Omniscient Quotes - Page 3

• Early on, I settled on the first-person strategy as a way to deal with exposition and world-description issues. As long as the book is, it could have been far longer had I gone with an omniscient third-person narrator, or multiple point-of-view characters, since either of those would have enabled me to impart much more detailed information about the history and geography of the world.

  Neal Stephenson

  Book, Character, Issues

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• The vocabulary of an omniscient man would embrace words and images excluded from polite conversation. What would be base, or even obscene, to the obscene, becomes illustrious, spoken in a new connexion of thought.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Men, Vocabulary, Would Be

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald A. Bosco, Joel Myerson (2015). “Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.209, Harvard University Press

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• About 120 million of us place the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer. If our polls are to be trusted, nearly 230 million Americans believe that a book showing neither unity of style nor internal consistency was authored by an omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent deity.

  Sam Harris

  Believe, Book, Beer

  Sam Harris (2005). “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason”, p.17, W. W. Norton & Company

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• It is safe to say that almost every person living in New Orleans at the moment Hurricane Katrina struck shared your belief in an omnipotent, omniscient, and compassionate God. But what was God doing while Katrina laid waste to their city? Surely He heard the prayers of those elderly men and women who fled the rising waters for the safety of their attics, only to be slowly drowned there.

  Sam Harris

  Prayer, Men, Elderly

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• In the Buddhist texts, some of them say, when you die, basically that wild horse gets cut loose, and the mind is incredibly powerful and expansive, omniscient and can go anywhere and see anything, but - and this is the catch - it's colored by the habits of thought we made in life.

  George Saunders

  Buddhist, Horse, Powerful

  Interview with Jenny Shank, www.patheos.com. March 6, 2017.

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• The thing I love about Dickens is the omniscient, omnipotent narrator, and the great confidence of the narrator, which marks 19th-century novelists in general and Dickens in particular.

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  Things I Love, Narrators, Novelists

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• If you're the leader, you've got to give up your omniscient and omnipotent fantasies - that you know and must do everything. Learn how to abandon your ego to the talents of others.

  Warren G. Bennis

  Giving Up, Leader, Ego

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• If the public homage of a people can ever be worthy of the favorable regard of the Holy and Omniscient Being to Whom it is addressed, it must be that in which those who join in it are guided only be their free choice-by the impulse of their hearts and the dictates of their consciences.

  James Madison

  Heart, People, Choices

  James Madison, Robert Allen Rutland (1984). “The Papers of James Madison: 8 February-24 October 1813”

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• The government pretends to be endowed with the mystical power to accord favors out of an inexhaustible horn of plenty. It is both omniscient and omnipotent. It can by a magic wand create happiness and abundance. The truth is the government cannot give if it does not take from somebody.

  Ludwig von Mises

  Government, Giving, Magic

  Ludwig von Mises (2016). “Bureaucracy: The Economist”, p.78, VM eBooks

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• For an omnipotent and omniscient being, God has made some really lousy earthly staffing decisions.

  John Cole

  Decision, Staffing, Made

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• I was writing a story, 'The Artistic Career of Corky,' about two young men, Bertie Wooster and his friend Corky, getting into a lot of trouble, and neither of them had brains enough to get out of the trouble. I thought: Well, how can I get them out? And I thought: Suppose one of them had an omniscient valet?

  P. G. Wodehouse

  Writing, Men, Careers

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• I want, I think, to be omniscient. I think I would like to call myself "the girl who wanted to be God." Yet if I were not in this body where would I be-perhaps I am destined to be classified and qualified. But, oh, I cry out against it.

  Sylvia Plath

  Girl, Thinking, Body

  Sylvia Plath, Aurelia Schober Plath (1975). “Letters home: correspondence, 1950-1963”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• God is self-evident, impersonal, omniscient, the Knower and the Master of nature, the Lord of all. He is behind all worship and it is being done according to Him, whether we know it or not.

  Swami Vivekananda

  Self, Done, Worship

  Swami Vivekananda (2015). “The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda”, p.309, Manonmani Publishers

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• That's why the army sends all its future generals to what we call "charm school." As soon as you are a general, people think that you know everything. You think yourself that you have become omniscient and omnipotent. Be careful, because people want to do everything they can to please the general, and you need to guard against this.

  Colin Powell

  School, Army, Thinking

  Source: www.egonzehnder.com

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• Common sense is almost as omniscient as God.

  Emily Dickinson

  Common Sense, Common

  Emily Dickinson, Marta L. Werner (1995). “Emily Dickinson's Open Folios: Scenes of Reading, Surfaces of Writing”, p.282, University of Michigan Press

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• But why doesn't the Gospel ever say that Christ laughed?" I asked, for no good reason. "Is Jorge right?" "Legions of scholars have wondered whether Christ laughed. The question doesn't interest me much. I believe he never laughed, because, omniscient as the son of God had to be, he knew how we Christians would behave. . . .

  Umberto Eco

  Christian, Laughter, Believe

  Umberto Eco (1995). “Name of the Rose”, p.173, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Entrepreneurs constantly confuse what they do with who they are. We're all certainly responsible for what we do, but failing doesn't make us bad people and succeeding doesn't make us omniscient.

  Howard A. Tullman

  People, Entrepreneur, Succeed

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• What helps most is remembering that such a cry or attack or sly blow is a reflection of that other person’s inner state; it is not an omniscient summary of you. Your reaction reflects your own inner state, and that can tell you which aspects of your own inner world are needy of attention. p.291

  Stephanie Dowrick

  Reflection, Blow, Attention

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• The sadistic narcissist perceives himself as Godlike, ruthless and devoid of scruples, capricious and unfathomable, emotion-less and non-sexual, omniscient, omnipotent and omni-present, a plague, a devastation, an inescapable verdict.

  Sam Vaknin

  Devastation, Emotion, Narcissist

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• When we are unduly impatient with an omniscient God's timing, we really are suggesting that we know what's best. Strange isn't it-we who wear wrist watches seek to counsel Him who oversees cosmic clocks and calendars.

  Neal A. Maxwell

  Watches, Calendars, Strange

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• The Internet is global and seemingly omniscient, while iPods and phones are all microscopic workings encased in plastic blobjects. Compare that to a steam engine, where you can watch the pistons move and feel the heat of its boilers. I think we miss that visceral appeal of the machine.

  Scott Westerfeld

  Moving, Thinking, Ipods

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• The age looks steadily to the redressing of wrong, to the righting of every form of error and injustice; and a tireless and prying philanthropy, which is almost omniscient, is one of the most hopeful characteristics of the time.

  Mary Baker Eddy

  Errors, Hopeful, Age

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• The sum total or Ishwara may be said to be All-good, Almighty, and Omniscient. These are obvious qualities, and need no argument to prove, from the very fact of totality.

  Swami Vivekananda

  Quality, Needs, May

  Swami Vivekananda (2015). “The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda”, p.3880, Manonmani Publishers

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• Why pray if we cannot change God? ...is that why we pray? To change omniscient Love? Isn't it rather to learn what it is and to fulfill it? Not to change it by our acts, but to change our acts by it.

  Peter Kreeft

  Prayer, Love Is, Praying

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• The wonderful arrangement and harmony of the cosmos would only originate in the plan of an almighty omniscient being. This is and remains my greatest comprehension.

  Isaac Newton

  Cosmos, Wonderful, Harmony

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