A Quote by Albert Schweitzer
The highest knowledge is to know that we are surrounded by mystery.
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The highest knowledge is to know that we are surrounded by mystery. Neither knowledge nor hope for the future can be the pivot of our life or determine its direction. It is intended to be solely determined by our allowing ourselves to be gripped by the ethical God, who reveals Himself in us, and by our yielding our will to His.
We strive toward knowledge, always more knowledge, but must understand that we are, and will remain, surrounded by mystery.
Knowledge is an island surrounded by a sea of mystery.
Esoteric or inner knowledge is no different from other kinds of human knowledge and ability. It is a mystery for the average person only to the extent that writing is a mystery for those who have not yet learned to write.
Wouldn't it be wonderful if we had a world where everybody said, 'We don't know?' The fact is that you're surrounded -God and you don't see God, because you KNOW ABOUT God. The final barrier to the vision of God is your God concept. You miss God because you think you know. The highest knowledge of God is to know God as unknowable. All revelations, however divine, are never any more than a finger pointing at the moon. As we say in the East, 'When the sage points to the moon, all the idiot sees is the finger'.
All our science and philosophy form only an island of knowledge surrounded by an ocean of mystery. The larger the island grows, the longer the shoreline where the known meets the unknown.
That knowledge which stops at what it does not know, is the highest knowledge.
Understanding human nature is the highest knowledge, and only by knowing it can we know God. It is also a fact that the knowledge of God is the highest knowledge, and only by knowing God can we understand human nature.
The heart of it all is mystery, and science is at best only the peripheral trappings to that mystery--a ragged barbed-wire fence through which mystery travels, back and forth, unencumbered by anything so frail as man's knowledge.
My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. The highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence. I do not know that this higher knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge before,—a discovery that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy.
Faith is not knowledge of what the mystery of the universe is, but the conviction that there is a mystery, and that it is greater than us.
I think it's important to live life with a knowledge of its mystery, and of your own mystery.
The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.
Faced with the immensity of the universe, Job realized that there are limits to man's rationalizing, that we cannot find where the cloud of sorrow starts, that all our boasted knowledge is but an island in the vast ocean of mystery, and as the island of knowledge grows larger, the shore line of mystery becomes longer. At the end of his wits, he surrendered in trust to a Higher Wisdom.
The reason we can't attain the highest level of knowledge while incarnate is that we can't then wholly escape the influence of the body (and so of perception and of certain desires that take us away from thinking properly); and that prevents us from understanding fully what forms are, which one must do in order to have the highest level of knowledge.
People have all this interest in food. But for most people, it's a mystery how to prepare food. I wanted the knowledge cooks know: the in-your-fingers knowledge you get by doing it over and over.
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