“Things can end badly, as they sometimes do in life. But if they do, then we know that something is wrong, just as we know it when a piece of music doesn’t resolve itself properly at the end. We know that. We just do. And so we prefer harmony.”
Love Over Scotland, chapter 102.
The 44 Scotland Street series
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Alexander McCall Smith 55
British writer 1948Related quotes
“What we know is as nothing, if we do not love God properly in all things.”
[Norris, K., The Cloister Walk, Penguin Publishing Group, 1997, 978-1-101-21566-1, http://books.google.com/books?id=pZkLNwpYcJ0C&pg=PT115]
“What we do know is that if we do not leave the EU it will mark the end of democracy in the UK.”
Brexit: Protests held at Parliament over delay https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-47751805 BBC News (29 March 2019)
2019
“What I do know is sometimes we love the wrong people and sometimes we marry them.”
Source: Getting to Happy
Page 68.
The Road to Mecca (1954)
“The most difficult thing is to know what we do know, and what we do not know.”
Source: Tertium Organum (1912; 1922), Ch. I
Context: The most difficult thing is to know what we do know, and what we do not know.
Therefore, desiring to know anything, we shall before all else determine WHAT we accept as given, and WHAT as demanding definition and proof; that is, determine WHAT we know already, and WHAT we wish to know.
In relation to the knowledge of the world and of ourselves, the conditions would be ideal could we venture to accept nothing as given, and count all as demanding definition and proof. In other words, it would be best to assume that we know nothing, and make this our point of departure.
But unfortunately such conditions are impossible to create. Knowledge must start from some foundation, something must be recognized as known; otherwise we shall be obliged always to define one unknown by means of another.
Remarks at a meeting with Serb leaders (16 March 1991), as quoted in Doder and Branson (1999) Milosevic: Portrait of a Tyrant