Not Knowing Is Not An Excuse Quotes

As as result of your "not knowing," this country has lost its freedom, lost it for centuries, perhaps, and you shout that you feel no guilt?
How can you stant the sight of what you've done?
How is it you aren't horrified? Have you no eyes to see?
If you had eyes, you would have to put them out and wander away from Thebes! ~ Milan Kundera

Sorry.
Sorry means you feel the pulse of other people's pain as well as your own, and saying it means you take a share of it. And so it binds us together, makes us trodden and sodden as one another. Sorry is a lot of things. It's a hole refilled. A debt repaid. Sorry is the wake of misdeed. It's the crippling ripple of consequence. Sorry is sadness, just as knowing is sadness. Sorry is sometimes self-pity. But Sorry, really, is not about you. It's theirs to take or leave.
Sorry means you leave yourself open, to embrace or to ridicule or to revenge. Sorry is a question that begs forgiveness, because the metronome of a good heart won't settle until things are set right and true. Sorry doesn't take things back, but it pushes things forward. It bridges the gap. Sorry is a sacrament. It's an offering. A gift. ~ Craig Silvey

It was strange to us that none of these three victims made any attempt to resist the attack. Indeed, not one inhabitant in any of these worlds considered for a moment the possibility of resistance. In every case the attitude to disaster seemed to express itself in such terms as these:
To retaliate would be to wound our communal spirit beyond cure. We choose rather to die. The theme of spirit that we have created must inevitably be broken short, whether by the ruthlessness of the invader or by our own resort to arms. It is better to be destroyed than to triumph in slaying the spirit. Such as it is, the spirit that we have achieved is fair; and it is indestructibly woven into the tissue of the cosmos. We die praising the universe in which at least such an achievement as ours can be. We die knowing that the promise of further glory outlives us in other galaxies. We die praising the Star Maker, the Star Destroyer. ~ Olaf Stapledon

I was the only person in an infinite exploding universe who knew that this powder was made of opal. In a wide, wide world, full of unimaginable numbers of people, I was - in addition to being small and insufficient - special. I was not only a quirky bundle of genes, but I was also unique existentially, because of the tiny detail that I knew about Creation, because of what I had seen and then understood. Until I phoned someone, the concrete knowledge that opal was the mineral that fortified each seed on each hackberry tree was mine alone. Whether or not this was something worth knowing seemed another problem for another day. I stood and absorbed this revelation as my life turned a page, and my first scientific discovery shone, as even the cheapest plastic toy does when it is new. I ~ Hope Jahren

I believe Truth is like God's fingerprint on our soul. I'm convinced we're created with an intrinsic capacity to feel it. I've discovered that 'finding' Truth is not purely an intellectual or analytical exercise. It's a feeling, a shiver of knowing. For me it's like something tickling the whiskers of my soul, letting me know I just brushed up against it. ~ Rebecca Rose

I flip the lock back in place and turn, hitting a concrete wall of a man.

"What's he made of? Concrete and sex?" I whisper into the phone like the man in front of me can't hear me.

"Good, he's already there," I hear Elle say as my eyes travel up and up an endless span of chest. Up, up, up, until my eyes finally land on a hard face with a clenched jaw.

He's hot in that oh-my-God-he-could-crush-me way. Wait, is that hot?

"Listen here, Hulk. You can take your incredible body and vacate my home. I won't be needing your services."

"I'm standing in the middle of your apartment, and you didn't so much as scream. This is despite you knowing someone has been stalking you. I could have been that someone. Fuck. I could be that someone."

I snort and roll my eyes.

"Yeah right, Hulk-man." I pat him on the chest before resting my hand there. I start to rub. I only meant to do a quick pat, but now I can't seem to remove my hand. I like the feel of him. I don't think I've ever liked the feel of a man before. I don't think I've ever had the urge to touch one before.

"You think I couldn't hurt you?" He grabs my wrist, pulling it away from his chest. The action makes me frown. Oh, I know he could hurt me, but someone like him would never stalk me. That just didn't add up to me. If anything, I'd end up stalking him.

"Oh, I'm sure you could Hulk smash me." Now that I'm not touching him, I bring my o ~ Alexa Riley

I cut an orange from the branch so that I could taste Palestine, but Umm Hassan yelled, "No! It's not for eating, it's Palestine." I was ashamed of myself and hung the branch on the wall of the sitting room in my house, and when you came to visit me and saw the mouldy fruit, you yelled, "What's that smell?" And I told you the story and watched you explode in anger.
"You should have eaten the oranges," you told me.
"But Umm Hassan stopped me and said they were from the homeland."
"Umm Hassan's senile," you answered. "You should have eaten the oranges, because the homeland is something we have to eat, not let it eat us. We have to eat the oranges of Palestine, and we have to eat Palestine and Galilee."
It came to me then that you were right, but the oranges were going bad. You went to the wall and pulled off the branch, and I took it from your hand and stood there confused, not knowing what to do with that bunch of decay.
"What are you going to do?" you asked.
"Bury it," I said.
"Why bury it?" you asked.
"I'm not going to throw it away, because it's from the homeland."
You took the branch and threw it in the rubbish.
"What a scandal!" you said. "What are these old women's superstitions? Before hanging the homeland up on the wall, it'd be better to knock down the wall and leave. We have to eat every orange in the world and not be afraid, because the homeland isn't oranges. The homeland is us. ~ Elias Khoury

The transformation of the world is brought about by the transformation of oneself, because the self is the product and a part of the total process of human existence. To transform oneself, self-knowledge is essential; without knowing what you are, there is no basis for right thought, and without knowing yourself there cannot be transformation. One must know oneself as on is, not as on wishes to be, which is merely an ideal and there for fictitious, unreal; it is only that which is that can be transformed, not that which you wish to be. To know oneself as one is requires and extraordinary alertness of mind, because what is, is constantly undergoing transformation, change; and to follow it swiftly the mind must not be tethered to any particular dogma or belief, to any particular pattern of action. If you would follow anything, it is no good being tethered. To know yourself, there must be the awareness, the alertness of mind in which there is freedom from all beliefs, from all idealization, because beliefs and ideals only give you a color, perverting true perception. If you want to know what you are, you cannot imagine or have belief in something which you are not. If I am greedy, envious, violent, merely having an ideal of non-violence, of non-greed, is of little value. The understanding of what you are, whatever it be – ugly or beautiful, wicked or mischievous – the understanding of what you are, without distortion, is the beginning of virtue. Virtue is essential, for it gives ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

Knowing about reincarnation helps us relax. It assists us with an understanding of death and dying. Death is not an end, quite the contrary. ~ Frederick Lenz

Seith Mann: The thing about that scene [where the girl student slices the other girl's face] that really struck me, was Dukie and the fan. After this girl does this horrific thing, Dukie is reaching out with this fan in this sweet way. It was profound to me, seeing Dukie and the way he goes in the story. ... Seeing someone in the midst of all that chaos, for him to zero in on this girl and try to extend this gesture of kindness, of sweetness that can't really be articulated, was poetic. Even in the midst of all this madness, there's this sweet soul trying to touch somebody else and knowing the rest of the reason and how he gets lost on his way, to a certain extent, is why I think that season is so powerful. Just having an inherently good heart does not help you when you're in certain circumstances. That's tragic. (228) ~ Jonathan Abrams

One morning as I was leaving, the director said I didn't have to leave the set anymore. What happened? Why did they change their ways of treating me? I came to the realization that it was because I had a mother. My mother spoke highly of me, and to me. But more important, whether they met her or simply heard about her, she was there with me. She had my back, supported me. This is the role of the mother, and in that visit I really saw clearly, and for the first time, why a mother is really important. Not just because she feeds and also loves and cuddles and even mollycoddles a child, but because in an interesting and maybe an eerie and unworldly way, she stands in the gap. She stands between the unknown and the known. In Stockholm, my mother shed her protective love down around me and without knowing why people sensed that I had value. ~ Maya Angelou

The philosophy of praxis does not aim at the peaceful resolution of existing contradictions in history and society, but is the very theory of these contradictions. It is not the instrument of government of the dominant groups in order to gain the consent and exercise hegemony over the subaltern classes. It is the expression of subaltern classes who want to educate themselves in the art of government and who have an interest in knowing all truths, even the unpleasant ones, and in avoiding the impossible deceptions of the upper class, and even more their own. ~ Antonio Gramsci

It is very likely an anxiety dream, brought on by your move out of your childhood home and the comfort of the reach of your family's love and protection." Gideon reached to stroke her hair soothingly. "I am only surprised it has not happened sooner."
"Are you sure?" Her nervousness was clear, but she was truly relaxing already.
"Yes. And so are you. You know everything there is to know about psychology, you tell me what you think."
"But you thought it was this . . . new level of ability."
"And for the first time in a millennium my diagnosis is wrong. I do despise it when such bothersome things occur. Now I shall have to start the 'No Mistakes' clock all over again."
Legna giggled at him, which was of course his intention. She swung her arms around his neck, hugging him warmly.
"You smell so good," he murmured against her ear a long minute later.
"I smell like sex," she argued.
He nodded, making a loud noise of appreciation as he sniffed and nibbled her neck.
"You smell like very good sex," he amended with a voracious growl and an eager mouth moving over her bare skin with bold appetite.
"Gideon!" She squealed as he went straight for her waist, knowing she was ticklish there. The playful flicker of his tongue and the scrape of his teeth drove her mad, and she twisted as she screamed for him to stop.
When he tickled her she absolutely could not use her classic escape method. She could barely catch her breath, never mind her ~ Jacquelyn Frank

The first way to balance stress in my life is to get an internal balance of who I am. And I know who I am by knowing whose I am. I am a child of God. I was put on earth not by accident, but for a purpose. I am deeply loved by God. I am accepted by him. He has a plan for my life, and because he put me here, I am significant. ~ Rick Warren

There is an old Eastern fable about a traveler who is taken unawares on the steppes by a ferocious wild animal. In order to escape the beast the traveler hides in an empty well, but at the bottom of the well he sees a dragon with its jaws open, ready to devour him. The poor fellow does not dare to climb out because he is afraid of being eaten by the rapacious beast, neither does he dare drop to the bottom of the well for fear of being eaten by the dragon. So he seizes hold of a branch of a bush that is growing in the crevices of the well and clings on to it. His arms grow weak and he knows that he will soon have to resign himself to the death that awaits him on either side. Yet he still clings on, and while he is holding on to the branch he looks around and sees that two mice, one black and one white, are steadily working their way round the bush he is hanging from, gnawing away at it. Sooner or later they will eat through it and the branch will snap, and he will fall into the jaws of the dragon. The traveler sees this and knows that he will inevitably perish. But while he is still hanging there he sees some drops of honey on the leaves of the bush, stretches out his tongue and licks them. In the same way I am clinging to the tree of life, knowing full well that the dragon of death inevitably awaits me, ready to tear me to pieces, and I cannot understand how I have fallen into this torment. And I try licking the honey that once consoled me, but it no longer gives me pleasure. ~ Leo Tolstoy

There was the bulge and the glitter, and there was the cold grip way down in the stomach as though somebody had laid hold of something in there, in the dark which is you, with a cold hand in a cold rubber glove. It was like the second when you come home late at night and see the yellow envelope of the telegram sticking out from under your door and you lean and pick it up, but don't open it yet, not for a second. While you stand there in the hall, with the envelope in your hand, you feel there's an eye on you, a great big eye looking straight at you from miles and dark and through walls and houses and through your coat and vest and hide and sees you huddled up way inside, in the dark which is you, inside yourself, like a clammy, sad little fetus you carry around inside yourself. The eye knows what's in the envelope, and it is watching you to see you when you open it and know, too. But the clammy, sad little fetus which is you way down in the dark which is you too lifts up its sad little face and its eyes are blind, and it shivers cold inside you for it doesn't want to know what is in that envelope. It wants to lie in the dark and not know, and be warm in its not-knowing. ~ Robert Penn Warren

To claim that a man may trust Christ without knowing whether or not he has trusted Christ, is to articulate an absurd idea. Of course a man can know whether or not he believes in the offer of salvation. ~ Zane C. Hodges

The God to whom I was introduced as a child was basically a Jewish one: male, fatherly, Anglo-European, bearded, angrily loving, judgmental, righteously indignant,mand frighteningly powerful, not to mention present everywhere and all-knowing. In trying to make sense of this God, man has continued to manufacture and manipulate images of this perceived deity. The images have changed over the centuries, based on the mood of the times. During kind times when harvests were abundant and peace reigned (admittedly rare in the ancient world), God was benevolent. When plpague and famine killed millions, God was portrayed as enraged and vengeful.

To this day, this emotionally infantile God remains in power, a fear-based aberration produced by fevered imaginations, promoted by those who understand how such a deity can be used to gain and consolidate power over believers, and protected by flocks of billions who refuse to question their damning God for fear of their own damnation -- or out of an even greater immediate terror of social and cultural isolation. But I argue that it is PRECISELY this image of God -- an infantile, simplistic, ridiculous notion of the sublime power that underlies the world -- that is destroying civil religion, fueling the rage of the "angry atheist" movement, and pitting science against the spiritual at a time when we should be using every tool within reach to discover what it means to be human -- and divinely human at that. ~ Carlton D. Pearson

Good science is more than the mechanics of research and experimentation. Good science requires that scientists look inward-to contemplate the origin of their thoughts. The failures of science do not begin with flawed evidence or fumbled statistics; they begin with personal self-deception and an unjustified sense of knowing. ~ Robert A. Burton

In my view, the spurning of DID is highly connected with knowing and not knowing about child sexual abuse. Side by side with denial of childhood trauma and of severe dissociation, is an unmistakable cognizance of dissociative processes as they are embedded in our language. We regularly say things such as, "pull yourself together", "he is coming unglued", "she was beside herself", "don't fall apart", "he's not all there", "she was shattered", and so on. ~ Elizabeth Howell

Within the mystery of life there is the infinite darkness of the night sky lit by distant orbs of fire, the cobbled skin of an orange that releases its fragrance to our touch, the unfathomable depths of the eyes of our lover. No creation story, no religious system can fully describe or explain this richness and depth. Mystery is so every-present that no one can know for certain what will happen one hour from now.
It does not matter whether you have religion or are an agnostic believe in nothing, You can only appreciate (without knowing or understanding) the mysteries of life. ~ Jack Kornfield

Until that moment Vetch had watched him with an anxious dread, for he was not sure what had happened there in the dark land. He did not know if this was Ged in the boat with him, and his hand had been for hours ready to the anchor, to stave in the boat's planking and sink her there in midsea, rather than carry back to the harbors of Earthsea the evil thing that he feared might have taken Ged's look and form. Now when he saw his friend and heard him speak, his doubt vanished. And he began to see the truth, that Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life's sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark. In the Creation of Ea, which is the oldest song, it is said, "Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky." That song Vetch sang aloud now as he held the boat westward, going before the cold wind of the winter night that blew at their backs from the vastness of the Open Sea. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I watched the gorilla's eyes again, wise and knowing eyes, and wondered about this business of trying to teach apes language. Our language. Why? There are many members of our own species who live in and with the forest and know it and understand it. We don't listen to them. What is there to suggest we would listen to anything an ape could tell us? Or that it would be able to tell us of its life in a language that hasn't been born of that life? I thought, maybe it is not that they have yet to gain a language, it is that we have lost one. ~ Douglas Adams

For all these reasons (...) working class intellectuals like big words and their sentence formation is excessively ornate. It's what they think of as 'smart'. Pomposity. It's an embarrassing condition of being unsophisticated and not knowing what is truly smart which is simplicity and modernism; certainly it was twenty years ago that I learned to write. But the working class person is above all afraid to seem dumb so in acting 'smart' and footnoting everything they betray the insecurity and weightiness of the unexperienced conclusion, which is an imitation of what writers are like. In general I think writers are not smart. They are something else and each writer can fill in a word here, but smart is not what that word is. ~ Eileen Myles

The overreactor is responsible, as the psychological term puts it, for the 'transference' of an emotion from the past on to someone in the present -- who perhaps doesn't entirely deserve it.

Our minds are, oddly, not always good at knowing what era they are in. They jump a little too easily, like an erstwhile victim of burglary who keeps a gun by the bed and is startled awake by every rustle.

What's worse for the loved ones standing in the vicinity is the people in the throes of a transference have no easy way of knowing, let alone calmly explaining, what they are up to; they simply feel that their response is entirely appropriate to the occasion. Their partners, on the other hand, may reach a rather different and rather flattering conclusion: that they are distinctly odd -- and maybe even a little mad. ~ Alain De Botton

When a baby comes into the world, its hands are clenched, right? Like this?" He made a fist. "Why? Because a baby not knowing any better, wants to grab everything, to say the whole world is mine. But when an old person dies, how does he do so? With his hands open. Why? Because he has learned his lesson." "What lesson?" I asked. He stretched open his empty fingers. "We can take nothing with us. ~ Mitch Albom

The unknown is exciting. Not knowing what you really want to do is an adventure. It's a chance to go out there and find out what you want, to learn about yourself. Not everyone has it figured out, you know. ~ R.K. Ryals

Children are our crop, our fields, our earth. They are birds let loose into darkness. They are errors renewed. Still, they are the only source from which may be drawn a life more successful, more knowing than our own. Somehow they will do one thing, take one step further, they will see the summit. We believe in it, the radiance that streams from the future, from days we will not see. Children must live, must triumph. Children must die; that is an idea we cannot accept. ~ James Salter

It's so weird, not knowing what your life is going to be. I'm being optimistic. And when 'Leverage' comes to an end, I have lots of ideas for other things. You can't really sit and wait for things to come to you. ~ Beth Riesgraf

All of us are infected today with an extraordinary egoism. And that is not freedom; freedom means learning to demand only of oneself, not of life and others, and knowing how to give: sacrifice in the name of love. ~ Andrei Tarkovsky

Today, what's normal is being redefined: from vaginal birth to surgical birth; from 'My water broke,' to 'Let's break your water;' from 'It's time' to 'It's time for the induction.' As medical anthropologist Robbie Davis-Floyd writes, 'in the early twenty-first century, we do not know what normal birth is.' Most practicing obstetricians have never witnessed an unplugged birth that wasn't an accident. Women are even beginning to deny normal birth to themselves: if 'normal' means being induced, immobilized by wires and tubes, sped up with drugs, all the while knowing that there's a good chance of surgery, well, might as well just cut to the chase, so to speak. 'Just give me a cesarean,' some are saying. And who can blame them? They want to avoid what they think of as normal birth. ~ Jennifer Block

In order for a god to be all-knowing, he must know even the fact of his own omniscience. But can he do this? He may know the totality of facts constituting the world; call this Y. But in order to know that he has mastered Y, he must also know that 'There are no facts unknown to me' - and this is beyond Y.
It seems impossible that a god (or anyone) could ever be sure that nothing exists beyond his ken. It makes no sense to imagine [a god] arriving at this limit, peering beyond it (at what?), and satisfying himself no further facts exist. But without this certainty he cannot be sure of his own omniscience, and so does not know everything.
A theist might argue that his god has created all the facts in existence. But an omniscient god would have to be sure of even this - that he is the sole creator, and that there are no facts unknown to him. And how could he come to this knowledge? ~ Roland Puccetti

One of the most irrational of all the conventions of modern society is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected. ... [This] convention protects them, and so they proceed with their blather unwhipped and almost unmolested, to the great damage of common sense and common decency. that they should have this immunity is an outrage. There is nothing in religious ideas, as a class, to lift them above other ideas. On the contrary, they are always dubious and often quite silly. Nor is there any visible intellectual dignity in theologians. Few of them know anything that is worth knowing, and not many of them are even honest. ~ H.L. Mencken