Chinua Achebe Quotes

How can the unknown merit reverence? In other words how can you revere that of which you are ignorant? At the same time, it would be ridiculous to propose that what we know merits reverence. What we know merits any one of a number of things, but it stands to reason reverence isn't one of them. In other words, apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?

Our ignorance can be divided into problems and mysteries. When we face a problem, we may not know its solution, but we have insight, increasing knowledge, and an inkling of what we are looking for. When we face a mystery, however, we can only stare in wonder and bewilderment, not knowing what an explanation would even look like.

What we know is a drop, what we don't know is an ocean.

Never forget: We are alive within mysteries.

But mark, madam, we live amongst riddles and mysteries--the most obvious things, which come in our way, have dark sides, which thequickest sight cannot penetrate into; and even the clearest and most exalted understandings amongst us find ourselves puzzled and at a loss in almost every cranny of nature's works.

It's as simple as something that nobody knows.

Apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?

Everything is a mystery, ourselves, and all things both simple and humble.

Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.

All that we know is nothing, we are merely crammed wastepaper baskets, unless we are in touch with that which laughs at all our knowing.

What you don't know intrigues you more than what you do know.

Most of us can't even begin to imagine.

The known is finite, the unknown is infinite.

Our ignorance will always remain greater than our knowledge.

What is imponderable in the world is greater than what we can handle.

Art is a mystery. A mystery is something immeasurable.

It is Mystery - the mystery any one man or woman can feel but not understand as the meaning of any event - or accident - in any life on earth.

In mysteries what we know, and our realization of what we do not know, proceed together; the larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder. It is like the quantum world, where the more we understand its formalism, the stranger that world becomes.

Magic is just a way of saying 'I don't know.'

Who would dare assert that we know all there is to be known?

His mind of man, a secret makes I meet him with a start he carries a circumference in which I have no part.

Men are apt to idolize or fear that which they cannot understand, especially if it be a woman.

The incomprehensible pleases us, the inexplicable is our friend.

The more mysterious, the more imperfect; as darkness is, in comparison with light--so is mystery, in comparison with knowledge.

We can be as honest as we are ignorant. If we are, when asked what is beyond the horizon of the known, we must say that we do not know.