Unfathomable Quotes

1. ". . . for us there still exists a serene, unfathomable abyss in which God and the spirits dwell. The soul, in moments of ecstasy, often soars across it; poetry unveils it at times with childlike naivete; but science with its hammer and yardstick is often perched at the rim and may, in many cases, contribute nothing at all."
Author: Adalbert Stifter

2. "Sublime places gently move us to acknowledge limitations that we might otherwise encounter with anxiety or anger in the ordinary flow of events. It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming. But it is the vast spaces of nature that perhaps provide us with the finest, the most respectful reminder of all that exceeds us. If we spend time in them, they may help us to accept more graciously the great, unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust."
Author: Alain De Botton

3. "The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less sure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend"
Author: Aldous Huxley

4. "All it needed was me, and my fear. Because alone in the silence, in the unfathomable darkness, I knew that my own thoughts would drive me mad. My own mind would kill me."
Author: Alexander Gordon Smith

5. "You are so terribly nimble, so clever. I distrust your cleverness. You make a wonderful pattern, everything is in its place, it looks convincingly clear, too clear. And meanwhile, where are you? Not on the clear surface of your ideas, but you have already sunk deeper, into darker regions, so that one only thinks one has been given all your thoughts, one only imagines you have emptied yourself in that clarity. But there are layers and layers -- you're bottomless, unfathomable. Your clearness is deceptive. You are the thinker who arouses most confusion in me, most doubt, most disturbance."
Author: Anaïs Nin

6. "I try to imagine what type of girl Connor would seek, but she seems unfathomable--like a hazy picture with only her brain showing."
Author: Becca Ritchie

7. "I was suddenly made aware of another world of beauty and mystery such as I had never imagined to exist, except in poetry. It was as though I had begun to see and smell and hear for the first time. The world appeared to me as Wordsworth describes with "the glory and freshness of a dream." The sight of a wild rosegrowing on a hedge, the scent of lime-tree blossoms caught suddenly as I rode down a hill on a bicycle, came to me like visitations from another world. But it was not only my sensesthat were awakened. I experienced an overwhelming emotionin the presence of nature, especially at evening. It began to have a kind of sacramental character for me. I approached it with a sense of almost religious awe and , in a hush that comes before sunset, I felt again the presence of an almost unfathomable mystery. The song of the birds, the shape of the trees, the colors of the sunset, were so many signs of the presence, which seemed to be drawing me to itself."
Author: Bede Griffiths

8. "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."
Author: Brennan Manning

9. "Kindness is seen as weakness and intelligence worshiped, even when that intelligence allows unfathomable injustice and suffering to occur under its smart watch."
Author: Bryant McGill

10. "I've had lots of happy moments. I've been lucky. But I always think the happiest moment hasn't happened yet. I'm talking about the queen of happy moments. The biggie. The unfathomable. The epitome of happiness. The only thing is, I worry that when it comes along I won't recognize it. It'll be flashing away there at the edge of my vision and I'll be looking so hard that I'll just let it float right by."
Author: Carol Shields

11. "Our unfathomable evolutionary past paints a picture vastly more immense than any spiritual story could ever create because it is raw and real, violent, dirty and beautiful—and because of that—it's spectacular!"
Author: Christopher Loren

12. "A Grand Design we couldn't see because we were part of it. A Grand Design we only got occasional, fleeting glimpses of. A Grand Design involving the entire course of history and all of time and space that, for some unfathomable reason, chose to work out its designs with cats and croquet mallets and penwipers, to say nothing of the dog. And a hideous piece of Victorian artwork. And us."
Author: Connie Willis

13. "Lies are convenient when the truth is unfathomable."
Author: Courtney M. Privett

14. "O your life, your lonely lifeWhat have you ever done with it,And done with the great gift of consciousness?What will you ever do before Death's knifeProvides the answer ultimate and appropriate?As I for my part felt in my heart as one who falls,Falls in a parachute, falls endlessly, and feels the vastDraft of the abyss sucking him down and down,An endlessly helplessly falling and appalled clown:This is the way the night passes by, thisIs the overnight endless trip to the famous unfathomable abyss."
Author: Delmore Schwartz

15. "God loves human beings. God loves the world. Not an ideal human, but human beings as they are; not an ideal world, but the real world. What we find repulsive in their opposition to God, what we shrink back from with pain and hostility, namely, real human beings, the real world, this is for God the ground of unfathomable love."
Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

16. "If we isolate the stray thought, the passing thought," he said, "the thought whose origin is unfathomable, then we begin to understand that we are routinely deranged, everyday crazy."
Author: Don DeLillo

17. "After a duration of a thousand years, the power of astrology broke down when, with Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, the progress of astronomy overthrew the false hypothesis upon which the entire structure rested, namely the geocentric system of the universe. The fact that the earth revolves in space intervened to upset the complicated play of planetary influences, and the silent stars, related to the unfathomable depths of the sky, no longer made their prophetic voices audible to mankind. Celestial mechanics and spectrum analysis finally robbed them of their mysterious prestige."
Author: Franz Cumont

18. "Maybe love, unfathomable love, was too much for people, so they had traded it for something easier."
Author: Gwenn Wright

19. "The distance to the corner shops of childhood becomes unfathomable, immeasurable; the candy bars have changed. And change has changed."
Author: Ilse Aichinger

20. "Silence before being born, silence after death: life is nothing but noise between two unfathomable silences."
Author: Isabel Allende

21. "When you only dream of doing one thing for the majority of your life, it's almost unfathomable to think about doing anything else. You don't know how. It's all you ever wanted and you'll not only fight like hell to get there, you'll fight like hell to stay."
Author: J. Sterling

22. "As men obsessed with the idea that all knowledge lies within a woman's body, but having entered it to find themselves as ignorant as before, they are driven towards all women again and again: in childish hope that somehow the next time they will find the treasure, and then the equally childish desire for revenge since it cannot be found, that knife in the unfathomable entrails; and they grow full of hatred."
Author: John McGahern

23. "Prose—it might be speculated—is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard. The one is presumably articulate and social, a shared language, the voice of "communication"; the other is private, allusive, teasing, sly, idiosyncratic as the spider's delicate web, a kind of witchcraft unfathomable to ordinary minds."
Author: Joyce Carol Oates

24. "Dinner was ready. Professor Lidenbrock did full justice to it, for his compulsory fast on board had turned his stomach into an unfathomable gulf."
Author: Jules Verne

25. "And yet. When I read the Dawn on line and then looked around me to the pristine surroundings of campus life, I knew that every other city in the world only showed me its surface, but when I looked at Karachi I saw the blood running through and out of its veins; I knew that I understood the unspoken as much as the articulated among its inhabitants; I knew that there were so many reasons to fail to love it, to cease to love it, to be unable to love it, that it made love a fierce and unfathomable thing; I knew I couldn't think of Karachi and find any easy answers, and I didn't know how to decide if that was reason to go back or reason to stay away."
Author: Kamila Shamsie

26. "Oh! Great Lady of Fascination! We arise in somnambulant awe and dance entranced as you glide slowly and softly through the Heavenly Dome and suffuse our presence with unfathomable desires for faerie worlds, where all is order, where all is beauty, where nuances of quality proliferate miraculously in myraids of delicious subtleties."
Author: Lady Svetlana

27. "But though towards the end of the battle the men felt all the horror of their actions, though they would have been glad to cease, some unfathomable, mysterious force still led them on, and the artillerymen-the third of them left-soaked with sweat, grimed with powder and blood, and panting with weariness, still brought the charges, loaded, aimed, and lighted the match; and the cannon balls flew as swiftly and cruelly from each side and crushed human flesh, and kept up the fearful work, which was done not at the will of men, but at the will of Him who sways men and worlds."
Author: Leo Tolstoy

28. "How good it would be to know where to look for help in this life and what to expect after it, there, beyond the grave! How happy and calm I'd be, if I could say now: Lord, have mercy on me! ... But to whom shall I say it? Either it is an indefinable, unfathomable power, which I not only cannot address, but which I cannot express in words - the great all or nothing...or it is that God of whom Princess Marya has sewn in here, in this amulet? Nothing, nothing is certain, except the insignificance of everything I can comprehend and the grandeur of something incomprehensible but most important!"
Author: Leo Tolstoy

29. "...there was apparent in all a sort of anxiety, a softening of the heart, and a consciousness of some great, unfathomable mystery being accomplished... the most solemn mystery in the world was being accomplished. Evening passed, night came on. And the feeling of suspense and softening of the heart before the unfathomable did not wane, but grew more intense. No one slept."
Author: Leo Tolstoy

30. "Now her eyes meet mine like green lightning-they are green, these eyes of hers, whose power is so indescribable-green, but as are precious stones, or deep unfathomable mountain lakes."
Author: Leopold Von Sacher Masoch

31. "After he died, there was a deep calm to his face; he seemed a kind of unfathomable, still well which opened on and down beneath the suddenly smooth surface of his skin…The heat in him lasted a long time. I loved that heat. I don't know how long I held his face and his shoulders and stroked him; as he began to cool I kept my hands on his belly, where the last of his warmth seemed to pool and concentrate. Here the fire of the body came to rest, smoldering longest, down to the last embers."
Author: Mark Doty

32. "Whence come I and whither go I? That is the great unfathomable question, the same for every one of us. Science has no answer to it."
Author: Max Planck

33. "Thomas Wolfe warned in the title of America's great novel that ‘You Can't Go Home Again.' I enjoyed the book but I never agreed with the title. I believe that one can never leave home. I believe that one carries the shadows, the dreams, the fears and dragons of home under one's skin, at the extreme corners of one's eyes and possibly in the gristle of the earlobe.Home is that youthful region where a child is the only real living inhabitant. Parents, siblings, and neighbors, are mysterious apparitions, who come, go, and do strange unfathomable things in and around the child, the region's only enfranchised citizen.[…]We may act sophisticated and worldly but I believe we feel safest when we go inside ourselves and find home, a place where we belong and maybe the only place we really do."
Author: Maya Angelou

34. "Cal: "I'm not presuming. I know exactly what you think about me. You think I'm an anal-retentive Armrest Nazi . . . an arrogant Modelizer. You can't stand the way I talk, any of the subjects I choose to talk about, the imperious manner I order food in restaurants or tell cab drivers how much we owe them. You find my taste in women odious, the fact that I don't own a television an unforgivable sin, and the fact that I would choose to write a book about Saudi Arabia completely unfathomable. And you're also totally in love with me. If you weren't you wouldn't have pushed me into the pool earlier today when you saw Grazi walk in."Every Boy's Got One"
Author: Meg Cabot

35. "Today history is no more than a thin thread of the remembered stretching over an ocean of the forgotten, but time moves on, and an epoch of millennia will come which the inextensible memory of the individual will be unable to encompass; whole centuries and millennia will therefore fall away, centuries of paintings and music, centuries of discoveries, of battles, of books, and this will be dire, because man will lose the notion of his self, and his history, unfathomable, unencompassable, will shrivel into a few schematic signs destitute of all sense."
Author: Milan Kundera

36. "He could have swept me into his arms, kissed my mouth in a fit of passion, and begged me to be his bride, and whatever deep thirst I had hidden in the heart of me still would not be slaked. Amazing, unfathomable man that he was, I had hoped that he could breathe life into me. It took the touch of his lips to convince me that he was only a man.True, he stirred something in me- sweetly, tenderly, even graciously- but when his kindness brushed up against my soul, it did not begin to ease the ache of the seemingly bottomless fissure that still gaped."
Author: Nicole Baart

37. "Awakeness is found in our pleasure and our pain, our confusion and our wisdom, available in each moment of our weird, unfathomable, ordinary everyday lives."
Author: Pema Chödrön

38. "The future was as unfathomable as the black holes between the stars at night."
Author: Penelope Williamson

39. "It reminded her too, time and again, of her own susceptibility to panic and her unfathomable dread of being alone."
Author: Richard Yates

40. "I turned to face him, knowing in him, I'd find the temporary cure. "Do you want to fuck it out?" Braden smiled slowly, bemused, causing another twist of attraction in my gut. "Fuck it out?""All the bullshit. What she did. What he did. Every soulless bitch that wanted something from you"His expression changed immediately, becoming hard, unfathomable, as he took a step towards me. "Are you saying you don't want anything from me?""I want this. I want our arrangement. I want you..." I sucked in a breath, feeling my control slip. "... to fuck it out of me."
Author: Samantha Young

41. "Unfathomable mind: now beacon, now sea."
Author: Samuel Beckett

42. "Something unfathomable moved behind his eyes. He sighed deeply.'Do you ever, even once,' he asked, 'consider the price of caring about you?"
Author: Sara Poole

43. "Love is like an unfathomable idea. An idea that is slightly above euphoria, yet a fingers width from heaven."
Author: Shannan Jacoby

44. "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?"
Author: Søren Kierkegaard

45. ". . . the idea of existing beyond the patriarchal institution of faith, of withdrawing our external projection of God onto the church is almost unfathomable. . . . We think there's nothing beyond the edge. No real spirituality, no salvation, no community, no divine substance. We cannot see that the voyage will lead us to whole new continents of depth and meaning. That if we keep going, we might even come full circle, but with a a whole new consciousness."
Author: Sue Monk Kidd

46. "I'd won our school science fair in the fourth grade, my "Phases of an Egg" presentation eclipsing the dozen or so baking-soda-and-vinegar volcanoes presented by the rest of our class. I'd taken gold in our town's Junior Olympics when I was ten, and got to stand up on the top of a three-tiered pedestal after placing first in the Fifty Yard Dash. One time when I was fourteen, I'd received a Presidential Physical Fitness certificate from Ronald Reagan, when I logged a record-breaking eighty-two situps in the span of a minute. But nothing compared to the sense of accomplishment I felt - no award, no ribbon, no trophy - no achievement lived up to the unfathomable triumph of having won the heart of Terrence C. Wilmington III."
Author: T. Torrest

47. "A library after closing is a lonely place. It is heart-poundingly silent, and the rows of shelves create an almost unfathomable number of dark and creepy corners."
Author: Vicki Myron

48. "Then overwhelmed by the sense of that unknown infinity, like one bewildered by a strange persecution, confronting the shadows of night, in the presence of that impenetrable darkness, in the midst of the murmur of the waves, the swell, the foam, the breeze, under the clouds, under that vast diffusion of force, under that mysterious firmament of wings, of stars, of gulfs, having around him and beneath him the ocean above him the constellations, under the great unfathomable deep, he sank, gave up the struggle, lay down upon the rock, his face towards the stars, humble, and uplifting his joined hands towards the terrible depths, he cried aloud, "Have mercy."
Author: Victor Hugo

49. "While a battle still entirely political was preparing in this same place which had already seen so many revolutionary events, while the youth, the secret associations, the schools in the name of principles, and the middle class in the name of interests, were moving in to dash against each other, to grapple and overthrow each other, while each was hurrying and calling the final and decisive hour of the crisis, far off and outside that fatal sector, in the deepest of the unfathomable caverns of that miserable old Paris, the gloomy voice of the people was heard deeply growling. A fearful, sacred voice, composed of the roaring brute and the speech of God, which terrifies the feeble and warns the wise, which comes at the same time from below like the voice of a lion and from above like the voice of thunder. Page 1123 Saint-Denis Chapter 13 part II"
Author: Victor Hugo

50. "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."
Author: W. Somerset Maugham

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