William H. Gass Quotes

Only a blind man can easily define what light is. When you do not know, you are bold. Ignorance is always bold; knowledge hesitates. And the more you know, the more you feel that the ground underneath is dissolving. The more you know, the more you feel how ignorant you are.

The scientist knows very well that he is approaching ultimate truth only in an asymptotic curve and is barred from ever reaching it; but at the same time he is proudly aware of being indeed able to determine whether a statement is a nearer or a less near approach to the truth.

And now, when I have summed up all my store, Thinking (so I myself deceive) So rich a chaplet thence to weave As never yet the King of Glory wore, Alas! I find the serpent old, That, twining in his speckled breast, About the flowers disguised does fold With wreaths of fame and interest.

Each word of Heraclitus expresses the pride and the majesty of truth, but of truth grasped in intuitions rather than attained by the rope ladder of logic.

Thus with my lips have I denounced you, while my heart, bleeding within me, called you tender names. It was love lashed by its own self that spoke. It was pride half slain that fluttered in the dust. It was my hunger for your love that raged from the housetop, while my own love, kneeling in silence, prayed your forgiveness.

Whenever we proceed from the known to the unkown we may hope to understand, but we may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word 'understanding'

In spiritual matters, knowledge is dependent upon being; as we are, so we know.

To believe is to know you believe, and to know you believe is not to believe.

Only as a warrior can one survive the path of knowledge.

Faith is the commitment of one's consciousness to beliefs for which one has no sensory evidence or rational proof. When man rejects reason as his standard of judgement, only one alternative standard remains to him: his feelings. A mystic is a man who treats his feelings as tools of cognition. Faith is the equation of feelings with knowledge

Knowledge can only be limited. Ignorance is boundless. In recognizing our ignorance, we will touch that which is boundless.

You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.

We just do not see how very specialized the use of "I know" is.

I was brought up to be a good boy and proud of myself so I suppress all the things about me that are bad.

The battle is lost or won in the secret places of the will before God, never first in the external world.

When you reach the end of what you should know, you will be at the beginning of what you should sense.

For me, the best time to pray is the very moment a tense situation or an unspiritual attitude overtakes me. God the Holy Spirit is always there, ready to help me gain victory in the spiritual battles I face-big or small.

We are too weak to discover the truth by reason alone

Mental alertness is not awareness. Mental alertness only enhances your survival instincts. It does not take you towards liberation.

The term ignorant is indeed perhaps an overstatement, implying as it does that something is known somewhere, whereas in reality we are not even sure of this: we in fact cannot aver with any degree of certainty that we are ignorant. Yet this is not so bad; we have at any rate kept our open-mindedness -- that, at least, we may be sure that we have -- and are not in any danger, or so it seems, of freezing into the pious attitudes of those true spiritual bigots whose faces are turned toward eternity and who therefore can see nothing.

The bulk of the world's knowledge is an imaginary construction.

I want knowledge. Not belief. Not surmise. But knowledge. I want God to put out His hand, show His face, speak to me.

I hate to try to be that person in my own skin, in my own way, in my own head, not through exercises or anything else, just by, I guess, belief, concentration.

For, strictly considered, what is all Knowledge too but recorded Experience, and a product of History; of which, therefore, Reasoning and Belief, no less than Action and Passion, are essential materials?

Practice radical humility when it comes to your own accomplishments, and give credit everywhere except to your ego.