Marianne Moore Quotes

Everyone always wants to find the answer, to feel that things are resolved. But in dreams, maybe there isn't an answer so much.

We know accurately only when we know little, with knowledge doubt increases.

But a lot of shows, they pose questions and they give you a puzzle where there's no solution.

And new Philosophy calls all in doubt, the element of fire is quite put out; the Sun is lost, and the earth, and no mans wit can well direct him where to look for it.

We keep, in science, getting a more and more sophisticated view of our essential ignorance.

Sometimes there are no answers.

I have never met anyone who wasn't confused inside.

I create doubt in the reader's mind. That is what literature is for: to provoke, to raise doubts, to talk about things that are not obvious.

Basically, I really love work that puts the reader into a kind of vertigo, into a real doubt, and a beautiful way to convey that, a really perfect metaphor for that, is to make the reader also experience doubt.

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 reality is, there's still so much we haven't yet figured out. There's still so much stuff that has not been made more, frankly, efficient.

The greater the knowledge, the greater the doubt.

You think that would have changed things? The answer is of course, and for a while, and never.

We know so very little about this strange planet we live on, this haunted world where all answers lead only to more mystery.

You know nothing till you know all; which is the reason we never know any thing.

No one has the answer: we are answer and question.

We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!

Life is like that. We don't know anything. We call something bad; we call it good. But really we just don't know.

A part is always too limited to explain the whole. You might picture a worldview as trying to stuff the entire universe into a box. Invariably, something will stick out of the box. Its categories are too "small" to explain the world.

In art, and maybe just in general, the idea is to be able to be really comfortable with contradictory ideas. In other words, wisdom might be, seem to be, two contradictory ideas both expressed at their highest level and just let to sit in the same cage sort of, vibrating. So, I think as a writer, I'm really never sure of what I really believe.

All things will be ambiguous, for this is the curse of wisdom.

Life doesn't have plots and subplots and denouements. It's just a big collection of loose ends and dangling threads that never get explained.

The fact that many things have no explanation ought to prevent them from happening; but it doesn't.

The more I see, the less I know.

Not all questions can be answered.