Michael Mullen (1946) U.S. Navy admiral and 17th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
To Army War College Graduates, Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, 7 June 2008 http://www.jcs.mil/chairman/speeches/07JUN08_ArmyWarCollege_Commencement.html, CJCS.
Life Is A Miracle : An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000)
Context: We are alive within mystery, by miracle. "Life," wrote Erwin Chargaff, "is the continual intervention of the inexplicable." We have more than we can know. We know more than we can say. The constructions of language (which is to say the constructions of thought) are formed within experience, not the other way around. Finally we live beyond words, as also we live beyond computation and beyond theory. There is no reason whatever to assume that the languages of science are less limited than other languages.
Michael Mullen (1946) U.S. Navy admiral and 17th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
To Army War College Graduates, Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, 7 June 2008 http://www.jcs.mil/chairman/speeches/07JUN08_ArmyWarCollege_Commencement.html, CJCS.
“The difficulty in philosophy is to say no more than we know.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Austrian-British philosopher
Source: 1930s-1951, The Blue Book (c. 1931–1935; published 1965), p. 45
“We know more than we need to know.”
William Saroyan (1908–1981) American writer
Jim Dandy : Fat Man in a Famine (1947)
Hans Christian von Baeyer (1938) American physicist
Source: Information, The New Language of Science (2003), Chapter 2, The Spell of Democritus, Why information will transform physics, p. 11
Agnes Martin (1912–2004) American artist
Source: 1970's, The Untroubled Mind', 1972, p. 62
Ram Dass (1931–2019) American contemporary spiritual teacher and the author of the 1971 book Be Here Now