Philosophy limits the thinkable and therefore the unthinkable.
The limits of thought are not so much set from outside, by the fullness or poverty of experiences that meet the mind, as from within, by the power of conception, the wealth of formulative notions with which the mind meets experiences.
Nothing, she now knew, could be defined in exclusion, and every bug, pencil, and grass blade was a dictionary in itself, requiring the definitions of all things to fulfill its own.
The western mind makes definitions; it draws lines.
We sift reality through screens composed of ideas . (And such ideas have their roots in older ideas.) Such idea systems are necessarily limited by language , by the ways we can describe them. That is to say: language cuts the grooves in which our thoughts move. If we seek new validity forms (other laws and other orders) we must step outside language.
Ideas, aspirations, and objectives that, by their content, transcend the established universe of discourse and action are either repelled or reduced to terms of this universe.
Every word or concept, clear as it may seem to be, has only a limited range of applicability.
If everything had a label, we would live in a fully delineated but false world.
Many things, for aught I know, may exist, whereof neither I nor any other man hath or can have any idea or notion whatsoever.
A lost trail always extends beyond the evidence, and even the trails we find are only fragments of the trails that lie beyond our comprehension.
Words are finite organs of the infinite mind. They cannot cover the dimensions of what is in truth. They break, chop, and impoverish it.
People cannot do what they cannot think, and they cannot think what they cannot say.
A person incapable of imaging another world than given to him by his senses would be subhuman, and a person who identifies his imaginary world with the world of sensory fact has become insane.
Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries, let alone revising their categories.
What can be shown, cannot be said.
Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth... Through words and concepts we shall never reach beyond the wall off relations, to some sort of fabulous primal ground of things.
In our work, we are always between Scylla and Charybdis; we may fail to abstract enough, and miss important physics, or we may abstract too much and end up with fictitious objects in our models turning into real monsters that devour us.
The trouble begins when we start to be so impressed by the strategies of our systematized thought that we forget that it does relate to an obverse, that it is hewn from negation, that it is but very small security against the void of negation which surrounds it.
Man, if he compare himself with all that he can see, is at the zenith of power; but if he compare himself with all that he can conceive, he is at the nadir of weakness.
Categories are gibberish to me. I understand - it helps people organize their thoughts. But you can't go too far with it.
Imagination runs out. But it makes sense, right? We probably just imagine things based on what we already know, and we run out of analogies in the thirty-first century.
The opposite of nature is impossible.
Metaphors of unity and integration take us only so far, because they are derived from the finiteness of the human mind.
Only words and conventions can isolate us from the entirely undefinable something which is everything.
The act of saying that things exist that cannot be described in words shakes a universe where words are the supreme belief.
