Unknowing Quotes

The worst predijudice is unknowing. We think we treat others as equals, but, in our deepest heart, we regard ourselves as superior. In part, this is because we are, in ways, powerful. But that does not make the race of humans (funanga) better than that of the dog or equine.

Unknowing ignorance is preferable to informed stupidity.

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.

Does a population have informed consent when that population is not taught the inner workings of its monetary system, and then is drawn, all unknowing, into economic adventures?

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.

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

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.

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.

The Senate is an unknowing world

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.

If you, unknowing, are able to create masterpieces in color, then unknowledge is your way. But if you are unable to create masterpieces in color out of your unknowledge, then you ought to look for knowledge.

Seeing is believing and believing is knowing and knowing beats unknowing and the unknown.

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

One of the odd enjoyments in life is to be alone in a room full of people. To have them there as unknowing human filler in your wide shot.

Booze is flowing all unknowing; grandma downs a few, smiles and giggles happily enjoying her new brew.

To be left alone on the tightrope of youthful unknowing is to experience the excruciating beauty of full freedom and the threat of eternal indecision.

We are conjured voiceless out of nothing and must return to an unknowing state. What happens in between is an uncontrolled dance, and what we ask for in love is no more than a momentary chance to get the steps right, to move in harmony until the music stops.

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.

Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.

I want to preserve a certain unknowing about my own poems – perhaps because unknowing is in itself a useful poetic thirst. To move the perimeter of saying outside my own boundaries is one reason I write.

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

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?

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.

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.

The man in between waits between the two, not hearing the lie and not seeing the true. Unknowing what is and denying what seems, and there he will sleep, the man in between.

He who hopes for spring with upturned eye never sees so small a thing as Draba. He who despairs of spring with downcast eye steps on it, unknowing. He who searches for spring with his knees in the mud finds it, in abundance.

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.

The hardest part of change is going through the unknown.