
“The world is not our imagination but our nightmare, full of inconceivable surprises.”
Kaddish for a Child Not Born (1990)
Source: Gabriela, Clavo y Canela
“The world is not our imagination but our nightmare, full of inconceivable surprises.”
Kaddish for a Child Not Born (1990)
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985)
Context: The world in which we live is very nearly incomprehensible to most of us. There is almost no fact... that will surprise us for very long, since we have no comprehensive and consistent picture of the world which would make the fact appear as an unacceptable contradiction.... in a world without spiritual or intellectual order, nothing is unbelievable; nothing is predictable, and therefore, nothing comes as a particular surprise.... The medieval world was... not without a sense of order. Ordinary men and women... had no doubt that there was such a design, and their priests were well able, by deduction from a handful of principles, to make it, if not rational, at least coherent.... The situation we are presently in is much different.... sadder and more confusing and certainly more mysterious.... There is no consistent, integrated conception of the world which serves as the foundation on which our edifice of belief rests. And therefore... we are more naive than those of the Middle Ages, and more frightened, for we can be made to believe almost anything.
“Bring something incomprehensible into the world!”
Source: A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
“Life is full of little surprises.
Time travel is full of big ones.”
Source: The Man Who Folded Himself (1973), p. 46
The New York Times (26 November 1978)
“The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is at all comprehensible.”
“Life is full of surprises, but never when you need one.”
Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat
“All true language
is incomprehensible,
Like the chatter
of a beggar’s teeth.”
Ci-Gît.
“Humans sometimes make surprising choices, and human history is full of uncertainties.”
Source: Understanding International Conflicts: An Introduction to Theory and History (6th ed., 2006), Chapter 2, Origins of the Great Twentieth Century Conflicts, p. 51.
The Other World (1657)
Context: Do you say it is incomprehensible that there is nothingness in the world and that we are partly composed of nothing? Well, why not? Is not the whole world enveloped by nothingness? Since you concede that point, admit as well that it is just as easy for the world to have nothingness within as without.