Unfathomable Quotes - Page 4

• For if joyful is the fountain that rises in the sun, its springs are in the wells of sorrow unfathomable at the foundations of the Earth.

  J. R. R. Tolkien

  Spring, Sorrow, Foundation

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• Silence before being born, silence after death: life is nothing but noise between two unfathomable silences.

  Isabel Allende

  Two, Silence, Noise

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• Unfathomable mind, now beacon, now sea.

  Samuel Beckett

  Sea, Mind, Beacons

  Samuel Beckett (2007). “Molloy”, p.111, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• He was in love, and people in that condition did stupid, unfathomable things. They were all flawed, every single one.

  Alice Hoffman

  Stupid, People, Flawed

  Alice Hoffman (2009). “The Story Sisters: A Novel”, p.158, Broadway Books

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• If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair?

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Passion, Dark, Men

  Soren Kierkegaard (2005). “Fear and Trembling”, p.18, Penguin UK

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• After she left everything fell apart. No Jew was safe. There were rumors of unfathomable things, and because we couldn't fathom them we failed to believe them, until we had no choice and it was too late. p 8

  Nicole Krauss

  Believe, Choices, Rumor

  Nicole Krauss (2006). “The History of Love: A Novel”, p.8, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Don't be upset. Don't listen to me. I only meant that I am jealous of a dark, unconscious element, something irrational, unfathomable. I am jealous of your toilet articles, of the drops of sweat on your skin, of the germs in the air you breathe which could get into your blood and poison you. And I am jealous of Komarovsky, as if he were an infectious disease. Someday he will take you away, just as certainly as death will someday separate us. I know this must seem obscure and confused, but I can't say it more clearly. I love you madly, irrationally, infinitely.

  Boris Pasternak

  Confused, Love You, Jealous

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• What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can’t be trusted—? What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly-held common virtues and instead straight towards a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster?

  Donna Tartt

  Beautiful, Strong, Responsibility

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• People’s lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, and unfathomable – deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.

  Alice Munro

  Simple, People, Kitchen

  "Lives of Girls and Women". Book by Alice Munro, 1971.

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• Meditation is your awakening. The moment you awake, sleep disappears and with it all the dreams, all the projections, all expectations, all desires. Suddenly you are in a state of desirelessness, non-ambition, unfathomable silence. And only in this silence, blossoms flower in your being. Only in this silence the lotuses open their petals.

  Rajneesh

  Dream, Flower, Ambition

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• For Ragamuffins, God's name is Mercy. We see our darkness as a prized possession because it drives us into the heart of God. Without mercy our darkness would plunge us into despair - for some, self-destruction. Time alone with God reveals the unfathomable depths of the poverty of the spirit. We are so poor that even our poverty is not our own: It belongs to the mysterium tremendum of a loving God.

  Brennan Manning

  Heart, Self, Names

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• For me the world is weird because it is stupendous, awesome, mysterious, unfathomable; my interest has been to convince you that you must assume responsibility for being here, in this marvelous world, in this marvelous desert, in this marvelous time. I want to convince you that you must learn to make every act count, since you are going to be here for only a short while, in fact, too short for witnessing all the marvels of it.

  Carlos Castaneda

  Life, Responsibility, Desert

  Carlos Castaneda (2012). “Journey To Ixtlan”, p.81, Simon and Schuster

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• As I glanced at the phraseology of the research report, dull and unfathomable to outsiders like me, I thought that if you have the ambition to become a villain, the first thing you should do is learn to be impenetrable. Don’t act like Blofeld—monocled and ostentatious. We journalists love writing about eccentrics. We hate writing about impenetrable, boring people. It makes us look bad: the duller the interviewee, the duller the prose. If you want to get away with wielding true, malevolent power, be boring.

  Jon Ronson

  Hate, Writing, Ambition

  Jon Ronson (2012). “Jon Ronson's Adventures With Extraordinary People”, p.534, Pan Macmillan

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• You do not know the unfathomable cowardice of humanity...servile in the face of force, pitiless in the face of weakness, implacable before blunders, indulgent before crimes...and patient to the point of martyrdom before all the violences of bold despotism.

  Niccolo Machiavelli

  Humanity, Liberty, Weakness

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• Americans have become conditioned to believe the world is a gray place without absolutes; this is because we’re simultaneously cowardly and arrogant. We don’t know the answers, so we assume they must not exist. But they do exist. They are unclear and/or unfathomable, but they’re out there. And—perhaps surprisingly—the only way to find those answers is to study NBA playoff games that happened twenty years ago. For all practical purposes, the voice of Brent Musburger was the pen of Ayn Rand.

  Chuck Klosterman

  Believe, Years, Nba

  Chuck Klosterman (2004). “Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto”, p.98, Simon and Schuster

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• The further one advances in experience, the closer one comes to the unfathomable; the more one learns to utilize experience, the more one recognizes that the unfathomable is of no practical value.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Learning, Experience, Practicals

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1963). “Goethe's world view: presented in his reflections and maxims”

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• Community is another such phenomenon. Like electricity, it is profoundly lawful. Yet there remains something about it that is inherently mysterious, miraculous, unfathomable. Thus there is no adequate one-sentence definition of genuine community. Community is something more than the sum of its parts, its individual members. What is this "something more?" Even to begin to answer that, we enter a realm that is not so much abstract as almost mystical. It is a realm where words are never fully suitable and language itself falls short.

  M. Scott Peck

  Fall, Community, Answers

  M. Scott Peck (2010). “The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace”, p.60, Simon and Schuster

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• Something unfathomable lies behind every thought ... something for which there aren't any words.

  Peter Weiss

  Lying, Behinds

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• Peoples lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing, unfathomable-deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum. . . . What I wanted [to write down] was every last thing, every layer of speech and thought, stroke of light on bark or walls, every smell, pothole, pain, crack, delusion, held still and held together-radiant, everlasting.

  Alice Munro

  Wall, Pain, Writing

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• Unfathomable Sea! whose waves are years, Ocean of Time, whose waters of deep woe Are brackish with the salt of human tears! Thou shoreless flood, which in thy ebb and flow Claspest the limits of mortality! And sick of prey, yet howling on for more, Vomitest thy wrecks on its inhospitable shore, Treacherous in calm, and terrible in storm, Who shall put forth on thee, Unfathomable sea?

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Ocean, Years, Sea

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (1840). “The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley”, p.292

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• I do here in the most solemn and bitter manner curse the Prime Minister of England [sic] for having cumulated all his other betrayals of the national interest and honour, by his last terrible exhibition of dishonour, weakness and gullibility. The depths of infamy which our accurst "love of peace" can lower us are unfathomable.

  Enoch Powell

  Betrayal, Weakness, Depth

  "Like the Roman. The Life of Enoch Powell" by Simon Heffer, (p. 47), 1999.

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• The incarnation is in itself an unfathomable mystery, but it makes sense of everything else that the New Testament contains.

  J. I. Packer

  Mystery, New Testament, Incarnation

  J. I. Packer, Carolyn Nystrom (2009). “Knowing God Devotional Journal: A One-Year Guide”, p.21, InterVarsity Press

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• In truly great films - the ones that people need to make, the ones that start speaking through them, the ones that keep moving into territory that is more and more unfathomable and uncomfortable - nothing's ever simple or neatly resolved. You're left with a mystery.

  Martin Scorsese

  Moving, Simple, People

  "Martin Scorsese channels his inner film critic on ‘The Searchers’" by Guy Lodge, uproxx.com. March 8, 2013.

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• God is certainly one. He has no second. He is unfathomable, unknowable and unknown to the vast majority of mankind.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  God, Majority, Mankind

  Mahatma Gandhi (2011). “The Way to God: Selected Writings from Mahatma Gandhi”, p.5, North Atlantic Books

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• There shall be poets! When woman's unmeasured bondage shall be broken, when she shall live for and through herself, man--hitherto detestable--having let her go, she, too, will be poet! Woman will find the unknown! Will her ideational worlds be different from ours? She will come upon strange, unfathomable, repellent, delightful things; we shall take them, we shall comprehend them.

  Arthur Rimbaud

  Men, Broken, World

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