To Army War College Graduates, Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, 7 June 2008 http://www.jcs.mil/chairman/speeches/07JUN08_ArmyWarCollege_Commencement.html, CJCS.
“We have more than we can know. We know more than we can say.”
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.
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Wendell Berry 189
author 1934Related quotes
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Source: 1930s-1951, The Blue Book (c. 1931–1935; published 1965), p. 45
“We know more than we need to know.”
Jim Dandy : Fat Man in a Famine (1947)
Source: Information, The New Language of Science (2003), Chapter 2, The Spell of Democritus, Why information will transform physics, p. 11