Robert Penn Warren Quotes

What do I know of man's destiny? I could tell you more about radishes.

Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know - and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knowledge, so that we use it to destroy ourselves? Even if that is so, knowledge remains better than ignorance. It is better to know - even if the knowledge endures only for the moment that comes before destruction - than to gain eternal life at the price of a dull and swinish lack of comprehension of a universe that swirls unseen before us in all its wonder. That was the choice of Achilles, and it is mine, too.

All that is not God is death.

To me, the right approach is to say we are profoundly ignorant of these matters. We need to work on them. But to suddenly say the answer is God - it's that that seems to me to close off the discussion.

What is bad? What is good? What should one love, what hate? Why live, and what am I? What is lie,what is death? What power rules over everything?" he asked himself. And there was no answer to any of these questions except one, which was not logical and was not at all an answer to these questions. This answer was: "You will die--and everything will end. You will die and learn everything--or stop asking.

It does not matter whether you have religion or are an agnostic believe in nothing, You can only appreciate (without knowing or understanding) the mysteries of life.

To know much is often the cause of doubting more.

I suppose I will try to enjoy my life now while I have it. Who knows what's going to happen in the future?

Que sçais-je?" (What do I know?)

I pray for meaning. I pray for the limits of reality to become clear. For a world – and a type of being – that makes sense. I pray for a life after death that is not like this life. I pray for the end of mystery. What would a life be like with all the mysteries solved? If there were no questions, there’d be no stories. If there were no stories, there’d be no language. If there was no language there’d be no . . . What?

As for a future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities.

There is philosophy, which is about conceptual analysis - about the meaning of what we say - and there is all of this ... all of life.

Life is the question and life is the answer, and God is the reason and love is the way.

Death would be a complete knowingness, but what frightened him was this: not knowing beforehand what it was he would know.

The bedrock of doubt is the total nothingness of death. Death is a leveler, not because everybody dies, but because nobody understands what death means.

The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless.

The hour of departure has arrived and we go our ways; I to die, and you to live. Which is better? Only God knows.

The God to whom depth in philosophy bring back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them

Ask yourself whether you have earned the right to have an opinion. Opinions are easy to produce, so bad ones abound. Knowing that you don't know something is nearly as valuable as knowing it. The worst situation is thinking you know something when you don't.

How do I know that loving life is not a delusion? How do I know that in hating death I am not like a man who, having left home in his youth, has forgotten the way back?

But there’s a reason we recognize Hamlet as a masterpiece: it’s that Shakespeare told us the truth, and people so rarely tell us the truth in this rise and fall here [indicates blackboard]. The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.

... we die, just as we were born, at the edge of a road not of our choosing.

Perhaps the best proof of the Almighty's existence is that we never know when we are to die.

Truth burns up error.

The sure way of knowing nothing about life is to try to make oneself useful.