For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely far from understanding either. The ends of things and their beginnings are impregnably concealed from him in an impenetrable secret. He is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness out of which he was drawn and the infinite in which he is engulfed.

I have only to contemplate myself; man comes from nothing, passes through time, and disappears forever in the bosom of God. He is seen but for a moment wandering on the verge of two abysses, and then is lost.

If man were wholly ignorant of himself he would have no poetry in him, for one cannot describe what one does not conceive. If he saw himself clearly, his imagination would remain idle and would have nothing to add to the picture. But the nature of man is sufficiently revealed for him to know something of himself and sufficiently veiled to leave much impenetrable darkness, a darkness in which he ever gropes, forever in vain, trying to understand himself.

Intellect is invisible to the man who has none.

A man has not seen a thing who has not felt it.

Man, as we realize if we reflect for a moment, never perceives anything fully or comprehends anything completely.

Tout l'esprit qui est au monde est inutile à celui qui n'en a point : il n'a nulles vues, et il est incapable de profiter de celles d'autrui.

Whoever cannot seek the unforeseen sees nothing, for the known way is an impasse.

Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.

We can see nothing face to face; our utmost seeing is but a fumbling of blind finger-ends in an overcrowded pocket.

Man as man can never know God: His wishing, seeking, and striving are all in vain.

Man can embody the truth but he cannot know it.

"I perceive I have not really understood any thing, not a single object, and that no man ever can."

-from "As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life"

When I see the blindness and the wretchedness of man, when I regard the whole silent universe, and man without light, left to himself, and, as it were, lost in this corner of the universe, without knowing who has put him there, what he has come to do, what will become of him at death, and incapable of all knowledge, I become terrified, like a man who should be carried in his sleep to a dreadful desert island, and should awake without knowing where he is, and without means of escape. And thereupon I wonder how people in a condition so wretched do not fall into despair.

Yet so vain is man, and so blinded by his vanity,