Understanding human nature is the highest knowledge, and only by knowing it can we know God. It is also a fact that the knowledge of God is the highest knowledge, and only by knowing God can we understand human nature.

You think: you become that thought. And consciousness, or the state of pure awareness, is lost. The highest knowledge man can possess is that which is true in his own experience. If his experience is limited, so is his knowledge and he behaves accordingly.

this is the last word of Western and Eastern wisdom alike. The Hindu Upanishads say: He who thinks that God is not comprehended, by him God is comprehended; but he who thinks that God is comprehended knows him not. God is unknown to those who know him, and is known to those who do not know him at all. Goethe says it in words which, to the modern mind, may be plainer: The highest to which man can attain is wonder; and if the prime phenomenon makes him wonder, let him be content; nothing higher can it give him, and nothing further should he seek for behind it; here is the limit.

It has been said that we can know God only in so far as we can become God.

In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that-and, therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison-you do not know God at all.

Man does not know himself truly except as he knows himself confronted by God. Only in that confrontation does he become aware of his full stature and freedom and of the evil in him.

Firsyt of all, it must be realized that only God
truly knows about Himself ( ya-
rif aqq ma-
rifatih) and fully comprehends
the essence of His majesty. This need not be considered strange. For I
say, only an angel truly knows about angels. Only a prophet truly knows
about prophets. Indeed, only a scholar truly knows about scholars. I
would even say that as long as a student has not attained his professor’s
rank in scholarship, he does not truly know his professor. When he has
attained his professor’s rank, he knows him almost in the way the pro-
fessor knows himself . . . I would even say that it cannot be conceived
that an impotent man could truly know about the condition attained
by a person during cohabitation . . .” Al-Ghazzâlî goes on to say that
even for low animal life such as ants and gnats, it must be assumed that
any true knowledge of their being is possible only for ants and gnats,
that man has no true knowledge of himself and as a rule knows about
himself only through the actions and characteristics of his self (soul),
while ignoring its quiddity, “and once man knows that he is of necessity
unable to perceive the essence of God’s majesty, he has attained what
is the end of his perfection, as this is the goal of human perfection.

When Christianity becomes conscious of its innermost nature, it realizes that it is godliness rising our of inward constraint. The highest knowledge is to know that we are surrounded by mystery. Neither knowledge nor hope for the future can be the pivot of our life or determine its direction. It is intended to be solely determined by our allowing ourselves to be gripped by the ethical God, who reveals Himself in us, and by our yielding our will to His.

To say that God is "unknowable" is, on the one hand simply a manner of speaking which intends to emphasize that reason is limited in principle, and on the other hand that the intellect, accidentally obscured, is limited in fact. To possess total Knowledge is to be possessed by it: it is to be a "knower by God" (ʿārif bi ʾLlāh), in the sense that God reveals Himself to the extent that He is, in us, both the Subject and the Object of Knowledge.

To know, but to be as though not knowing, is the height of wisdom.

The human mind may know God, and learn of God, though it has no terms by which to explain Him; it may think of Him as Absolute, as Infinite, as Personal, while it may never in this life be able to fathom the full meaning of these sublime ideas.

Naught ever can be known in God: One and Alone Is He. To know Him, Knower must be one with Known.

Who can know heaven except by its gifts? and who can find out God, unless the man who is himself an emanation from God?

...The more a man knows about individual objects, the more he knows about God. Translating Spinoza's language into ours, we can say: The more a man knows about himself in relation to every kind of experience, the greater his chance of suddenly, one fine morning, realizing who in fact he is...