Conceptual Limits Quotes

The existing scientific concepts cover always only a very limited part of reality, and the other part that has not yet been understood is infinite.

The Way that can be walked is not the eternal Way.

I'm fascinated by the fact that we can't grasp anything about time.

Our ideas, like orange-plants, spread out in proportion to the size of the box which imprisons the roots.

Memory is like all other human powers, with which no man can be satisfied who measures them by what he can conceive, or by what he can desire.

There are many aspects of time we just do not understand. That’s the thing about writing a popular book: You realize the things you understand because for those you can give a really simple explanation. But some things about time I just don’t know how to give simple explanations for, even though I can tell you mathematically what’s going on.

That there should absolutely be nothing at all is utterly impossible. The mind, let it stretch its conceptions ever so far, can never so much as bring itself to conceive of a state of perfect nothing.

The only idea man can affix to the name of God, is that of a first cause, the cause of all things. And, incomprehensibly difficult as it is for a man to conceive what a first cause is, he arrives at the belief of it, from the tenfold greater difficulty of disbelieving it. It is difficult beyond description to conceive that space can have no end; but it is more difficult to conceive an end. It is difficult beyond the power of man to conceive an eternal duration of what we call time; but it is more impossible to conceive a time when there shall be no time.

Kant described beauty as a feeling of ungraspability: this is why the beauty experience is beyond concept.