Henri Frederic Amiel Quotes

One last word of advice, though, Mr. Okada, though you may not want to hear this. There are things in this world it is better not to know about. Of course, those are the very things that people most want to know about. It's strange.

The curiosity of knowing things has been given to man for a scourge.

I don’t want to know anything, and I want to know it all

I think we all have a need to know what we do not need to know.

Mystery creates wonder and wonder is the basis of man's desire to understand.

I like to watch mankind in its futile attempt to understand the unknown, when they don't even understand that which they know.

Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.

Its really most remarkable how the human race is so seldom satisfied with what its got. Give a man the world and he's pining for the moon.

This desire of knowledge and the wonder which it hopes to satisfy are the driving power behind all the changes that we, with careless, question-begging inference, call progress.

All is mystery; but he is a slave who will not struggle to penetrate the dark veil.

There are few things we should keenly desire if we really knew what we wanted.

We should scarcely desire things ardently if we were perfectly acquainted with what we desire.

Human weakness is to desire to know what one does not want to know.

Desire , to know why, and how, CURIOSITY; such as is in no living creature but Man ; so that Man is distinguished, not only by his Reason; but also by this singular Passion from other Animals ; in whom the appetite of food, and other pleasures of Sense, by predominance, take away the care of knowing causes; which is a Lust of the mind, that by a perseverance of delight in the continual and indefatigable generation of Knowledge, exceedeth the short vehemence of any carnal Pleasure.

It doesn't matter what you're chasing, when you get there you're gonna be like, "Oh, is this all? It kind of sucks."

However gnawing a deficiency, satiety is worse... We are meant to be hungry.

Ignorance is the mother of research.

The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can't know. He can't know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed, all right, but he can't know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he has got or because of the knowledge which he hasn't got and which if he had it, would save him.

The modern mind has lost all capacity to wonder. It has lost all capacity to look into the mysterious, into the miraculous - because of knowledge, because it thinks it knows.

No one is ever satisfied where he is.

Those who know it do not speak about it. Those who speak about it do not know it.

We cannot understand. The best is perhaps what we understand least.

Why is it that when one man builds a wall, the next man immediately needs to know what's on the other side?

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

I think a part of evolution is the desire to know yourself, and know the world you live in, and discover everything you can about the world you live in. That world can be the microcosm of your own emotions, or a society, or the cosmos. There's this constant desire for knowledge.