Edmund Spenser Quotes

To those who study her, Nature reveals herself as extraordinarily fertile and ingenious in devising means, but she has no ends which the human mind has been able to discover or comprehend.

Infinity is a way to describe the incomprehensible to the human mind. In a way, it notates a mystery. That kind of mystery exists in relationships. A lifetime is not enough to know someone else. It provides a brief glimpse.

If any philosopher had been asked for a definition of infinity, he might have produced some unintelligible rigmarole, but he would certainly not have been able to give a definition that had any meaning at all.

The universe ought to be presumed too vast to have any character.

But nature is always more subtle, more intricate, more elegant than what we are able to imagine.

I’m so tired... I was up all night trying to round off infinity.

Calculate what man knows and it cannot compare to what he doesn't know. Calculate the time he is alive and it cannot compare to the time before he was born. Yet man takes something so small and tries to exhaust the dimensions of something so large!

Nothing discernible to the eye of the spirit is more brilliant or obscure than man; nothing is more formidable, complex, mysterious, and infinite. There is a prospect greater than the sea, and it is the sky; there is a prospect greater than the sky, and it is the human soul.

Over the years they both reached the same wise conclusion by different paths: it was not possible to live together in any other way, or love in any other way, and nothing in this world was more difficult than love.

The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don't know.

...she wanted God to make sense. He doesn't. He will make no more sense to me than I will make sense to an ant.

It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words, "And this too, shall pass away." How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!

When you come to see you are not as wise today as you thought you were yesterday, you are wiser today.

Musing on the phrase 'waste of time.' So much more complex than it appears. Many 'wastes of time' small talk, daydreaming are imperatives.

Under every deep a lower deep opens.

We cannot conceive how the Foetus is form'd in the Womb, nor as much as how a Plant springs from the Earth we tread on ... And if we are ignorant of the most obvious things about us, and the most considerable within our selves, 'tis then no wonder that we know not the constitution and powers of the creatures, to whom we are such strangers.

The machinery of the world is far too complex for the simplicity of men.

We must have passed through life unobservantly, if we have never perceived that a man is very much himself what he thinks of others.

To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age

Ageing destroys youth, sickness destroys health, degeneration of life destroys all excellent qualities and death destroys life. Even if you are a great runner, you cannot run away from death. you cannot stop death with your wealth, through your magic performances or recitation of mantras or even medicines. Therefore, it is wise to prepare for your death.

A mystery is not a puzzle waiting to be solved, but rather something for which there is no human solution. Mystery's offspring is not frustration but awe, and that sense of awe grows in tandem with knowledge.

The saddest thing in the world was that human beings, for all their ardent striving and desire, could never achieve physical, emotional, or intellectual perfection. The species was doomed to imperfection; it thrashed forever in despair or denial of that fact.

In the end, like the Almighty Himself, we make everything in our image, for want of a more reliable model; our artifacts tell more about ourselves than our confessions.

Nothing human is finally calculable; even to ourselves we are strange.