Unknown Quotes

“People are supposed to fear the unknown, but ignorance is bliss when knowledge is so damn frightening.”
― Laurell K. Hamilton, The Laughing Corpse

“When you walk to the edge of all the light you have and take that first step into the darkness of the unknown, you must believe that one of two things will happen:

There will be something solid for you to stand upon, or, you will be taught to fly.”
― Patrick Overton, The Leaning Tree

“Nothing is more frightening than a fear you cannot name.”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkheart

“There’s a kind of time travel in letters, isn’t there? I imagine you laughing at my small joke; I imagine you groaning; I imagine you throwing my words away. Do I have you still? Do I address empty air and the flies that will eat this carcass? You could leave me for five years, you could return never—and I have to write the rest of this not knowing.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all. When there's a big disappointment, we don't know if that's the end of the story. It may just be the beginning of a great adventure. Life is like that. We don't know anything. We call something bad; we call it good. But really we just don't know.”
― Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

“The unseen enemy is always the most fearsome.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings

“A single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exuper

“Would you like to know your future?

If your answer is yes, think again. Not knowing is the greatest life motivator.

So enjoy, endure, survive each moment as it comes to you in its proper sequence -- a surprise.”
― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

“what you don't know, you don't miss”
― Cecelia Ahern, Love, Rosie

“The fear of an unknown never resolves, because the unknown expands infinitely outward, leaving you to cling pitifully to any small shelter of the known: a cracker has twelve calories; the skin, when cut, bleeds.”
― Caroline Kettlewell, Skin Game

“It’s the unknown that draws people.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly,

“When we are able to break free from the imprisonment of our little, small self-thinking and dare to face the essence of life, we recognize we are never at home with ourselves. We are always on the road. By challenging the unknown and the unidentified we are capable of opening our skyline. ("Transcendental journey")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“You say you are a nameless man. You are not to your wife and to your child. You will not long remain so to your immediate colleagues if you can answer their simple questions when they come into your office. You are not nameless to me. Do not remain nameless to yourself — it is too sad a way to be. Know your place in the world and evaluate yourself fairly, not in terms of the naïve ideals of your own youth, nor in terms of what you erroneously imagine your teacher's ideals are.”
― Richard Feynman

“What you choose also chooses you.”
― Kamand Kojouri

“Whenever we proceed from the known into the unknown we may hope to understand, but we may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word 'understanding.”
― Werner Karl Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science

“The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land, to add something to the extent and the solidity of our possessions. And even a cursory glance at the history of the biological sciences during the last quarter of a century is sufficient to justify the assertion, that the most potent instrument for the extension of the realm of natural knowledge which has come into men's hands, since the publication of Newton's ‘Principia’, is Darwin's ‘Origin of Species.”
― Thomas Henry Huxley

“In a world of diminishing mystery, the unknown persists.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland

“They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

“We always vilify what we don't understand.”
― Nenia Campbell, Horrorscape

“Much healing can occur through the sexual act with a person you love and trust if the two of you can stay with each other during your most vulnerable moments. You enter into a sacred space, this unknown territory, from which you’ll emerge into new and unexpected states of being.”
― Alexandra Katehakis, Erotic Intelligence: Igniting Hot, Healthy Sex While in Recovery from Sex Addiction

“The Celt, and his cromlechs, and his pillar-stones, these will not change much – indeed, it is doubtful if anybody at all changes at any time. In spite of hosts of deniers, and asserters, and wise-men, and professors, the majority still are adverse to sitting down to dine thirteen at a table, or being helped to salt, or walking under a ladder, of seeing a single magpie flirting his chequered tale. There are, of course, children of light who have set their faces against all this, although even a newspaperman, if you entice him into a cemetery at midnight, will believe in phantoms, for everyone is a visionary, if you scratch him deep enough. But the Celt, unlike any other, is a visionary without scratching.”
― William Butler Yeats

“No one infers a god from the simple, from the known, from what is understood, but from the complex, from the unknown, and incomprehensible. Our ignorance is God; what we know is science.”
― Robert G. Ingersoll, On the Gods and Other Essays

“Only the unknown frightens men. But once a man has faced the unknown, that terror becomes the known.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“How can you know what you're capable of if you don't embrace the unknown?”
― Esmeralda Santiago, Conquistadora

“For now, I had escaped. I was free. And I wanted to know what freedom really felt like, at least for a while.”
― Steven Decker, Child of Another Kind

“Coincidences give you opportunities to look more deeply into your existence.”
― Doug Dillon

“I was dreadfully concerned that this creature meant to harm me, but then a thought entered my mind. I am the one who moved Annette, Charles. And now, I will take you on a journey of your own.   ”
― Steven Decker, Addicted to Time

“He [Nicolaus Steno] told the audience, "Beautiful is what we see. More beautiful is what we understand. Most beautiful is what we do not comprehend.”
― Mira Bartok, The Memory Palace

“Since the dawn of existence, you mortals have feared dying, feared the unknown and the pain of it, and yet, pain is a part of life, not death. And I—I am the first moment after pain ceases,” he [Death] pronounced. “It is life that fights and struggles and rages; life, that tears at you in its last agonizing throes to hold on, even if but for one futile instant longer... Whereas I, I come softly when it is all done. Pain and death are an ordered sequence, not a parallel pair. So easy to confuse the correlations, not realizing that one does not bring the other.”
― Vera Nazarian, Cobweb Bride

“By Jove, it's great! Walk along the streets on some spring morning. The little women, daintily tripping along, seem to blossom out like flowers. What a delightful, charming sight! The dainty perfume of violet is everywhere. The city is gay, and everybody notices the women. By Jove, how tempting they are in their light, thin dresses, which occasionally give one a glimpse of the delicate pink flesh beneath!

"One saunters along, head up, mind alert, and eyes open. I tell you it's great! You see her in the distance, while still a block away; you already know that she is going to please you at closer quarters. You can recognize her by the flower on her hat, the toss of her head, or her gait. She approaches, and you say to yourself: 'Look out, here she is!' You come closer to her and you devour her with your eyes.

"Is it a young girl running errands for some store, a young woman returning from church, or hastening to see her lover? What do you care? Her well-rounded bosom shows through the thin waist. Oh, if you could only take her in your arms and fondle and kiss her! Her glance may be timid or bold, her hair light or dark. What difference does it make? She brushes against you, and a cold shiver runs down your spine. Ah, how you wish for her all day! How many of these dear creatures have I met this way, and how wildly in love I would have been had I known them more intimately.

"Have you ever noticed that the ones we would love the most distractedly are those whom we never meet to know? Curious, isn't it? From time to time we barely catch a glimpse of some woman, the mere sight of whom thrills our senses. But it goes no further. When I think of all the adorable creatures that I have elbowed in the streets of Paris, I fairly rave. Who are they! Where are they? Where can I find them again? There is a proverb which says that happiness often passes our way; I am sure that I have often passed alongside the one who could have caught me like a linnet in the snare of her fresh beauty.”
― Guy de Maupassant, Selected Short Stories