Unknowing Quotes

• We the willing, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much, with so little, for so long, we are now qualified to do anything, with nothing.

  Mother Teresa

  Sad, Long, Ungrateful

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• Only those who truly love and who are truly strong can sustain their lives as a dream. You dwell in your own enchantment. Life throws stones at you, but your love and your dream change those stones into the flowers of discovery. Even if you lose, or are defeated by things, your triumph will always be exemplary. And if no one knows it, then there are places that do. People like you enrich the dreams of the worlds, and it is dreams that create history. People like you are unknowing transformers of things, protected by your own fairy-tale, by love.

  Ben Okri

  Dream, Strong, Flower

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• He trudged along unknowing what he sought, And whistled as he went, for want of thought.

  John Dryden

  Want

  'Cymon and Iphigenia' (1700) l. 84

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• The Senate is an unknowing world

  Robert Caro

  World, Senate

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• Unknowing ignorance is preferable to informed stupidity.

  Brandon Sanderson

  Ignorance, Stupidity

  Brandon Sanderson (2009). “Warbreaker”, p.311, Macmillan

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• What has happened to our ability to dwell in the unknowing, to live inside a question and coexist with the tensions of uncertainty? Where is our willingness to incubate pain and let it birth something new? What has happened to patient unfolding, to endurance? These things are what form the ground of waiting.

  Sue Monk Kidd

  Pain, Waiting, Endurance

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• This moving away from comfort and security, this stepping out into what is unknown, uncharted and shaky - that's called liberation.

  Pema Chodron

  Buddhist, Freedom, Moving

  Pema Chodron (2001). “Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living”, p.21, Shambhala Publications

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• Though it may be called a nescience, and unknowing, yet there is in it more than all knowing and understanding without it; for this unknowing lures and attracts you from all understood things, and from yourself as well.

  Meister Eckhart

  Knowing, Understanding, May

  Meister Eckhart (1987). “Meister Eckhart, Sermons & Treatises”, Element Books Limited

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• The hardest part of change is going through the unknown.

  Robert Kiyosaki

  Inspirational, Life, Change

  FaceBook post by Robert Kiyosaki from May 31, 2011

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  The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Fear, Halloween, Scary

  H. P. Lovecraft (2014). “Complete Collection Of H. P. Lovecraft - 150 eBooks With 100+ Audiobooks (Complete Collection Of Lovecraft's Fiction, Juvenilia, Poems, Essays And Collaborations)”, p.11, Ageless Reads

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• Any company run by unknowing and mechanistic minds is in jeopardy and faces a limited life. Specifically, the pursuance of policies that focus on cost reduction and a continued optimisation of the bottom line just accelerate progress towards sudden death

  Peter Cochrane

  Running, Focus, Mind

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  Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.

  Leonard Bernstein

  Music, Communication, Talking

  Leonard Bernstein (1976). “The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard”, p.140, Harvard University Press

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• I think we have to trust ourselves in the darkness of not knowing. The God out of which we came and into which we go is an unknown God. It's the luminosity of that darkness and that unknowing that is, I think, the most human - and the most sacred - place of all.

  Sam Keen

  Thinking, Knowing, Darkness

  Source: www.scottlondon.com

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• Better the devil you know than the angel you don't.

  Hama Tuma

  Angel, Devil, Acquaintance

  "The Devil They Know" by Jon Lee Anderson, www.newyorker.com. July 27, 1998.

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• [W]e must come into a transformed knowing, an unknowing which comes not from ignorance but from knowledge.

  Meister Eckhart

  Ignorance, Knowing, Transformed

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• Truth walks toward us on the paths of our questions. As soon as you think you have the answer, you have closed the path and may miss the vital new information. Wait awhile in the stillness, and do not rush to conclusions, no matter how uncomfortable the unknowing.

  Jacqueline Winspear

  Thinking, Waiting, Missing

  Jacqueline Winspear (2003). “Maisie Dobbs”, p.26, Soho Press

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• You don't fear change. You fear the unknown. If you knew the future would be great, you'd welcome the change to get there. Well, the future IS great. Proceed.

  Joe Vitale

  Inspirational, Would Be, Welcome

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• You have to be willing to endure the discomfort, the doubts and unknowing, you somehow find the courage to walk through your doubts and the difficult times because you are living the life you are meant to live.

  Mary Pope Osborne

  Live Life, Doubt, Difficult Times

  Source: www.yabookshelf.com

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• The whole pleasure of being in a state of unknowing is that as long as you don’t know, all possible outcomes feel as if they are happening.

  John Green

  Long, Outcomes, Pleasure

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• Accident is design / And design is accident / In a cloud of unknowing.

  T. S. Eliot

  Clouds, Design, Accidents

  T. S. Eliot (2014). “The Family Reunion”, p.105, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The desert wears... a veil of mystery. Motionless and silent it evokes in us an elusive hint of something unknown, unknowable, about to be revealed. Since the desert does not act it seems to be waiting -- but waiting for what?

  Edward Abbey

  Waiting, Doe, Desert

  Edward Abbey (1968). “Desert Solitaire”, p.241, Simon and Schuster

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• I think unknowing is the most important theological idea for me. Unlearning the things you think you know.

  Darcey Steinke

  Thinking, Ideas, Important

  "Road Trip". Interview with Ali Liebegott, logger.believermag.com. October 25, 2013.

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• For him it was a dark passage which led to nowhere, then to nowhere, then again to nowhere, once again to nowhere, always and forever to nowhere, heavy on the elbows in the earth to nowhere, dark, never any end to nowhere, hung on all time always to unknowing nowhere, this time and again for always to nowhere, now not to be borne once again always and to nowhere, now beyond all bearing up, up, up and into nowhere, suddenly, scaldingly, holdingly all nowhere gone and time absolutely still and they were both there, time having stopped and he felt the earth move out and away from under them.

  Ernest Hemingway

  Moving, Dark, Forever

  Ernest Hemingway (2014). “For Whom the Bell Tolls”, p.181, Simon and Schuster

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• When I write, I don't know what is going to emerge. I begin in a condition of complete unknowing, an utter nakedness of concept or goal. A word appears, another word appears, an image. It is a moving into mystery.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Moving, Writing, Goal

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• The fact is that the more we take flight upward [to God], the more our words are confined to the ideas we are capable of forming; so that now as we plunge into that darkness which is beyond intellect, we shall find ourselves not simply running short of words but actually speechless and unknowing.

  Pope Dionysius

  Christian, Running, Ideas

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