Wendell Berry Quotes

Apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?

What is divine? It is simply that which man has not been able to understand. Once you do, it loses its divinity.

How can the unknown merit reverence? In other words how can you revere that of which you are ignorant? At the same time, it would be ridiculous to propose that what we know merits reverence. What we know merits any one of a number of things, but it stands to reason reverence isn't one of them. In other words, apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?

Eternity.—Thy name Or glad, or fearful, we pronounce, as thoughts Wandering in darkness shape thee. Thou strange being, Which art and must be, yet which contradict'st All sense, all reasoning,—thou, who never wast Less than thyself, and who still art thyself Entire, though the deep draught which Time has taken Equals thy present store—No line can reach To thy unfathomed depths. The reasoning sage Who can dissect a sunbeam, count the stars, And measure distant worlds, is here a child, And, humbled, drops his calculating pen.

The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe.

In the past some of the most influential Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians, such as Maimonides, Aquinas and Ibn Sina, made it clear that it was very difficult to speak about God, because when we confront the ultimate, we are at the end of what words or thoughts can do.

If I shall exist eternally, how shall I exist tomorrow?

We endeavor to stuff the universe into the gullet of an aphorism.

What is divine? Simply that which man has not yet been able to understand. Once understood, it ceases to be divine.

Life has its dimensions in the mysterious.

What is real is beyond all reach.

Divine Nature cannot be apprehended by human reason.

It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand, and what those things are

Just because we don't understand doesn't mean that the explanation doesn't exist.

The greatest mystery of existence is existence itself.

I have infinite knowledge that there is no being in existence with infinite knowledge

Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops

We are alive within mystery, by miracle... We have more than we can know. We know more than we can say.

Wisdom is not the understanding of mystery. Wisdom is accepting that mystery is beyond understanding. That's what makes it mystery.

Oh invisible, we view thee, O world intangible, we touch thee, o world unknowable, we know thee.

As we acquire knowledge, things do not become more comprehensible, but more mysterious.

The highest happiness of man ... is to have probed what is knowable and quietly to revere what is unknowable.

Everything is illusion. Even that last sentence.

i have never pondered over questions that are not questions.

The real universe is always one step beyond logic.