Look, everyone talks about the unknown like it's some big scary thing, but it's the familiar that's always bothered me. It's heavy, builds up around you like rocks, until it's walls and a ceiling and a cell.

A zoologist who observed gorillas in their native habitat was amazed by the uniformity of their life and their vast idleness. Hours and hours without doing anything. Was boredom unknown to them? This is indeed a question raised by a human, a busy ape. Far from fleeing monotony, animals crave it, and what they most dread is to see it end. For it ends, only to be replaced by fear, the cause of all activity. Inaction is divine; yet it is against inaction that man has rebelled. Man alone, in nature, is incapable of enduring monotony, man alone wants something to happen at all costs - something, anything.... Thereby he shows himself unworthy of his ancestor: the need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.

Until you step into the unknown, you don't know what you're made of.

I am fated to journey hand in hand with my strange heroes and to survey the surging immensity of life, to survey it through the laughter that all can see and through the tears unseen and unknown by anyone.

No matter how close we are to another person, few human relationships are as free from strife, disagreement, and frustration as is the relationship you have with a good dog. Few human beings give of themselves to another as a dog gives of itself. I also suspect that we cherish dogs because their unblemished souls make us wish - consciously or unconsciously - that we were as innocent as they are, and make us yearn for a place where innocence is universal and where the meanness, the betrayals, and the cruelties of this world are unknown.

I think in the end, you would have stayed with me, out of obligation...or maybe comfort. Maybe I was safe to you, and you needed to feel that. I know how scared you get of the unknown. To you...I must be kind of a security blanket. Do you see now, how that doesn't work for me? I don't want to be there, simply because the idea of me being gone is too...scary. I want to be someone's everything. I want fire and passion, and love that's returned, equally. I want to be someone's heart... Even if it means breaking my own.

It does good to no woman to be flattered [by a man] who does not intend to marry her; and it is madness in all women to let a secret love kindle within them, which, if unreturned and unknown, must devour the life that feeds it; and, if discovered and responded to, must lead, ignis-fatuus-like, into miry wilds whence there is no extrication.

If the highest things are unknowable then the highest capacity or virtue of man cannot be theoretical wisdom.

It's difficult to get started-when it comes to dealing with an unknown quantity people are reluctant to trust their own opinion. It helps if two or three people give you a boost.

Not only does travel give us a new system of reckoning it also brings to the fore unknown aspects of our own self. Our consciousness being broadened and enriched we shall judge ourselves more correctly.

You do not travel if you are afraid of the unknown you travel for the unknown that reveals you with yourself.

Vision is perhaps our greatest strength... it has kept us alive to the power and continuity of thought through the centuries it makes us peer into the future and lends shape to the unknown.

What is missing from today's dialogue is the effect autism is having on families our society and what the unknown factors are. The 300lb. gorilla in the room is that our children with autism today will soon become adults with autism.

When I was a kid I loved 'The Curse of Frankenstein ' 'The Creeping Unknown ' 'X: The Unknown.' I love 'Forbidden Planet ' 'The Thing from Another World.' They were science fiction/horror movies generally.

Don't you see what's at stake here? The ultimate aim of all science to penetrate the unknown. Do you realize we know less about the earth we live on than about the stars and the galaxies of outer space? The greatest mystery is right here right under our feet.

Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads how to follow how to connect find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists.

The twentieth century has exhibited a barbarism and lack of respect for human life on a massive scale just about unknown before.

Religion may be defined thus: a belief in and homage rendered to existences unseen and causes unknown.

What then do you call your soul? What idea have you of it? You cannot of yourselves without revelation admit the existence within you of anything but a power unknown to you of feeling and thinking.

Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings to the unknown and returns us to our rational structured selves refreshed.

So poetry becomes a means for useful dialogue between people who are not only unknown but mute to each other. It produces a dialogue among people that guards all of us against manipulation by our so-called leaders.

True poetry is similar to certain pictures whose owner is unknown and which only a few initiated people know.

Peace is that state in which fear of any kind is unknown.

Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.