“If we commit ourselves to reading thus increasing our knowledge, only God limits how far we can go in this world.”

—  Ben Carson

Source: Think Big: Unleashing Your Potential for Excellence

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Ben Carson191
17th and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urb… 1951

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“The view from complexity claims that we cannot know complex things completely… modest positions are inescapable… We can increase the knowledge we have of a certain [complex] system, but this knowledge is limited… The fact that our knowledge is limited is not a disaster, it is a condition for knowledge. Limits enable knowledge.”

Paul Cilliers (1956–2011) South African philosopher

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“The ethics of art are terrifying because real art by increasing our knowledge of ourselves increases in exactly the same proportion the ethical commitment.”

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Context: There is a sense, and a very exciting sense, in which art is moral. When Stendhal says a good picture is nothing but a construction in ethics, one recognises a truth about art which opens up vistas that are at the same time liberating and terrifying. The ethics of art are terrifying because real art by increasing our knowledge of ourselves increases in exactly the same proportion the ethical commitment.

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“The idea of a God we infer from our experimental dependence on something superior to ourselves in wisdom, power and goodness, which we call God; our senses discover to us the works of God which we call nature, and which is a manifest demonstration of his invisible essence. Thus it is from the works of nature that we deduce the knowledge of a God, and not because we have, or can have any immediate knowledge of, or revelation from him.”

Ethan Allen (1738–1789) American general

Source: Reason: The Only Oracle Of Man (1784), Ch. V Section II - Containing Observations on the Providence and Agency of God, as it Respects the Natural and Moral World, with Strictures on Revelation in General

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“Of all the knowledge that we can ever obtain, the knowledge of God, and the knowledge of ourselves, are the most important.”

Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) Christian preacher, philosopher, and theologian

Source: A careful & strict inquiry into the modern prevailing notions of that freedom of the will, which is supposed to be essential to moral agency, virtue & vice, reward & punishment, praise & blame...

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“What is the lesson to us to-day? Are we to go the way of the older civilizations? The immense increase in the area of civilized activity to-day, so that it is nearly coterminous with the world's surface; the immense increase in the multitudinous variety of its activities; the immense increase in the velocity of the world movement—are all these to mean merely that the crash will be all the more complete and terrible when it comes? We can not be certain that the answer will be in the negative; but of this we can be certain, that we shall not go down in ruin unless we deserve and earn our end. There is no necessity for us to fall; we can hew out our destiny for ourselves, if only we have the wit and the courage and the honesty.”

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1910s, The World Movement (1910)

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“We live among particulars, but we always want and see something more than any particular can give or reveal—thus our restlessness, our boredom, our suffering. We are certain to die, although we find in ourselves tokens of undying spirit—thus our sense of living under the pressure of an intolerable contradiction between our experience of selfhood and our recognition of the unyielding limits nature imposes on our existence. We can see only dimly beyond the boundaries of the social world that we ourselves make—thus our confusion, our inability to place our undeniable suffering and our apparent accomplishment within a context of all contexts that would keep them safe from doubt and denigration.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger book The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound

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“We lose ourselves in what we read, only to return to ourselves, transformed and part of a more expansive world.”

Judith Butler (1956) American philosopher and gender theorist

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“How calmly may we commit ourselves to the hands of Him who bears up the world!”

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“Thus we use our supposed "knowledge" of others to speak on their behalf, and condemn them for their words we ourselves put in their silent mouths.”

Margaret George (1943) American writer

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“Knowledge of ourselves teaches us whence we come, where we are, and whither we are going. We come from God, and we are in exile.”

John Ruysbroeck (1293–1381) Flemish mystic

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