Omniscient Quotes

Common sense is almost as omniscient as God. ~ Emily Dickinson

Don't you think it would be interesting if you could read the story of your life- written perfectly truthfully by an omniscient author? And suppose you could only read it on this condition: that you would never forget it, but would have to go through life knowing ahead of time exactly how everything you did would turn out, and forseeing to the exact hour the time you would die. How many people do you suppose you have the courage to read it then? Or how many could suppress their curiosity sufficiently to escape from reading it, even at the price of having to live without hope, without surprise? Life is monotonous enough at best; you have to eat and sleep about so often. But imagine how deadly monotonous it would be if nothing unexpected could happen between meals? ~ Jean Webster

There is something distinctly odd about the argument, however. Believing is not something you can decide to do as a matter of policy. At least, it is not something I can decide to do as an act of will. I can decide to go to church and I can decide to recite the Nicene Creed, and I can decide to swear on a stack of bibles that I believe every word inside them. But none of that can make me actually believe it if I don't. Pascal's Wager could only ever be an argument for feigning belief in God. And the God that you claim to believe in had better not be of the omniscient kind or he'd see through the deception. ~ Richard Dawkins

An omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent being has no need for creation, for it already encompasses everything. ~ Joseph Rain

I was writing a story, 'The Artistic Career of Corky,' about two young men, Bertie Wooster and his friend Corky, getting into a lot of trouble, and neither of them had brains enough to get out of the trouble. I thought: Well, how can I get them out? And I thought: Suppose one of them had an omniscient valet? ~ P.G. Wodehouse

She learned
that dead moms
were not just
a thing that
happened to
characters
in her favorite
fairy tales.
it happened to
girls like her, too.
but the
difference was
there was no
omniscient narrator
to teach her how
to navigate it.
- the cracked compass. ~ Amanda Lovelace

When dealing with a subject who is dead, you have this feeling of being God. You know who they're going to marry, when they're going to die. It's strange to feel so omniscient. ~ Claire Tomalin

GCHQ has traveled a long and winding road. That road stretches from the wooden huts of Bletchley Park, past the domes and dishes of the Cold War, and on towards what some suggest will be the omniscient state of the Brave New World. As we look to the future, the docile and passive state described by Aldous Huxley in his Brave New World is perhaps more appropriate analogy than the strictly totalitarian predictions offered by George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Bizarrely, many British citizens are quite content in this new climate of hyper-surveillance, since its their own lifestyle choices that helped to create 'wired world' - or even wish for it, for as we have seen, the new torrents of data have been been a source of endless trouble for the overstretched secret agencies. As Ken Macdonald rightly points out, the real drives of our wired world have been private companies looking for growth, and private individuals in search of luxury and convenience at the click of a mouse. The sigint agencies have merely been handed the impossible task of making an interconnected society perfectly secure and risk-free, against the background of a globalized world that presents many unprecedented threats, and now has a few boundaries or borders to protect us. Who, then, is to blame for the rapid intensification of electronic surveillance? Instinctively, many might reply Osama bin Laden, or perhaps Pablo Escobar. Others might respond that governments have used these villains as a convenient ex ~ Richard J. Aldrich

Apparently on the screen I look tall, ageless, and damned close to omniscient-delivering jeopardy-laden warnings through gritted teeth. But when people see me on the street, they say 'by God, this kid is 5 foot 5, he's got a broken nose, and looks about as foreboding as a bank teller on a lunch break.' ~ Rod Serling

God, as represented by Scripture, by nature is the true non-conformist. He does not need to conform to any truth; He does not need to conform to some moral law. It proclaims that He is the Truth; He defines Morality: the Great I Am, the Beginning and the End who radiates all that is Holy. Therefore, and unless we too were wholly holy and omniscient, we would do well to understand at the very least that even if this God were to wipe away all in existence, then despite my opinion or your opinion, His decision would be objectively good and moral simply because He is the one doing it. ~ Criss Jami

He by whom the whole universe is constantly pervaded is the Knower, the Author of time. He is sinless and omniscient.

It is at His command that the work which is called earth, water, fire, air and akasa appears as the universe. All this should be reflected upon by the wise. ~ Svetasvatara Upanishad

The age looks steadily to the redressing of wrong, to the righting of every form of error and injustice; and a tireless and prying philanthropy, which is almost omniscient, is one of the most hopeful characteristics of the time. ~ Mary Baker Eddy

Why do I keep doing this? Making her out to be more than what she was, grander, omniscient even, lovely and unreal. She could be such a bitch. She could sense what you hated about yourself, and is you pissed her off she'd throw it back in your face, she'd make sure you knew she thought it, too. Sometimes I feel like she is my invention. Like the more I say, the further from the truth of her I get. I'm trying to hold palmfuls of sand, but I squeeze harder, tighten my fists, and the quicker it all escapes. ~ Julie Buntin

It's just one of those things people talk about. Like, if you could have a superpower, what would it be?"
"I'd like to be able to fly," Cletus responded as though her question had been asked in earnest.
"Not be invisible? Or read minds? Or be omniscient?" Roscoe suggested.
Cletus shook his head. "Certainly not. That'd be redundant because I'm already all of those things."
"Then make it rain blueberries," Roscoe teased. ~ Penny Reid

Only 'he', who becomes free from his intellect (abudha), can become Omniscient (sarvagna). ~ Dada Bhagwan

Happily men don't realise how stupid they are, or half the world would commit suicide. Knowledge is a will-of-the-wisp, fluttering ever out of the traveller's reach; and a weary journey must be endured before it is even seen. It is only when a man knows a good deal that he discovers how unfathomable is his ignorance. The man who knows nothing is satisfied that there is nothing to know, consequently that he knows everything; and you may more easily persuade him that the moon is made of green cheese than that he is not omniscient. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

Google is omniscient of what people search for and do. Facebook has over a billion subscribers, meaning Mark Zuckerberg has personal information about one in every seven people on Earth. U.S.A., Brazil, Mexico, India and Indonesia are at the top of that list. ~ Eduardo Paes

To an omniscient being, nothing in all of Creation can be original, fashionable, or even distinct, as every event, thought, action, adventure and discovery is occurring simultaneously in one stretched-out moment. To be omniscient means to have never felt even the slightest twang of curiosity, for there can be no unexpected twists if every outcome to every drama and experiment is already known. Without the capacity for curiosity it is, therefore, impossible for the omniscient being to be interested in anything, let alone be attentive to His own pleasure, as pleasure is inaccessible if all of Creation is, from His great perspective, perfectly flat and of a uniform temperature. ~ John Zande

And you cannot have a socialist revolution commandeered from the top, ordered around by some omniscient leader or group of leaders. ~ Ernest Mandel

And yet viewing several depictions of even an imaginary city, is enlightening in a way," Leibniz said. "Each painter can view the city from only one standpoint at a time, so he will move about the place, and paint it from a hilltop on one side, then a tower on the other, then from a grand intersection in the middle
all in the same canvas. When we look at the canvas, then, we glimpse in a small way how God understands the universe
for he sees it from every point of view at once. By populating the world with so many different minds, each with its own point of view, God gives us a suggestion of what it means to be omniscient. ~ Neal Stephenson

He is ETERNAL, which means that He antedates time and is wholly independent of it. Time began in Him and will end in Him. To it He pays no tribute and from it He suffers no change.
He is IMMUTABLE, which means that He has never changed and can never change in any smallest measure. To change He would need to go from better to worse or from worse to better. He cannot do either, for being perfect He cannot become more perfect, and if He were to become less perfect He would be less than God.
He is OMNISCIENT, which means that He knows in one free and effortless act all matter, all spirit, all relationships, all events. He has no past and He has no future.
He IS, and none of the limiting and qualifying terms used of creatures can apply to Him. ~ A.W. Tozer

Why pray if we cannot change God? ... is that why we pray? To change omniscient Love? Isn't it rather to learn what it is and to fulfill it? Not to change it by our acts, but to change our acts by it. ~ Peter Kreeft

The censorship method ... is that of handing the job over to some frail and erring mortal man, and making him omnipotent on the assumption that his official status will make him infallible and omniscient. ~ George Bernard Shaw

There cannot be two almighty beings in this world. [Imagine having] two or three Gods; one will create the world, another says, "I will destroy the world." It [can] never happen. There must be one God. The soul attains to perfection; [it becomes] almost omnipotent [and] omniscient. This is the worshipper. Who is the worshipped? He, the Lord God Himself, the Omnipresent, the Omniscient, and so on. And above all, He is Love. How is [the soul] to attain this perfection? By worship. ~ Swami Vivekananda

Science has proved there's nothing to the talk of ghosts and spirits, no proof anything like the soul exists. And to my mind that's an argument against the existence of an omniscient force. I think people believe whatever makes living easiest, and who am I to deny someone comfort? ~ Ann Aguirre

The dream is so pleasant: to extend a limited sub-portion of yourself into a simulated world and pretend for a while that you are blissfully less. Less than an omniscient being. ~ David Brin

But if two's company, three's a crowd - and that demands the omniscient point of view. ~ Arthur Herzog

My friend Markus Zusak wrote a story from the point of view of death, 'The Book Thief.' I thought that's a great idea, where your omniscient narrator is death. I'm glad he had that idea because I wouldn't have been able to work so well with it. ~ Shaun Tan

For an omnipotent and omniscient being, God has made some really lousy earthly staffing decisions. ~ John Cole

I'm the omniscient narrator ~ Karen M. McManus

Its invisibility, and the mystery which was attached to it, made this organization doubly terrible. It appeared to be omniscient and omnipotent, and yet was neither seen nor heard. The man who held out against the Church vanished away, and none knew whither he had gone or what
had befallen him. His wife and his children awaited him at home, but no father ever returned to tell them how he had fared at the hands of his secret judges. A rash word or a hasty act was followed by annihilation, and yet none knew what the nature might be of this terrible power which was suspended over them. No wonder that men went about in fear and trembling, and that even in the heart of the wilderness they dared not whisper the doubts which oppressed them. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

God is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent. He is intricately involved in our lives and for that alone, we should be thankful. ~ Robin Bertram

We all have certain desires and undesired outcomes related to whatever possible course and attitude we take in life, whether it be at the larger macro scale (what shall I do with the rest of my life?) or at the micro level (as in, what route shall I take to work this morning). These include all the myriad choices we make each hour and each day. These choices determine our karma and our destiny. It's no accident, nor any great mystery, how this evolves; although one would have to utterly omniscient to understand all the many gross and subtle interconnections and causative links that determine happenings and outcomes. ~ Lama Surya Das

Knowledge born of the finest discrimination takes us to the farthest shore. It is intuitive, omniscient, and beyond all divisions of time and space. ~ Patanjali

Oh, my God, Ted," she moaned, fakely.

They dated for the next four months. ~ Kristen Roupenian

We are loved. Born out of love, into love, to know love, and to be loved. Yes, we were born into a fallen, sorry world, which is at the same time more lovely than any fairy tale. It is both. And in this beautiful, heartbreaking world, God - the eternal, omniscient, amazing One - loves human beings. Including you. Especially you. ~ Stasi Eldredge

From a philosophical perspective, Linde's little story underscores the danger of assuming that the creative force behind our universe, if there is one, must correspond to the traditional image of God: omnipotent, omniscient, infinitely benevolent, and so on. Even if the cause of our universe is an intelligent being, it could well be a painfully incompetent and fallible one, the kind that might flub the cosmogenic task by producing a thoroughly mediocre creation. ~ Jim Holt

The Internet is global and seemingly omniscient, while iPods and phones are all microscopic workings encased in plastic blobjects. Compare that to a steam engine, where you can watch the pistons move and feel the heat of its boilers. I think we miss that visceral appeal of the machine. ~ Scott Westerfeld

There would never be enough milk. One titty is too many and a thousand are never enough. What I really sought was a cosmic titty. I sought a titty so omniscient it could sate all my holes. The world was already not enough, and I, of course, was not enough either. They gave me a bottle. ~ Melissa Broder

Do you remember when you were 10 or 11 years old and you really thought your folks were the best? They were completely omniscient and you took their word for everything. And then you got older and you went through this hideous age when suddenly they were the devil, they were bullies, and they didn't know anything. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

We must face the fact that the United States is neither omnipotent nor omniscient, that we cannot impose our will upon the other 94 percent of mankind, that we cannot right every wrong or reverse every adversity, and that therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world problem. ~ John F. Kennedy

I believe that at this point in history, the greatest danger to our freedom and way of life comes from the reasonable fear of omniscient State powers kept in check by nothing more than policy documents. ~ Edward Snowden

Omnipotent not omniscient. We are frequently blinded by how much we see. ~ Karen Marie Moning

As Psalm 136:5--9 tell us, creation was God's power expressed in love. By reading and understanding the Bible as a series of love letters to men and women, you begin to recognize the tender and mighty love of God. The Bible is not a rule book for life or a collection of fairy tales; it's a weapon of mass instruction. It's a love letter from God to humanity. It's an introduction to Jesus Christ, who is God in human form. It declares to the world: God is for you, not against you. To me, the Bible is a work of nonfiction broken into three parts: from Genesis to Malachi, it's about Jesus Christ coming to earth; from Matthew to John, it's about Jesus' life on earth; and from Acts to Revelation, it's about Jesus coming back to earth. It's all about Jesus and how we can have a relationship with the omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, eternal, holy, and righteous Almighty. This relationship is more important than simply joining a church or doing a few good things. ~ Jase Robertson

The subject had reference to secret sin and those sad mysteries which we hide from our nearest and dearest, and would fain conceal from our own consciousness, even forgetting that the Omniscient can detect them. ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

I have three powers to win the world: my omnipotent love, my omnipresent kindness, and my omniscient compassion. ~ Debasish Mridha

God is omnipotent, He is omniscient, and He is ever present. ~ Little Richard

To preserve yourself as the center of the world, to stay your own best authority on everything, your own expert on all topics, infallible, omniscient. Always, every time of the month, forever: Use birth control. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

Impudent dog! God knows why I bear with you!' Harding grinned. 'Probably, sir. Omniscient, isn't He? ~ Elizabeth Rolls

I am afraid of getting older. I am afraid of getting married. Spare me from cooking three meals a day - spare me from the relentless cage of routine and rote. I want to be free. ( ... ) I want, I think, to be omniscient ... I think I would like to call myself "The girl who wanted to be God." Yet if I were not in this body, where would I be - perhaps I am destined to be classified and qualified. But, oh, I cry out against it. I am I - I am powerful - but to what extent? I am I. ~ Sylvia Plath

The Knower of the Soul is considered Self Realized (The Enlightened one). The knower of all the eternal elements is known as Omniscient (sarvagna). ~ Dada Bhagwan

The vocabulary of an omniscient man would embrace words and images excluded from polite conversation. What would be base, or even obscene, to the obscene, becomes illustrious, spoken in a new connexion of thought. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I'm a strong believer in telling stories through a limited but very tight third person point of view. I have used other techniques during my career, like the first person or the omniscient view point, but I actually hate the omniscient viewpoint. None of us have an omniscient viewpoint; we are alone in the universe. We hear what we can hear ... we are very limited. If a plane crashes behind you I would see it but you wouldn't. That's the way we perceive the world and I want to put my readers in the head of my characters. ~ George R R Martin

In a rational state it would be more appropriate to ensure that a cobbler passed an examination than an executive civil servant; because shoe-making is a craft in the absence of which it is still possible to be a good citizen and a man in society. But the necessary 'knowledge of the state' is a precondition in the absence of which one lives outside the state, cut off from the air one breathes and from oneself. Thus the 'examination' is nothing but a Masonic initiation, the legal recognition of the knowledge of citizenship, the acknowledgement of a privilege.

This 'link' between the 'individual' and his 'office', this objective bond between the knowledge of civil society and the knowledge of the state, namely the examination, is nothing but the bureaucratic baptism of knowledge, the official recognition of the transubstantiation of profane knowledge into sacred knowledge (it is plain that in every examination the examiner is omniscient).

It is not recorded that Greek and Roman statesmen ever took examinations. But then what is a Roman statesman compared to a Prussian civil servant! ~ Karl Marx

Maybe I was wrong, Ted thought. Maybe I could be content with this.

Unfortunately, he could not. ~ Kristen Roupenian

What's this? here's velvet shark-skin," intently gazing at Ahab's hand, and feeling it. "Ah, now, had poor Pip but felt so kind a thing as this, perhaps he had ne'er been lost! This seems to me, sir as a man-rope; something that weak souls may hold by. Oh, sir, let old Perth now come and rivet these two hands together; the black one with the white, for I will not let this go."

"Oh, boy, nor will I thee, unless I should thereby drag thee to worse horrors than are here. Come, then to my cabin. Lo! ye believers in gods all goodness, and in man all ill, lo you! see the omniscient gods oblivious of suffering man; and man, though idiotic, and knowing not what he does, yet full of the sweet things of love and gratitude. Come! I feel prouder leading thee by they black hand, than though I grasped an Emperor's! ~ Herman Melville

A startling thought this, that a woman could handle business matters as well or better than a man, a revolutionary thought to Scarlett who had been reared in the tradition that men were omniscient and women none too bright. ~ Margaret Mitchell

A man knows, not only that he now is, but also that there was a time when he did not exist; consequently there must have been a cause. But we can only infer, from effects, causes exactly adequate to those effects. There certainly is a generative power which is effected by particular instruments; we cannot prove that it is inherent in these instruments, nor is the contrary hypothesis capable of demonstration. We admit that the generative power is incomprehensible, but to suppose that the same effects are produced by an eternal Omnipotent and Omniscient Being, leaves the cause in the same obscurity, but renders it more incomprehensible. ~ Christopher Hitchens

We have Christians against Muslims against Jews, and no matter how liberal your theology, merely identifying yourself as a Christian or a Jew lends tacit validity to this status quo. People have morally identified with a subset of humanity rather than with humanity as a whole. ~ Sam Harris

Even the best planning is not so omniscient as to get it right the first time. ~ Fred Brooks

True, my boy. Only Hashem is omniscient, and until He decides we're worthy of His communication via prophets or the Messiah, we mortals are forced to live in a state of ignorance. I've spent my whole life learning, Detective, acquiring knowledge not only from the scriptures of my belief, but from countless other sources - American law, philosophy, psychology, economics, political science: I have studied them all at great length. Yet, a madman can slip under my nose, and I realize I know nothing. I am still a meaningless speck of dust in the scheme of things. A most humbling experience. ~ Faye Kellerman

There was no good name for this spot. Evie, who had shot like an arrow from school into life, who had never wavered, who had seen clear right from the start where she wanted to get to, had lately found herself more and more in the brambles. Somehow, here she was, no longer certain where she was going. Or even if she wanted to get there.

The jobs had been won, the beds made, the dishes washed, the children sprouted. The wheel had stopped, and now what? Where, for instance, was the story of a middle-aged orphan with the gray streak in her hair, the historian who had rustled thirteenth-century women's lives out of fugitive pages, who believed more than most that there was no such thing as the certainty of a plot in the story of a life, in fact who taught this to students year in and year our, and yet who found herself lately longing, above all else for just that? Longing, against reason, for some kind of clear direction, for the promise of a pattern. For this relief--she pulled against the shoulder strap of her satchel--the unbearable relief of an omniscient narrator.

Adolescence, she reflected, pushing open the classroom door with a kind of savage glee, had nothing on this. ~ Sarah Blake

I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me. My love's not impersonal yet not wholly subjective either. I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I'll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time ... ~ Sylvia Plath

Omniscient, omnipotent, omnivorous and omnipresent all begin with Om. ~ Ashwin Sanghi

It's not arrogant to say that you can't figure out the answers to the universe with your internal faith. It's not arrogant to know that there's no omniscient, omnipotent prime mover in the universe who loves you personally. It's not sad to feel that life and the love of your real friends and family is more than enough to make life worth living. Isn't it much sadder to feel that there is a more important love required than the love of the people who have chosen to spend their limited time with you? ~ Penn Jillette

I want, I think, to be omniscient. I think I would like to call myself "the girl who wanted to be God." Yet if I were not in this body where would I be-perhaps I am destined to be classified and qualified. But, oh, I cry out against it. ~ Sylvia Plath

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

most religions adhere to some form of determinism and predestination. Since God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent, He knows the future, and hence the future is determined ahead of time. He knows even before you are born whether you will go to Heaven or Hell. The Catholic Church split in half on this precise question during the Protestant revolution. According to Catholic doctrine at that time, one could change one's ultimate fate with an indulgence, usually by making generous financial donations to the Church. In other words, determinism could be altered by the size of your wallet. ~ Michio Kaku

There is nothing unforgivable and there are no secrets before an all-knowing merciful God. ~ J.E.B. Spredemann

Before the reaper could react, the Darkness had grabbed him by the neck and hauled him from his feet into the air. Dangling, at his master's mercy, he was forced to look into his eyes. A dark swirling mass of shadows, weaving in and out – the mirror image of captured souls and walls of blue flame – burned inside his omniscient being. ~ Nikki Landis

I believe God himself will someday debate with and answer every objection arrogant men can come up with against him; I believe he will humble us and humor himself. Know-it-alls, pseudo-intellectuals, militant anti-theists, for Christ's sake, or rather their own sake, best beware of getting roasted by their own medicine. Ah! Our delusions of trying to argue against an omniscient Creator. ~ Criss Jami

The desire of Kenyans is manifest. They know too well that their invincible, invisible, nameless, faceless, yet omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent rulers are condemned to serve them for life! ~ Levi Cheruo Cheptora

Nobody ever inferred from the multiple infirmities of Windows that Bill Gates was infinitely benevolent, omniscient, and able to fix everything. ~ Simon Blackburn

We forget that Socrates was famed for wisdom not because he was omniscient but because he realized at the age of seventy that he still knew nothing. ~ Robert Wilson Lynd

It is God's will not only to hear our prayer, but to give us the best and the richest answer which He, the almighty and omniscient God, can devise. He will send us the answer when it will benefit us and His cause the most. ~ Ole Hallesby

If you believe that you are NOT omnipresent, omniscient and ultimately omnipotent – you are delusional. If you believe that you are separate from that which you call God, then you are living a lie. ~ Kevin Michel

If, as you believe there is an Almighty, Omnipresent, Omniscient God, who created the earth or universe, please let me know, first of all, as to why he created this world. This world which is full of woe and grief, and countless miseries, where not even one person lives in peace ... Where is God? What is He doing? Is He getting a diseased pleasure out of it? A Nero! A Genghis Khan! Down with Him! ~ Bhagat Singh

The classical theory of omniscient rationality is strikingly simple and beautiful. ~ Herbert A. Simon

My God is none other than the people. Only the popular masses are omniscient and omnipotent and almighty on earth. Therefore my lifetime motto is: The people are my God. ~ Kim Il-sung

Believing there is no God means the suffering I've seen in my family, and indeed all the suffering in the world, isn't caused by an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent force that isn't bothered to help or is just testing us, but rather something we all may be able to help others with in the future. No God means the possibility of less suffering in the future. ~ Penn Jillette

We are not omniscient or all-powerful. Even enhanced by technology, our physical and mental powers are limited. ~ Atul Gawande

Early on, I settled on the first-person strategy as a way to deal with exposition and world-description issues. As long as the book is, it could have been far longer had I gone with an omniscient third-person narrator, or multiple point-of-view characters, since either of those would have enabled me to impart much more detailed information about the history and geography of the world. ~ Neal Stephenson

God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent – it says so right here on the label. If you have a mind capable of believing all three of these divine attributes simultaneously, I have a wonderful bargain for you. No checks, please. Cash and in small bills. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

Middlemarch is a novel that is diminished by being put on the screen. It can't help but be, because so much of what we enjoy in Middlemarch is the interplay between what the characters do and what we know about them because of the telling voice.

It's less of a problem for the cinema when it deals with novels that are purely concerned with action and what people do. I haven't thought this through, and I'm just trying it now to see what it sounds like. But maybe it would be less a problem with novels that are told in the first person. The interesting thing to me about Middlemarch, and Thackeray's Vanity Fair, and several other great novels, is precisely this omniscient, as we call it, third person, which naive readers mistake for the author. It isn't George Eliot who is saying this; it's a voice that George Eliot adopts to tell this story.

There can be something very interesting in a novel like Bleak House, which was also done very well on the television by the same adapter, Andrew Davis. Now, Bleak House is told in two voices, as you remember. One is the somewhat trying Esther Summerson, who is a paradigm of every kind of virtue, and the other is a different sort of voice entirely, a voice that tells the story in the present tense, which was unusual for the time, a voice that doesn't seem to have a main character attached to it.

But I think that Dickens is playing a very subtle game here. I've noticed a couple of things about that second narrat ~ Philip Pullman

You know so much, Onida."
"I have nine brains - which never stop growing - three hearts, and I can regenerate my arms; but mostly, it's because I'm female." Female. Well, shit. Admittedly, I had limited knowledge of them, but they had always seemed omniscient and formidable to me. ~ Kira Jane Buxton

The sadistic narcissist perceives himself as Godlike, ruthless and devoid of scruples, capricious and unfathomable, emotion-less and non-sexual, omniscient, omnipotent and omni-present, a plague, a devastation, an inescapable verdict. ~ Sam Vaknin

An omnipotent god can create a being whose acts are known only to itself.

An omniscient god cannot do this.

It would appear, then, that no god can be both omnipotent and omniscient. ~ Richard R. LA Croix

When we are unduly impatient with an omniscient God's timing, we really are suggesting that we know what's best. Strange isn't it-we who wear wrist watches seek to counsel Him who oversees cosmic clocks and calendars. ~ Neal A. Maxwell

It's like I'm trapped in one of those omniscient dreams where you just watch yourself do stupid shit, yelling at yourself about how stupid it is, and your dream-self just keeps doing what it's doing anyway. ~ Kendare Blake

The problem of vindicating an omnipotent and omniscient God in the face of evil is insurmountable. Those who claim to have surmounted it, by recourse to notions of free will and other incoherencies, have merely heaped bad philosophy onto bad ethics. ~ Sam Harris

In emphasizing God's love over his holiness
his set-apartness as a sovereign, omniscient authority
we end up believing that his central concern is our individual happiness. ~ Leslie Leyland Fields

The Bible does not profess to make men omniscient, but simply to tell them enough to make them happy and good, if they will believe it and live up to it. ~ Henry Van Dyke

Living becomes an awesome business when you realize that you spend every moment of your life in the sight and company of an omniscient, omnipresent Creator. ~ J.I. Packer

… an Emperor says, "I will kill you if you do not come", and the man bursts into a laugh and says, "You never told such a falsehood in your life, as you tell just now. Who can kill me? Me you kill, Emperor of the material world! Never! For I am Spirit unborn and undecaying; never was I born and never do I die; I am the Infinite, the Omnipresent, the Omniscient; and you kill me, child that you are!" That is strength, that is strength! ~ Swami Vivekananda

Philippians 2:3-8 tells us to humble ourselves by imitating Christ. Even though He is God, He was willing to add humanity to His deity. Becoming a human being was degrading to the second Person of the Godhead beyond words to describe it. In His humanity the omnipotent God became tired. The omniscient God grew in wisdom. The omnipresent God was circumscribed in a localized body. The sovereign God willingly submitted Himself to do the Father's will. The eternal God died in the cruelest manner imaginable. The holy Go was made sin for us. ~ Randy Jaeggli

Television wasn't getting rid of animals, but they were no longer cast as creatures that were omniscient and heroic. They were talking horses like Mr Ed or an absurdist pig like Arnold Ziffle ... Just like the heroic animals in silent films became comedians in talkies, animals on television were becoming jesters, something Rin Tin Tin had never been. ~ Susan Orlean

Keats mourned that the rainbow, which as a boy had been for him a magic thing, had lost its glory because the physicists had found it resulted merely from the refraction of the sunlight by the raindrops. Yet knowledge of its causation could not spoil the rainbow for me. I am sure that it is not given to man to be omniscient. There will always be something left to know, something to excite the imagination of the poet and those attuned to the great world in which they live (p. 64) ~ Robert Frost

The retaining membrane that held Dutch culture together for more than a century was a marvel of elasticity. Responding to appropriate external stimuli, it could expand or contract as the conditions of its survival altered. Under pressure, it could tighten to compress the Dutch into a sense of their indissoluble unity. In more expansive times it could relax and swell, allowing for internal differentiation and the absorption of a whole gamut of beliefs, faiths and even tongues. An omniscient kind of social filter swallowed up those foreign bodies and spat them out again as burghers: civically salubrious and residentially reliable. ~ Simon Schama

But when we look beyond human affairs and the properties of the surrounding bodies: When we carry our speculations into the two eternities, before and after the present state of things; into the creation and formation of the universe; the existence and properties of spirits; the powers and operations of one universal spirit, existing without beginning and without end; omnipotent, omniscient, immutable, infinite, and incomprehensible: We must be far removed from the smallest tendency to scepticism not to be apprehensive, that we have here got quite beyond the reach of our faculties. ~ David Hume

I have discovered that many of the things I thought were priceless are as cheap as costume jewelry, and much of what I labeled worthless was, all the time, filled with the kind of beauty that directly nourishes my soul ... Now I think that the vast majority of us "normal" people spend our lives trashing our treasures and treasuring our trash. We bustle around trying to create the impression that we are hip, imperturbable, omniscient, in perfect control, when in fact we are awkward and scared and bewildered. ~ Martha Beck