Unattainable Truth Quotes

For they (art and music) are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.

Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation. We are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot.

Philosophy is a kind of journey, ever learning yet never arriving at the ideal perfection of truth.

If you are trying to find something, it means you haven't got it. And if you find it simply by looking for it, that means it's false.

We're forever teetering on the brink of the unknowable, and trying to understand what can't be understood.

The real reality is always just around the corner.

Would there be this eternal seeking if the found existed?

Perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols; vagabond-language scrawled on gate-posts and paving-stones along the weary road that others have tramped before us; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us.

Is it astonishing that, like children trying to catch smoke by closing their hands, philosophers so often see the object they would grasp fly before them?

The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment... We are told that by its aid the stars are weighed and the billions of molecules in a drop of water are counted. Yet, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, this great science eludes the efforts of our mental weapons to grasp it.

Whoever you are, you will not write this book. I can tell you nothing. Do not call me again. Ever.

you'd like the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. That must be the most futile oath anyone ever swears.

The finite human being shall never know in its fullness Truth and Love which is itself infinite.

The sun was like a word written between the sea and the sky, a word that was swallowed up by the sea before any man had time to read it.