"Knowable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Though eminently meditative and reflective, Lyall's mind, his biographer says, "seemed always hungry for facts." "Though he had an unusual degree of imagination, he never allowed himself to be tempted too far from the region of the known or the knowable." The reason why he at times appeared to vacillate was that he did not consider he sufficiently understood all the facts to justify his forming an opinion capable of satisfying his somewhat hypercritical judgment. He was, in fact, very difficult to convince ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... greatest genius can not master. Add to these impediments the shortness of human life, the limitations of the intellect, the multitude and intricacy of scientific methods, the inaccessibility of many objects which are in themselves knowable, (e.g. the interior of the earth, the stellar universe)—and you have a host of limitations which make it physically impossible for the mind of man to encompass ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... we should not wish to know anything but what is easily and assuredly knowable. There's no end to it. If I could show you, or myself, a group of ultimate atoms, quite clearly, in this magnifying glass, we should both be presently vexed, because we could not break them in two ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... the infirmity of his senses. The world of the eye and the ear becomes to him a subject of fateful interest. He seizes every word of sight and hearing because his sensations compel it. Light and colour, of which he has no tactual evidence, he studies fearlessly, believing that all humanly knowable truth is open to him. He is in a position similar to that of the astronomer who, firm, patient, watches a star night after night for many years and feels rewarded if he discovers a single fact about it. The man deaf-blind to ordinary outward things, and ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... doubt that the actual source of the Mississippi had never been recognized until Captain Willard Glazier made its discovery in 1881. Captain Glazier merits the gratitude of every citizen of the United States who is interested in knowing all that is knowable about the ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... Fuller, with the fundamental principle of accepting the universe. The thing we know best and most directly is human nature in all its breadth. It is indeed the one thing immediately known and knowable. Like R.L. Stevenson, he perceives how tragically and comically astonishing a phenomenon is man. "What a monstrous spectre is this man," says Stevenson, "the disease of the agglutinated dust, lifting alternate ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... contradictories is one;" but he denies that a concrete thing or object can be positively conceived as absolute or infinite. Mr. Mill represents him as only proving that the "unmeaning abstractions are unknowable,"—abstractions which Hamilton does not assert to be unmeaning; and which he regards as knowable in the only sense in which such abstractions can be known, viz., by understanding ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... the same thought. Tyrants, hypocrites, sophists are the three plagues of humanity, standing between our intellect and God, who is the source of freedom, goodness, and true wisdom. In the last line Campanella expresses his opinion that God is knowable by an immediate act of perception analogous to the sense of taste: Se tutti al Senno non rendiamo il gusto. Compare ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... conditions. Indeed the very effort is in itself an invocation, and if made unflinchingly, will not fail to meet with a response. Much that has heretofore been to earnest seekers unknowable will become knowable, and a love, Mr Coldwaite, higher, if that be possible, than the love of humanity, yet correlative with and inseparable from it, will be found pressing with an irresistible potency into those vacant spaces of the human heart, which have from all time yearned for a closer contact with the ...
— Fashionable Philosophy - and Other Sketches • Laurence Oliphant
... the waters before the creation, who is the source whence hath sprung this mighty frame, who is the great combiner, the uncreate, the invisible essence of all, the great immutable, bereft of those attributes that are knowable by the senses, who is the universe itself, without beginning, birth, and decay,—is possessed of infinite wealth, that Grandsire of all creatures, became incarnate in the race of the Andhaka-Vrishnis ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... had grown to a discretionary age, and was at all able to know truth from error—supposing that to be knowable—there were in the country fifty thousand reverend gentlemen of every tincture of religious opinion who might ply him with their various theories, yet few of these would be contented unless they could seize him while his young nature was plastic, and try to imprint ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... conditions bears a certain relation to its scarcity, we can discover the one fact when the other fact is given, remembering only that our conclusions are not more certain than our premisses, and that the observed law depends upon unknown and most imperfectly knowable conditions. Such results, again, may be very useful in various ways, as illustrative of the way in which certain laws will work if they hold good; and, again, as testing many of our general theories. If you have argued ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... sound, was narrow in scope; for it failed to recognize, what was perfectly knowable, that the British support of the Lake Erie stations and the upper country depended on their power to control, or at worst to contest, Ontario. Of this they themselves were conscious, as the words of Yeo and Brock alike ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan |
