Knowing Quotes

“There are those who know and those who don't know. And for every ten thousand who don't know there's only one who knows. That's the miracle of all time--the fact that these millions know so much but don't know this.”
― Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

“There's more to getting to where you're going then just knowing there's a road.”
― Joan Lowery Nixon, In the Face of Danger

“If you truly want to know a person, talk to their enemies.”
― Jamie Leanne Gaines

“You might question a winkle - a feeling that came to you right out of the blue - but you didn’t question knowing.”
― Stephen King, Hearts in Atlantis

“For you see, when us people who know run into each other that's an event. It almost never happens. Sometimes we meet each other and neither guesses that the other is one who knows. That's a bad thing. It's happened to me a lot of times. But you see there are so few of us.”
― Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

“One could never know anything except through desire, real desire, which was not the same thing as greed or lust; a pure, painful and primitive desire, a longing for everything that was not in oneself, a torment of the flesh, that carried one beyond the limits of one's mind to other times and other places, and even, if one was lucky, to a place where there was no border between oneself and one's image in the mirror.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines

“We always think we know what we want: when in truth there is nothing we are less likely to know.”
― Jude Morgan, Indiscretion

“I don’t always feel what I know I should feel.
My thought crosses the river I swim very slowly
Because the suit men made it wear weighs it down.”
― Alberto Caeiro, The Keeper of Sheep

“Humanity's "progress of knowledge" and the "evolution of consciousness" have too often been characterized as if our task were simply to ascend a very tall cognitive ladder with graded hierarchical steps that represent successive developmental stages in which we solve increasingly challenging mental riddles, like advanced problems in a graduate exam in biochemistry or logic. But to understand life and the cosmos better, perhaps we are required to transform not only our minds but our hearts. For the whole being, body and soul, mind and spirit, is implicated. Perhaps we must go not only high and far but down and deep. Our world view and cosmology, which defines the context for everything else, is profoundly affected by the degree to which all out faculties–intellectual, imaginative, aesthetic, moral, emotional, somatic, spiritual, relational–enter the process of knowing. How we approach "the other," and how we approach each other, will shape everything, including out own evolving self and the cosmos in which we participate.”
― Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View

“The primary purpose of reading the Bible is not to know the Bible but to know God.”
― James Merritt

“How to recognize what is real? To know the layers and depths of oneself, to know how to open, to know how to fill a capacious hold-all, to know one’s own quirks and nervous twitches, cravings and transparencies, and, above all the force, literally the force, of events, connections, the wild calm in every thing. ”
― Shawna Lemay

“To sense the peace of extinguished passion
Happiness in not knowing the ultimate knowledge”
― Dejan Stojanovic, The Sign and Its Children

“There wasn't in the beginning. It wasn't until your kind discovered what was happening that any resistance started. That seems to be the key—knowing what’s going to happen.”
― Stephenie Meyer, The Host

“Awkward.
That's exactly how it was when we walked over to our sister and stood on each side of her, looking at her and feeling things and not knowing what to do.”
― Markus Zusak, Underdog

“The only picture of Tarrou he would always have would be the picture of a man who firmly gripped the steering-wheel of his car when driving, or else the picture of that stalwart body, now lying motionless. Knowing meant that: a living warmth, and a picture of death.”
― albert camus

“It is hard, said Mme Landau, when I told her about those railway lessons, in the end it is hard to know what it is that someone dies of. Yes, it is very hard, said Mme Landau, one really doesn't know.”
― W.G. Sebald, The Emigrants

“Rather than trying to master nature we should start with the basics of trying to understand nature, cooperate with nature.”
― Bryant McGill, Voice of Reason

“Connecting with yourself and knowing yourself is life changing.”
― Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life

“Man can't say he knows nothing when saying it.”
― Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut

“And that is to say, of course, that you can "read" a culture without its literature, without the bother of gathering and holding its ideas, considering their genesis and evolution, and weighing them in the balance with each other.”
― Richard Mitchell

“I’m not surprised that in a time of hideous precarity so many of us would find ourselves tempted by the false grandiosities of certainty. But we must not confuse certainty with safety — in fact, certainty is the end of the imagination and therefore the definition of unsafety. Nor should we confuse unknowing with ignorance. To unknow is to admit limits, to acknowledge that others might have answers you lack, to recognize our exquisite interdependence as people, and best of all to seek within. To dwell in unknowing is to put your phone away and be for a brief moment completely, imperfectly, human.

In times like ours unknowing is excellent proof against our society’s inhumanity, against the lizard supremacy of certainty.

There is wisdom in the question deferred, the question without an immediate answer. Tolerance and unity, too.

And art, as well, if we can tolerate the fact that we are all forever a question without answers, a beautiful unknown, an infinite unknowing.”
― Junot Díaz

“Cunoștințele sunt cele care se adună în capul nostru fără să ne fie întotdeauna de vreun folos. Cunoașterea e transformarea unor cunoștințe într-o experiență de viață.”
― Jean-Claude Carrière, Nu sperați că veți scăpa de cărți

“The pursuit of objectivity is noble, but it becomes dangerous when mistaken for truth. All knowing is filtered through the lens of experience.”
― Gary Schnell, Science & Spirituality: Two Sides of the Same Coin

“Resolving transference... means releasing the patient from the project, which is partly an illusion... of knowing and being known”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“All right?” Hugo asked as Wallace stopped awkwardly next to Nelson’s chair.
“I have no idea,” Wallace said.
Hugo beamed at him as if Wallace had said something profound. “That’s wonderful.”
Wallace blinked. “It is?”
“Very. Not knowing is better than pretending to know.”
― T.J. Klune, Under the Whispering Door

“Success is the finest embetterment prince of pride.”
― Ben Jr Grey

“Seek not to travel speedily through the rough streets of life, but seek to travel consciously and cautiously.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Sips And Little Portions

“This strange instrument I think I still have somewhere, for I could never bring myself to sell it, even in my worst need, for I could never understand what possible purpose it could serve, nor even contrive the faintest hypothesis on the subject. And from time to time I took it from my pocket and gazed upon it, with an astonished and affectionate gaze, if I had not been incapable of affection. But for a certain time I think it inspired me with a kind of veneration, for there was no doubt in my mind that it was not an object of virtu, but that it had a most specific function always to be hidden from me. I could therefore puzzle over it endlessly without the least risk. For to know nothing is nothing, not to want to know anything likewise, but to be beyond knowing anything, to know you are beyond knowing anything, that is when peace enters in, to the soul of the incurious seeker. It is then the true division begins, of twenty-two by seven for example, and the pages fill with the true ciphers at last.”
― Samuel Beckett, Molloy

“Is there a reason you know that?"

"Yes. Because everything is worth knowing!”
― Jim Benton, Jop and Blip Wanna Know #1: Can You Hear a Penguin Fart on Mars?: And Other Excellent Questions

“Knowing is not owning.”
― Monika Ajay Kaul