Source: Timescape (1980), Chapter 31 (p. 360)
Context: You had to form for yourself a lucid language for the world, to overcome the battering of experience, to replace everyday life’s pain and harshness and wretched dreariness with — no not with certainty but with an ignorance you could live with. Deep ignorance, but still a kind that knew its limits. The limits were crucial.
Source: How to Read a Book: The Classic Bestselling Guide to Reading Books and Accessing Information
“Our true enemies are: ignorance and limitation.”
The Impact of Space Activities Upon Society (ESA Br) European Space Agency (2005)
“Logic pervades the world: the limits of the world are also its limits.”
Original German:Die Logik erfüllt die Welt; die Grenzen der Welt sind auch ihre Grenzen. Wir können also in der Logik nicht sagen: Das und das gibt es in der Welt, jenes nicht.Das würde nämlich scheinbar voraussetzen, dass wir gewisse Möglichkeiten ausschließen, und dies kann nicht der Fall sein, da sonst die Logik über die Grenzen der Welt hinaus müsste; wenn sie nämlich diese Grenzen auch von der anderen Seite betrachten könnte. Was wir nicht denken können, das können wir nicht denken; wir können also auch nicht sagen, was wir nicht denken können.
1920s, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)
Context: Logic pervades the world: the limits of the world are also its limits. So we cannot say in logic, "The world has this in it, and this, but not that." For that would appear to presuppose that we were excluding certain possibilities, and this cannot be the case, since it would require that logic should go beyond the limits of the world; for only in that way could it view those limits from the other side as well. We cannot think what we cannot think; so what we cannot think we cannot say either. (5.61)
Source: This Is the Way the World Ends (1986), Chapter 1, “In Which Our Hero Is Introduced and Taught the True Facts Concerning Strategic Doctrine and Civil Defense” (p. 14)
“Kind hearts are here; yet would the tenderest one
Have limits to its mercy; God has none.”
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 409.
Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)
Context: At various stages of evolution, the Indian cultures were presented with only a limited number of possibilities. The members of certain kinds of societies—the small band, the large band, the tribe, the chiefdom, the state, and variations of these—tended to make characteristic choices concerning religion, law, government, and art... Such choices were not... consciously made... For a particular society, they either worked or they did not work.<!-- p. 212
AJENCIS, THE THIRD ANALYTIC OF MEN.
The White Luck Warrior (2011)
Of The Subject of Certainty p. 31
The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho Analysis (1978)
Introduction, p. xiii
Philosophy At The Limit (1990)
