Not Knowing Quotes (page 187)
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You don’t know anything, apart from what you read in the paper.”
“You seem to be the only person in the world that the papers get bang to rights. If they say you’ve slept with a fifteen-year-old, you have. If they say you’ve fallen over drunk in the street, you have. They don’t need to invent stuff for you.”
This was actually quite an acute observation. She was right: not once have I been the victim of misrepresentation or distortion. If you think about it, that was one of the most...
Nick Hornby
In his Comedy, Dante Alighieri names Virgil, with many tokens of respect, as his teacher, and yet, as Herr Meinhard remarks, makes such ill use of him: a clear proof that even in the days of Dante one praised the ancients without knowing why. This respect for poets one does not understand and yet wishes to equal is the source of the bad writing in our literature.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
The stars drew light across the night sky in that little mountain village, and the silence and the cold made the darkness vanish away. It was - I don't know how to explain it - as if everything solid melted away into the ether, eliminating all individualtiy and absorbing us, rigid, into the immense darkness. Not a single cloud to lend perspective to the space blocked any portion of the starry sky.
Che Guevara
The preferred medications were those that forestalled corruption. We know 'as a result of more than three thousand years of experience that Myrrh and Aloes preserve corpses.' (Lange, 1689) Are not these deteriorations of the bodies of the same nature as those that accompany the diseases of the humors?
Michel Foucault
for how many years have you gone through the houseshutting the windows, while the rain was still five miles awayand veering, o plum-colored clouds, to the northaway from youand you did not even know enoughto be sorry, you were gladthose silver sheets, with the occasional golden staple, were sweeping on, elsewhere, violent and electric and uncontrollable--and will you find yourself finally wanting to forgetall enclosures, includingthe enclosure of yourself, o lonely leaf, and will youdash...
Mary Oliver
This is why Paul upholds the teaching of the gospel in such a forceful way ... Seeing such an example and such a picture of man’s great weakness and fickleness, Paul states that the truth of the gospel must supersede anything that we may devise … he is showing us that we ought to know the substance of the doctrine which is brought to us in the name of God, so that our faith can be fully grounded upon it. Then we will not be tossed about with every wind, nor will we wander about aimlessly,...
John Calvin
It may not be nice to be good, little 6655321. It may be horrible to be good. And when I say that to you I realize how self-contradictory that sounds. I know I shall have many sleepless nights about this. What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him? Deep and hard questions, little 6655321.
Anthony Burgess