Sandburg,

65:We know that nothing can temper the spirit of a warrior as much as the challenge of dealing with impossible people in positions of power. Only under those conditions can warriors acquire the sobriety and serenity to stand the pressure of the unknowable. ~ Carlos Castaneda,

66:individualism. Campbell said, “All religions are true in that the metaphor is true.” I think this means that religions are meant to be literary maps, not literal doctrines, a signpost to the unknowable, a hymn to the inconceivable. Edward Slingerland is a professor ~ Russell Brand,

67:I try to be one of the exceptional people who can live with the complexity of things, who are at peace with the unknown and the unknowable, who leave all the cages open. I tell myself: There's so much that you don't know, you can't know, you aren't ever going to know. ~ Kelly Corrigan,

68:Science is the art of creating suitable illusions which the fool believes or argues against, but the wise man enjoys for their beauty or their ingenuity, without being blind to the fact that they are human veils and curtains concealing the abysmal darkness of the unknowable ~ Carl Jung,

69:The paradox therefore reflects a higher level of intellect and, by not forcibly representing the unknowable as known, gives a more faithful picture of the real state of affairs. ~ Carl JungThe Paramahamsa accepts only what is real, rejecting that which is unreal -- the phenomenal world,

70:Intuition is possible because the unknowable is there. Science denies the existence of the divine because it says, “There is only one division: the known and the unknown. If there is any God, we will discover him through laboratory methods. If he exists, science will discover him. ~ Osho,

71:You are the unknowable. You are here just to be in this moment, in this dream. Being has nothing to do with knowledge. It’s not about understanding. You don’t need to understand. It’s not about learning. You are here to unlearn, and that’s it, until one day you realize you know nothing. ~ Miguel Ruiz,

72:There is no “truth,” for the very term requires both conformity with physically verifiable reality and adherence to the underlying belief system of the “truth-seeker.” Belief systems, by definition, place faith in the unknowable above factual verification, while facts stand independent of faith. ~ L E Modesitt Jr,

73:In our daily meditations, we pray to the Divine who fills the world, and fills our hearts, and moves us from rung-to-rung, until we arrive at where we have always been. And then we take another step so that the soul can come to encompass the vastness of the knowable as well as the unknowable. ~ Zalman Schachter Shalomi,

74:I wrote it in one sitting early the next morning. When something assembles itself that fast, it's clear it's been composing itself somewhere in the unknowable back of the mind for a long time. It wanted to be written; it was restless for the racetrack; it galloped along once I sat down at the computer. ~ Rebecca Solnit,

75:There is the unknown and the unknowable which propounds all creation. This we cannot love , we can only accept it as a term of our own limitation and ratification. We can only know that from the unknown, profound desires enter in upon us, and that the fulfilling of these desires is the fulfilling of creation. ~ D H Lawrence,

76:Data in our psychic program is often nonlinear, nonhierarchical, archaic, alive, and teeming with paradox. Simply booting up is a challenge, if not for no other reason than that most of us find acknowledging the unknowable and monitoring its intrusions upon the familiar and mundane more than a little embarrassing. ~ Tom Robbins,

77:We tend to crave a “and so it is” and “so it was” that the illusion of a single perspective brings, but one thing I have learned from being in the world is that there is no such panopticon. Panopticons are for surveillance states. It behooves us as writers and artists at this moment in history to honor the unknown and the unknowable. ~ Eleni Sikelianos,

78:If you believe that humans are animals, there can be no such thing as the history of humanity, only the lives of particular humans. If we speak of the history of the species at all, it is only to signify the unknowable sum of these lives. As with other animals, some lives are happy, others wretched. None has a meaning that lies beyond itself. ~ John N Gray,

79:The four points of the compass be logic, knowledge, wisdom and the unknown. Some do bow in that final direction. Others advance upon it. To bow before the one is to lose sight of the three. I may submit to the unknown, but never to the unknowable. The man who bows in that final direction is either a saint or a fool. I have no use for either. ~ Roger Zelazny,

80:Love Is the Treasure The temple of love is not love itself; True love is the treasure, Not the walls about it. Do not admire the decoration, But involve yourself in the essence, The perfume that invades and touches you- The beginning and the end. Discovered, this replaces all else, The apparent and the unknowable. Time and space are slaves to this presence. ~ Rumi,

81:Love Is the Treasure The temple of love is not love itself; True love is the treasure, Not the walls about it. Do not admire the decoration, But involve yourself in the essence, The perfume that invades and touches you— The beginning and the end. Discovered, this replaces all else, The apparent and the unknowable. Time and space are slaves to this presence. ~ Rumi,

82:Among the many things that made the Professor an excellent teacher was the fact that he wasn't afraid to say 'we don't know.' For the Professor, there was no shame in admitting you didn't have the answer, it was a necessary step toward the truth. It was as important to teach us about the unknown or the unknowable as it was to teach us what had already been safely proven. ~ Y ko Ogawa,

83:His vision crawled with ghost hieroglyphs, translucent lines of symbols arranging themselves against the neutral backdrop of the bunker wall. He looked at the backs of his hands, saw faint neon molecules crawling beneath the skin, ordered by the unknowable code. He raised his right hand and moved it experimentally. It left a faint, fading trail of strobed afterimages. ~ William Gibson,

84:It met her as the uncaught inaudible Voice
That speaks for ever from the Unknowable. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Nirvana and the Discovery of the All-Negating Absolute
Voice of the unknowable
This void held more than all the teeming worlds,
This blank felt more than all that Time has borne,
This dark knew dumbly, immensely the Unknown. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Finding of the Soul,

85:In a universe where visible matter accounts for only 0.01 percent of creation, it would be foolish to undertake science without a sense that reality is extremely mysterious. Dark energy exists on the fringe of the unknowable, and so does a saint who exists without eating. The simplistic logic and outmoded science applied by Dawkins and company don’t remotely approach how reality works. ~ Deepak Chopra,

86:It is my sincere opinion that our precious time on earth should not be spent attempting to justify unbelievable acts of cruelty, death, and disease as a part of 'God’s Plan' or the greater good — and clinging to ancient texts that preach ill-concealed bigotry and sexism. Instead, we should find ways to make this life happy and satisfying, without regard to the unknowable nature of an afterlife. ~ David G McAfee,

87:We ought not to believe those who today, adopting a philosophical air and with a tone of superiority, prophesy the decline of culter and are content with the unknowable in a self-satisfied way. For us there is no unknowable, and in my opinion there is also non whatsoever for the natural sciences. In place of this foolish unknowable, let our watchword on the contrary be: we must know - we shall know. ~ David Hilbert,

88:Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists adopt the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It is the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. ~ Rebecca Solnit,

89:Art is not a substitute religion: it is a religion (in the true sense of the word: 'binding back', 'binding' to the unknowable, transcending reason, transcendent being). But the church is no longer adequate as a means of affording experience of the transcendental, and of making religion real - and so art has been transformed from a means into the sole provider of religion: which means religion itself. ~ Gerhard Richter,

90:Something comes out of every voyage,’ said the other man sharply. ‘Out of every bloody fruitless endeavour. All the striving after the unknowable. The unattainable, the search for Athor, the creative force, rolled into a circle. You with your quest; I with my care-ridden Emperor; Sir Thomas, sitting before the fire, his bowels burning before him. We add something. If we didn’t add something, there would be no object in it. ~ Dorothy Dunnett,

91:There’s no way we can raise a positronic brain one inch above the level of perfect materialism. “We can’t, damn it, we can’t. Not as long as we don’t understand what makes our own brains tick. Not as long as things exist that science can’t measure. What is beauty, or goodness, or art, or love, or God? We’re forever teetering on the brink of the unknowable, and trying to understand what can’t be understood. It’s what makes us men. ~ Isaac Asimov,

92:There is a broad distinction between religion and theology. The one is a natural, human experience common to all well-organized minds. The other is a system of speculations about the unseen and the unknowable, which the human mind has no power to grasp or explain, and these speculations vary with every sect, age, and type of civilization. No one knows any more of what lies beyond our sphere of action than thou and I, and we know nothing. ~ Lucretia Mott,

93:A wonderful area for speculative academic work is the unknowable. These days religious subjects are in disfavor, but there are still plenty of good topics. The nature of consciousness, the workings of the brain, the origin of aggression, the origin of language, the origin of life on earth, SETI and life on other worlds...this is all great stuff. Wonderful stuff. You can argue it interminably. But it can't be contradicted, because nobody knows the answer to any of these topics. ~ Michael Crichton,

94:Separate from the other unnamed billions who walk the earth, each of these little groups of three or five or twelve, brought together by the shuffle of chance, then welded by blood, sees in itself the whole of earth, or all that matters of it. What happens to one of the three or five or twelve will happen to them all. Whatever grief or triumph may touch any one will touch every one, as they are carried forward into the unknowable under the brilliant, terrifying sun which nourishes all. ~ Belva Plain,

95:Kugel didn't like attics, he never did. The roofing nails overhead like fangs, waiting to sink into his skull; the cardboard boxes and plastic crates and leather trunks - tombs, sarcophagi - full of ghosts and regret and longing and loss; worse yet was the implication in all this emotional hoarding that the past was preferable to the present, that what came before bests whatever comes next, so clutch it to your chests in mourning and dread as you head into the unknowable but probably lousy future. ~ Shalom Auslander,

96:Trying what?" cried Maury fiercely. "Trying to pierce the darkness of political idealism with some wild, despairing urge toward truth? Sitting day after day supine in a rigid chair and infinitely removed from life staring at the tip of a steeple through the trees, trying to separate, definitely and for all time, the knowable from the unknowable? Trying to take a piece of actuality and give it glamour from your own soul to make for that inexpressible quality it possessed in life and lost in transit to paper or canvas? ~ F Scott Fitzgerald,

97:It seems to me to be true that heavens are placed in the sky because it is the unreachable. The unreachable and therefore the unknowable always seems divine--hence, religion. People need religion because the great masses fear life and its consequences. Its responsibilities weigh heavy. Feeling a weakness in the face of great forces, men seek an alliance with omnipotence to bolster up their feeling of weakness, even though the omnipotence they rely upon is a creature of their own minds. It gives them a feeling of security. ~ Zora Neale Hurston,

98:All possible truth is practical. To ask whether our conception of chair or table corresponds to the real chair or table apart from the uses to which they may be put, is as utterly meaningless and vain as to inquire whether a musical tone is red or yellow. No other conceivable relation than this between ideas and things can exist. The unknowable is what I cannot react upon. The active part of our nature is not only an essential part of cognition itself, but it always has a voice in determining what shall be believed and what rejected. ~ G Stanley Hall,

99:There are two irreconcilable ideas of God. There′s the Unknowable Creative Principle---one believes in That. And there′s the Sum of altruism in man---naturally one believes in That...The sublime poem of the Christ life was man′s attempt to join those two irreconcilable conceptions of God. And since the Sum of human altruism was as much a part of the Unknowable Creative Principle as anything else in Nature and the Universe, a worse link might have been chosen after all! Funny---how one went through life without seeing it in that sort of way! ~ John Galsworthy,

100:One of my own stray childhood fears had been to wonder what a whale might feel like had it been born and bred in captivity, then released into the wild-into its ancestral sea-its limited world instantly blowing up when cast into the unknowable depths, seeing strange fish and tasting new waters, not even having a concept of depth, not knowing the language of any whale pods it might meet. It was my fear of a world that would expand suddenly, violently, and without rules or laws: bubbles and seaweed and storms and frightening volumes of dark blue that never end ~ Douglas Coupland,

101:One of my own stray childhood fears had been to wonder what a whale might feel like had it been born and bred in captivity, then released into the wild-into its ancestral sea-its limited world instantly blowing up when cast into the unknowable depths, seeing strange fish and tasting new waters, not even having a concept of depth, not knowing the language of any whale pods it might meet. It was my fear of a world that would expand suddenly, violently, and without rules or laws: bubbles and seaweed and storms and frightening volumes of dark blue that never end. ~ Douglas Coupland,

102:It is the natural tendency of the ignorant to believe what is not true. In order to overcome that tendency it is not sufficient to exhibit the true; it is also necessary to expose and denounce the false. To admit that the false has any standing in court, that it ought to be handled gently because millions of morons cherish it and thousands of quacks make their livings propagating it — to admit this, as the more fatuous of the reconcilers of science and religion inevitably do, is to abandon a just cause to its enemies, cravenly and without excuse. It is, of course, quite true that there is a region in which science and religion do not conflict. That is the region of the unknowable. ~ H L Mencken,

103:Devotion is diligence without assurance. Faith is a way of saying, 'Yes, I pre-accept the terms of the universe and I am voicing in advance what I am presently incapable of understanding.' There is a reason that we refer to leaps-of-faith, because the decision to consent to any notion of divinity is a mighty jump from the rational over to the unknowable, and I don't care how diligently scholars of every religion will try to sit you down with their stacks of books and prove that their faith is rational; it isn't. If they were rational, it wouldn't be - by definition - faith. Faith is belief in what you cannot see or prove or touch. Faith is walking face first and full speed into the dark. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert,

104:I grew up then, into this life of jazz, and fell immediately into the state of almost audible confusion. Life stood over me like an immoral schoolmistress, editing my thoughts. It seemed to me that there was no ultimate goal for man. Man was beginning a grotesque and bewildered fight with nature, that by the divine and magnificent accident has brought us to where we could fly in her face. We produce a Christ who can raise up the leper and presently, it's the salt of the Earth. If any one can find lesson in that, let him stand forth. Am I crazy trying to pierce the darkness of political idealism with some wild, despairing urge towards truth? Trying to separate the knowable from the unknowable? ~ F Scott Fitzgerald,

105:I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! Poison-mixers are they, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life are they, decaying and poisoned themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so let them go.
Once the sin against God was the greatest sin; but God died, and these sinners died with him. To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful thing, and to esteem the entrails of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth...
What is the greatest experience you can have? It is the hour of the great contempt. The hour when your happiness, too, arouses your disgust, and even your reason and your virtue. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche,

106:I look into Julie's face. Not just at it, but into it. Every pore, every freckle, every faint gossamer hair. And then the layers beneath them. The flesh and bones, the blood and brain, all the way down to the unknowable energy that swirls in her core, the life force, the soul, the fiery will that makes her more than meat, coursing through every cell and binding them together in millions to form her. Who is she, this girl? What is she? She is everything. Her body contains the history of life, remembered in chemicals. Her mind contains the history of the universe, remembered in pain, in joy and sadness, hate and hope and bad habits, every thought of God, past-present-future, remembered, felt, and hoped for all at once. ~ Isaac Marion,

107:You preserved your life because your life, your body, was as good as anyone’s, because your blood was as precious as jewels, and it should never be sold for magic, for spirituals inspired by the unknowable hereafter. You do not give your precious body to the billy clubs of Birmingham sheriffs nor to the insidious gravity of the streets. Black is beautiful—which is to say that the black body is beautiful, that black hair must be guarded against the torture of processing and lye, that black skin must be guarded against bleach, that our noses and mouths must be protected against modern surgery. We are all our beautiful bodies and so must never be prostrate before barbarians, must never submit our original self, our one of one, to defiling and plunder. ~ Ta Nehisi Coates,

108:There's a reason we refer to "leaps of faith" - because the decision to consent to any notion of divinity is a mighty jump from the rational over to the unknowable, and I don't care how diligently scholars of every religion will try to sit you down with their stacks of books and prove to you through scripture that their faith is indeed rational; it isn't. If faith were rational, it wouldn't be - by definition - faith. Faith is belief in what you cannot see or prove or touch. Faith is walking face-first and full-speed into the dark. If we truly knew all the answers in advance as to the meaning of life and the nature of God and the destiny of our souls, our belief would not be a leap of faith and it would not be a courageous act of humanity; it would just be... a prudent insurance policy. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert,

109:The division between the known and the unknown is not complete. The East has a threefold division—known, unknown, unknowable. It agrees with the West that the unknown can become known, but the unknowable will always remain unknowable. There will always be mystery around human consciousness. There will be always mystery around love, friendship, meditation, consciousness. We may be able to know all that is objective. But the subjectivity, the innermost core of human consciousness, will remain always a mystery. And this has been the persistent effort of the East, to make it clear to the whole world that the unknowable should not be denied; otherwise you will take all juice out of human life. You will create robots out of human beings, you will destroy them, and they will be just machines and nothing more. ~ Osho,

110:The Unknown is not the Unknowable; it need not remain the unknown for us, unless we choose ignorance or persist in our first limitations. For to all things that are not unknowable, all things in the universe, there correspond in that universe faculties which can take cognisance of them, and in man, the microcosm, these faculties are always existant and at a certain stage capable of development. We may choose not to develop them; where they are partially developed, we may discourage and impose on them a kind of atrophy. But, fundamentally all possible knowledge is knowledge within the power of humanity. And since in man there is the inalienable impulse of Nature towards self-realisation, no struggle of the intellect to limit the action of our capacities within a determined area can for ever prevail. ~ Sri Aurobindo,

111:Like most humanoids, I am burdened with what the Buddhists call the "monkey mind"--the thoughts that swing from limb to limb, stopping only to scratch themselves, spit and howl. From the distant past to the unknowable future, my mind swings wildly through time, touching on dozens of ideas a minute, unharnessed and undisciplined. This in itself is not necessarily a problem; the problem is the emotional attachment that goes along with the thinking. Happy thoughts make me happy, but-whoop!-how quickly I swing again into obsessive worry, blowing the mood; and then it's all over again; and then my mind decides it might be a good time to start feeling sorry for itself, and loneliness follows promptly. You are, after all, what you think. Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert,

112:And the voice spoke even more deliberately: '...but remember what is under the ocean of clouds: eternity.'

And suddenly that tranquil world, the world of such simple harmony that you discover as you rise above the clouds, took on an unfamiliar quality in my eyes. All that gentleness became a trap. In my mind's eye I saw that vast white trap laid out, right under my feet. Beneath it reigned neither the restlessness of men nor the living tumult and motion of cities, as one might have thought, but a silence that was even more absolute, a more final peace. That viscous whiteness was turning before my eyes into the boundary between the real and the unreal, between the known and the unknowable. And I was already beginning to sense that a spectacle has no meaning except when seen through a culture, a civilization, a professional craft. ~ Antoine de Saint Exup ry,

113:Like most humanoids, I am burdened with what the Buddhists call the “monkey mind”—the thoughts that swing from limb to limb, stopping only to scratch themselves, spit and howl. From the distant past to the unknowable future, my mind swings wildly through time, touching on dozens of ideas a minute, unharnessed and undisciplined. This in itself is not necessarily a problem; the problem is the emotional attachment that goes along with the thinking. Happy thoughts make me happy, but—whoop!—how quickly I swing again into obsessive worry, blowing the mood; and then it’s the remembrance of an angry moment and I start to get hot and pissed off all over again; and then my mind decides it might be a good time to start feeling sorry for itself, and loneliness follows promptly. You are, after all, what you think. Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert,

114:The Letters I Won'T Write
The letters I won't write
murmur most inaudibly
through the signs
of something like this
sometimes find the cracks
to transmit their noise. I've
no intention to write
to my father (about it all) but
it's a parallel epistle
fear and disappointment
inscribed in between
lines of a poem, say, or lines
spoken by a novel's hero
who (of course) has nothing
to do with a father. Cunning
and assiduous as I am
I can't always trap
the unknowable facts
in a cage constructed
of calculated artifice. Sooner
or later, hellish growls
of past hurts vibrate
the basis of an elaborate
indirect simulation. Not
formal constrictors - 'Dear...'
to 'Yours...' - but the gist
89
of an absolute, undocumented
list of accusations
that only insinuates
and never truly represents
the letters I can't write.
~ Ali Alizadeh,

115:It was the kind of nightmare where you realize that the missing weight of things is sitting right there on your chest, like some kind of succubus, but before you can shove it off, it gets sucked away through a mysterious process into the unknowable realm of your cells, and from there on you are defenseless, your cells already weigh a ton, while your whole body is so light it almost floats, and that’s how it goes until you can only wonder how the cells could be so unbearably heavy when the body is so nauseatingly light, and in this nauseating lightheadedness things gradually recede from you just as you too begin to gradually recede from them, in a word it is like when a person lugging a load becomes exhausted by all this lugging and suddenly looking down at his hands sees that there is nothing in them, there never was, that he had been lugging nothing—that is, when you suddenly realize that something is no longer in your possession, just as nothing ever had been. ~ L szl Krasznahorkai,

116:And meanwhile, even in spite of all my desire, I could never imagine to myself that there is no future life and no providence. Most likely there is all that, but we don't understand anything about the future life and its laws. But if it is so difficult and even completely impossible to understand it, can it be that I will have to answer for being unable to comprehend the unknowable? True, they say, and the prince, of course, along with them, that it is here that obedience is necessary, that one must obey without reasoning, out of sheer good behavior, and that I am bound to be rewarded for my meekness in the other world. We abase providence too much by ascribing our own notions to it, being vexed that we can't understand it. But, again, if it's impossible to understand it, then, I repeat, it is hard to have to answer for something it is not given to man to understand. And if so, how are they going to judge me for being unable to understand the true will and laws of providence? No, we'd better leave religion alone. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky,

117:Then the one called Raltariki is really a demon?" asked Tak.

"Yes—and no," said Yama, "If by 'demon' you mean a malefic, supernatural creature, possessed of great powers, life span and the ability to temporarily assume virtually any shape—then the answer is no. This is the generally accepted definition, but it is untrue in one respect."

"Oh? And what may that be?"

"It is not a supernatural creature."

"But it is all those other things?"

"Yes."

"Then I fail to see what difference it makes whether it be supernatural or not—so long as it is malefic, possesses great powers and life span and has the ability to change its shape at will."

"Ah, but it makes a great deal of difference, you see. It is the difference between the unknown and the unknowable, between science and fantasy—it is a matter of essence. The four points of the compass be logic, knowledge, wisdom and the unknown. Some do bow in that final direction. Others advance upon it. To bow before the one is to lose sight of the three. I may submit to the unknown, but never to the unknowable. ~ Roger Zelazny,

118:Child, child, have patience and belief, for life is many days, and each present hour will pass away. Son, son, you have been mad and drunken, furious and wild, filled with hatred and despair, and all the dark confusions of the soul - but so have we. You found the earth too great for your one life, you found your brain and sinew smaller than the hunger and desire that fed on them - but it has been this way with all men. You have stumbled on in darkness, you have been pulled in opposite directions, you have faltered, you have missed the way, but, child, this is the chronicle of the earth. And now, because you have known madness and despair, and because you will grow desperate again before you come to evening, we who have stormed the ramparts of the furious earth and been hurled back, we who have been maddened by the unknowable and bitter mystery of love, we who have hungered after fame and savored all of life, the tumult, pain, and frenzy, and now sit quietly by our windows watching all that henceforth never more shall touch us - we call upon you to take heart, for we can swear to you that these things pass. ~ Thomas Wolfe,

119:Best of all, of course, religion solves the problem of death, which no living individuals can solve, no matter how they would support us. Religion, then, gives the possibility of heroic victory in freedom and solves the problem of human dignity at it highest level. The two ontological motives of the human condition are both met: the need to surrender oneself in full to the the rest of nature, to become a part of it by laying down one's whole existence to some higher meaning; and the need to expand oneself as an individual heroic personality. Finally, religion alone gives hope, because it holds open the dimension of the unknown and the unknowable, the fantastic mystery of creation that the human mind cannot even begin to approach, the possibility of a multidimensionality of spheres of existence, of heavens and possible embodiments that make a mockery of earthly logic-and in doing so, it relieves the absurdity of earthly life, all the impossible limitations and frustrations of living matter. In religious terms, to "see God" is to die, because the creature is too small and finite to be able to bear the higher meanings of creation. Religion takes one's very creatureliness, one's insignificance, and makes it a condition of hope. Full transcendence of the human condition means limitless possibility unimaginable to us. ~ Ernest Becker,

120:The question that lingers is, how much was I a factor in my own survival, and how much was science, and how much miracle?
I don't have the answer to that question. Other people look to me for the answer, I know. But if I could answer it, we would have the cure for cancer, and what's more, we would fathom the true meaning of our existences. I can deliver motivation, inspiration, hope, courage, and counsel, but I can't answer the unknowable. Personally, I don't need to try. I 'm content with simply being alive to enjoy the mystery.
Good Joke:
A man is caught in a flood, and as the water rises he climbs to the roof of his house and waits to be rescued. A guy in a motorboat comes by, and he says, "Hop in, I'll save you."
"No thanks," the man on the rooftop says. "My Lord will save me."
But the floodwaters keep rising. A few minutes later, a rescue plane flies overhead and the pilot drops a line.
"No, thanks," the man on the rooftop says. "My Lord will save me."
But the floodwaters rise ever higher, and finally, they overflow the roof and the man drowns.
When he gets to heaven, he confronts God.
"My Lord, why didn't you save me?" he implores.
"You idiot," God says. "I sent a boat, I sent you a plane."
I think in a way we are all just like the guy on the rooftop. Things take place, there is a confluence of events and circumstances, and we can't always know their purpose, or even if there is one. But we can take responsibility for ourselves and be brave. ~ Lance Armstrong,

121:Thought's long far-circling journey touched its close
And ineffective paused the actor Will.
The symbol modes of being helped no more,
The structures Nescience builds collapsing failed,
All glory of outline, sweetness of harmony,
Rejected like a grace of trivial notes,
Expunged from Being's silence nude, austere,
Died into a fine and blissful Nothingness.
The Demiurges lost their names and forms,
The great schemed worlds that they had planned and wrought
Passed, taken and abolished one by one.
The universe removed its coloured veil,
And at the unimaginable end
Of the huge riddle of created things
Appeared the far-seen Godhead of the whole,
His feet firm-based on Life's stupendous wings,
Omnipotent, a lonely seer of Time,
Inward, inscrutable, with diamond gaze.
Attracted by the unfathomable regard
The unsolved slow cycles to their fount returned
To rise again from that invisible sea.
All from his puissance born was now undone;
Nothing remained the cosmic Mind conceives.
Eternity prepared to fade and seemed
A hue and imposition on the Void,
Space was the fluttering of a dream that sank
Before its ending into Nothing's deeps.
The spirit that dies not and the Godhead's self
Seemed myths projected from the Unknowable;
From It all sprang, in It is called to cease.
But what That was, no thought nor sight could tell.
Only a formless Form of self was left,
A tenuous ghost of something that had been,
The last experience of a lapsing wave ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, 3:1,

122:…There is some firm place in me which knows that what happened to Wally, whatever it was, whatever it is that death is as it transliterates us, moving us out of this life into what we can’t know, is kind.
I shock myself, writing that. I know that many deaths are anything but gentle. I know people suffer terribly…I know many die abandoned, unseen, their stories unheard, their dignity violated, their human worth ignored.
I suspect that the ease of Wally’s death, the rightness of it, the loving recognition which surrounded him, all made it possible for me to see clearly, to witness what other circumstances might obscure. I know, as surely as I know anything, that he’s all right now.

And yet.

And yet he’s gone, an absence so forceful it is itself a daily hourly presence.
My experience of being with Wally… brought me to another sort of perception, but I can’t stay in that place, can’t sustain that way of seeing. The experience of knowing, somehow, that he’s all right, lifted in some kind process that turns at the heart of the world, gives way, as it must, to the plain aching fact that he’s gone.
And doubt. And the fact that we can’t understand, that it’s our condition to not know. Is that our work in the world, to learn to dwell in such not-knowing?
We need our doubt so as to not settle for easy answers. Not-knowing pushes us to struggle after meaning for ourselves…Doubt’s lesson seems to be that whatever we conclude must be provisional, open to revision, subject to correction by forces of change. Leave room, doubt says, for the unknowable, for what it will never quite be your share to see.
Stanley Kunitz says somewhere that if poetry teaches us anything, it is that we can believe two completely contradictory things at once. And so I can believe that death is utter, unbearable rupture, just as I know that death is kind. ~ Mark Doty,

123:…There is some firm place in me which knows that what happened to Wally, whatever it was, whatever it is that death is as it transliterates us, moving us out of this life into what we can’t know, is kind.
I shock myself, writing that. I know that many deaths are anything but gentle. I know people suffer terribly…I know many die abandoned, unseen, their stories unheard, their dignity violated, their human worth ignored.
I suspect that the ease of Wally’s death, the rightness of it, the loving recognition which surrounded him, all made it possible for me to see clearly, to witness what other circumstances might obscure. I know, as surely as I know anything, that he’s all right now.

And yet.

And yet he’s gone, an absence so forceful it is itself a daily hourly presence.
My experience of being with Wally… brought me to another sort of perception, but I can’t stay in that place, can’t sustain that way of seeing. The experience of knowing, somehow, that he’s all right, lifted in some kind process that turns at the heart of the world, gives way, as it must, to the plain aching fact that he’s gone.
And doubt. And the fact that we can’t understand, that it’s our condition to not know. Is that our work in the world, to learn to dwell in such not-knowing?
We need our doubt so as to not settle for easy answers. Not-knowing pushes us to struggle after meaning for ourselves…Doubt’s lesson seems to be that whatever we conclude must be provisional, open to revision, subject to correction by forces of change. Leave room, doubt says, for the unknowable, for what it will never quite be your share to see.
Stanley Kunitz says somewhere that if poetry teaches us anything, it is that we can believe two completely contradictory things at once. And so I can believe that death is utter, unbearable rupture, just as I know that death is kind. ~ Mark Doty,

124:This inner Guide is often veiled at first by the very intensity of our personal effort and by the ego's preoccupation with itself and its aims. As we gain in clarity and the turmoil of egoistic effort gives place to a calmer self-knowledge, we recognise the source of the growing light within us. We recognise it retrospectively as we realise how all our obscure and conflicting movements have been determined towards an end that we only now begin to perceive, how even before our entrance into the path of the Yoga the evolution of our life has been designedly led towards its turning point. For now we begin to understand the sense of our struggles and efforts, successes and failures. At last we are able to seize the meaning of our ordeals and sufferings and can appreciate the help that was given us by all that hurt and resisted and the utility of our very falls and stumblings. We recognise this divine leading afterwards, not retrospectively but immediately, in the moulding of our thoughts by a transcendent Seer, of our will and actions by an all-embracing Power, of our emotional life by an all-attracting and all-assimilating Bliss and Love. We recognise it too in a more personal relation that from the first touched us or at the last seizes us; we feel the eternal presence of a supreme Master, Friend, Lover, Teacher. We recognise it in the essence of our being as that develops into likeness and oneness with a greater and wider existence; for we perceive that this miraculous development is not the result of our own efforts; an eternal Perfection is moulding us into its own image. One who is the Lord or Ishwara of the Yogic philosophies, the Guide in the conscious being ( caitya guru or antaryamin ), the Absolute of the thinker, the Unknowable of the Agnostic, the universal Force of the materialist, the supreme Soul and the supreme Shakti, the One who is differently named and imaged by the religions, is the Master of our Yoga.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Four Aids, 62 [T1],

125:Margery," I blurted out in a passion of frustration. "I don't know what to make of you!"

Nor I you, Mary. Frankly, I cannot begin to comprehend the motives of a person who dedicates a large portion of her life to the contemplation of a God in whom she only marginally believes."

I felt stunned, as if she had struck me in the diaphragm. She looked down at me, trying to measure the effect of her words.

Mary, you believe in the power that the idea of God has on the human mind. You believe in the way human beings talk about the unknowable, reach for the unattainable, pattern their imperfect lives and offer their paltry best up to the beingless being that created the universe and powers its continuation. What you balk as it believing the evidence of your eyes, that God can reach out and touch a single human life in a concrete way." She smiled a sad, sad smile. "You mustn't be so cold, Mary. If you are, all you will see is a cold God, cold friends, cold love. God is not cold-never cold. God sears with heat, not ice, the heat of a thousand suns, heat that inflames but does not consume. You need warmth, Mary-you, Mary, need it. You fear it, you flirt with it, you imagine that you can stand in its rays and retain your cold intellectual attitude towards it. You imagine that you can love with your brain. Mary, oh my dear Mary, you sit in the hall and listen to me like some wild beast staring at a campfire, unable to leave, fearful of losing your freedom if you come any closer. It won't consume you; I won't capture you. Love does not do either. It only brings life. Please, Mary, don't let yourself be tied up by the bonds of cold academia."

Her words, the power of her conviction, broke over me like a great wave, inundating me, robbing me of breath, and, as they receded in the room, they pulled hard at me to folllow. I struggled to keep my footing against the wash of Margery's vision, and only when it began to lose its strength, dissipated against the silence in the room, was I seized by a sudden terror at the nearness of my escape. ~ Laurie R King,

126:In our world error is continually the handmaid and pathfinder of Truth; for error is really a half-truth that stumbles because of its limitations; often it is Truth that wears a disguise in order to arrive unobserved near to its goal. Well, if it could always be, as it has been in the great period we are leaving, the faithful handmaid, severe, conscientious, clean-handed, luminous within its limits, a half-truth and not a reckless and presumptuous aberration.
A certain kind of Agnosticism is the final truth of all knowledge. For when we come to the end of whatever path, the universe appears as only a symbol or an appearance of an unknowable Reality which translates itself here into different systems of values, physical values, vital and sensational values, intellectual, ideal and spiritual values. The more That becomes real to us, the more it is seen to be always beyond defining thought and beyond formulating expression. "Mind attains not there, nor speech."3 And yet as it is possible to exaggerate, with the Illusionists, the unreality of the appearance, so it is possible to exaggerate the unknowableness of the Unknowable. When we speak of It as unknowable, we mean, really, that It escapes the grasp of our thought and speech, instruments which proceed always by the sense of difference and express by the way of definition; but if not knowable by thought, It is attainable by a supreme effort of consciousness. There is even a kind of Knowledge which is one with Identity and by which, in a sense, It can be known. Certainly, that Knowledge cannot be reproduced successfully in the terms of thought and speech, but when we have attained to it, the result is a revaluation of That in the symbols of our cosmic consciousness, not only in one but in all the ranges of symbols, which results in a revolution of our internal being and, through the internal, of our external life. Moreover, there is also a kind of Knowledge through which That does reveal itself by all these names and forms of phenomenal existence which to the ordinary intelligence only conceal It. It is this higher but not highest process of Knowledge to which we can attain by passing the limits of the materialistic formula and scrutinising Life, Mind and Supermind in the phenomena that are characteristic of them and not merely in those subordinate movements by which they link themselves to Matter.
The Unknown is not the Unknowable; it need not remain the unknown for us, unless we choose ignorance or persist in our first limitations. For to all things that are not unknowable, all things in the universe, there correspond in that universe faculties which can take cognisance of them, and in man, the microcosm, these faculties are always existent and at a certain stage capable of development. We may choose not to develop them; where they are partially developed, we may discourage and impose on them a kind of atrophy. But, fundamentally, all possible knowledge is knowledge within the power of humanity. And since in man there is the inalienable impulse of Nature towards self-realisation, no struggle of the intellect to limit the action of our capacities within a determined area can for ever prevail. When we have proved Matter and realised its secret capacities, the very knowledge which has found its convenience in that temporary limitation, must cry to us, like the Vedic Restrainers, 'Forth now and push forward also in other fields.'
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine,

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